Reay Jespersen

In the near future, the war against the machines is well under way. Skynet, once the latest answer to U.S. defense, has become self-aware and, believing humans are a threat to its existence, has begun systematically killing them. There are pockets of resistance, of course - groups of humans banding together to use whatever weaponry is available to fight back; to even just stay alive. One man stands apart from the others in this fight, believed by some through his actions and by others as destiny that he will be the person who will lead mankind to its victory over the machines. His name is John Connor.

While there were some good aspects to Terminator: Salvation, the unshakable feeling I had when leaving the theatre was that for all its hype, for all the money that the franchise had access to in order to do this right and knock it out of the park, it hadn’t been done as well as it could’ve on various fronts.

***BIG, FAT SPOILER WARNING***

To its credit, it is generally pretty well shot and acted, though for more than just me, second fiddle Sam Worthington (who plays Marcus Wright, a convict put to death years ago only to find himself alive again as a half-machine Skynet product) outshined lead man Christian Bale.
Then we get to logical issues. Allowing for the suspension of disbelief one must go into the movie with - followers of the series will remember that a terminator wrapped in real muscle and skin travels back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before the child is even conceived, and the soldier sent back to protect the mother has not only been sent back by John Connor himself, but ends up becoming his father, leading to one of Hollywood’s more memorable time-travel paradoxes - there are simply things that don’t make sense. A stories-tall terminator apparently sneaks up on a shack full of people (who it catches unaware, yet makes an awful racket after the initial surprise). And perhaps the most blatant logical issue: why the young Kyle Reese - the man who will eventually be sent back by John Connor to protect Connor’s mother, and who will end up being Connor’s father - doesn’t question a resurrected Marcus Wright when Wright shows up out of the blue, bewildered about the state of the world and asking questions that any human would know (”What was that [terminator]? What happened to the world? What year is it?”)
And finally, perhaps the biggest flaw in the writing for me is that for all the effort that Marcus puts into saving people and helping the humans (and Connor specifically), for all his human-ness despite being half machine, we find out toward the climax that Kyle has been a pawn of Skynet used to lure John Connor to Skynet’s headquarters (in his trying save Kyle Reese, as Connor feels he’s destined to) in order to finally kill him.
So let me understand: Skynet “built” Marcus in order to send him into the wild in order to find the resistance in order to make Connor trust him enough to bring Connor to Skynet to save Reese, all to kill Connor. Why, pray tell, wasn’t Marcus also programmed to simply kill Connor if given the opportunity? Most noteworthy here is one scene in particular where Connor is outside the compound on his own and is out of heavy ammo and is about to get jumped by an eel-like terminator that will surely try to kill him and… ? It’s stopped by Marcus at the last moment! Whew! Close call for Connor, who now finally has real reason to trust who and what Marcus is! Yes… or, alternately, had Marcus been programmed to let Connor be killed should such a chance present itself, he could’ve just stayed out of the way and let it happen.
Skynet is a machine. It thinks logically, so why would it not take any and all opportunities (as it seems to have done so far) to end the life of its one primary target, the only man it believes could stop it? Perhaps my old high school teacher could make some improvements to Skynet with a couple of programmed if/then statements.

At its best, Terminator: Salvation is well written, well shot, and well acted. At its worst, it has logic and plot holes you could drive a truck through. In the end, it works pretty well as an action movie, but as the final piece to the Terminator series puzzle, unfortunately leaves too much to be desired to be a truly satisfying Terminator movie.

This was the movie I was most looking forward to seeing this year, yet even notching it up for its decent action, I’d rate it a disappointing 7/10.