“Terminator Salvation” opens in 2003, with Dr. Serena Kogan of Cyberdyne Systems talking a death row inmate named Marcus Wright into signing over his body for medical research after his execution. It ends in 2018, in the middle of the war that decision helped start. The film is the fourth Terminator movie, the first without Arnold Schwarzenegger in the cast, and the first set entirely after Judgment Day. It runs 115 minutes. It is also, for long stretches, a movie that cannot decide what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Christian Bale Plays John Connor
Bale takes the role of John Connor, the Resistance fighter who has spent three films being promised and one film being born. McG, who directed, called Bale “the most credible action star in the world,” and Bale wanted the part badly enough to reject it three times first, as he said in 2018, partly to spite the people who told him not to take it. He signed in November 2007, the first actor cast, and spent six to eight hours a day in the editing room advising the finished product.
That is a lot of investment for a character the script keeps at arm’s length.
Marcus Wright Wakes Up in 2018
Sam Worthington plays Marcus, a human-Terminator hybrid who climbs out of the wreckage of a Skynet base and walks toward Los Angeles. Worthington compared Marcus to Dorothy and Alice, a man waking in another world and trying to find himself. James Cameron recommended him to McG. Russell Crowe did too.
Worthington tore his intercostal muscles in the first weeks of filming and kept working. Bale broke his hand punching a Terminator prop. The production ran 77 days in New Mexico, starting in May 2008, after a troubled pre-production in which the Halcyon Company bought the rights from Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar and several writers cycled through the screenplay.
None of that effort is wasted, exactly. It is just not visible on screen.
A Kill List and Four Days
The plot is a countdown. The Resistance finds a signal it believes can shut down Skynet’s machines and plans to strike Skynet’s headquarters in San Francisco in four days. Skynet has its own list, and it will kill the Resistance’s leaders in the same window. John Connor is second on it. Kyle Reese is first.
Anton Yelchin plays Kyle, the character first introduced in 1984, and the film shows the origins of the T-800. John finds schematics of human prisoners being incorporated as living tissue for the new machine. Kyle gets taken prisoner alongside a mute child named Star. Two Resistance A-10s go down trying to intercept a machine transport. Marcus pulls pilot Blair Williams, played by Moon Bloodgood, out of the wreck.
The pieces are all here. The movie keeps dropping them.
The Cast Is Deeper Than the Script
Helena Bonham Carter plays Serena. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kate Connor. Common plays Barnes. Michael Ironside plays General Ashdown. Jane Alexander plays Virginia. That is a serious ensemble for a film that gives most of them one scene and a uniform.
“The Terminator to make is the one with the war.”
Worthington said Cameron told him that. It is the best idea in the movie, and the movie does not fully follow it. The war in “Terminator Salvation” is mostly a backdrop for a mystery about Marcus — is he from the future or the past, friend or foe — and the film spends its running time circling that question without settling it.
What Actually Works
Three things.
- The T-800 origin. The schematics John finds, with human tissue as raw material, are the one image the film earns.
- Yelchin’s Kyle Reese. He carries the weight of a character the audience already knows, and he does it without winking.
- The 2018 setting. A post-apocalyptic Terminator film was the right instinct after “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.”
Where It Comes Apart
The film’s central problem is that Bale was cast as John Connor when McG originally wanted him for Marcus. Rewrites expanded John’s role to accommodate him, and the result is two leads competing for one movie. John’s arc is a kill list. Marcus’s arc is an identity. They never braid.
The tagline is “The end begins.” The film is 115 minutes of setup for a war it does not show.
The Verdict on Terminator Salvation
“Terminator Salvation” is not a bad idea. It is a film that had the right pieces — Worthington, Yelchin, a post-Judgment Day setting, Cameron’s blessing on the premise — and assembled them into something inert. The action is competent. The performances are committed. The connective tissue is missing.
It is the only Terminator film without Schwarzenegger, though his likeness appears briefly in digital form. That absence is not the problem. The problem is that the film replaces a monster with a mystery, and the mystery is not scary.
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