Mini-review: Terminator Salvation
Terminator Salvation was on tonight’s agenda for Kate, Owen and I. I’m not sure what brought me to the theater for this particular installment in the series. As a kid, I found the Terminator films to be rather trashy and T3 was a god forsaken disaster in a lot of ways. I actually avoided that most recent film until just last summer, when it seemed determined to be on TV while my defenses were down and boredom was up.
But, as with any movie you weren’t planning to see, the trailers got me. And the fact that a decent director was at the helm. With Helena Bonham Carter on the bill to boot.
My impressions after seeing it? Don’t go if you expect a fresh plot. It’s basically Battlestar Galactica circa the first time Boomer loses her shit (so, like Season 1.) The action was what you would expect for the Terminator family: car chases, explosions, molten metal. Helena Bonham Carter is hardly in it, which is disappointing and Christian Bale is shouty again a la Batman.
All that being said, it’s worth $8 to meet Marcus, the Terminator who cries when you shoot him. (It’s endearing, really.) Sam Worthington did a fantastic job of making the most advanced killing machine in the film the most human of all the characters on screen. As a technologist, I desperately wanted his whole consciousness sync with the supercomputer inside SkyNet. And his metal hand. He totally gets hosed at the end of the film, but you’ll have that.
One lasting thought that has followed me home is that the general attitude towards machines has shifted a lot since the 1984 beginning of this franchise. I think the paranoia and fear of the mechanical has given way massively over the intervening 25 years. Frankly, the idea of being half – or entirely – robotic is not terrifying in the least to me and I suspect the same is true for most of the audience. Even the T-whatever or others were not as menacing this time around. I guess a world with Asimo, EveR-2 and Cylons really leaves no room for fear of the artificial being.
In a weird way, I guess we have Terminator to thank.