Terminator 4:
Salvation
This
entry starts off with the biggest shock of all, a beginning more shocking than
the end of the third instalment. We find
out that the evil machines of Skynet actually created
the prophecy of John Connor leading humans to victory against them. They knew he had weak moral fibre and created
the prophecy so that he would be promoted to leader of the human resistance and
ultimately sell out his fellow mankind for a nice condo and some pussy. They sent both the robot assassins and his
protectors back in time as a big rouse to get him to buy into it.
The rest of the
movie we mostly witness John Connor’s descent into madness. He lives as the sole human in the machine
city where he listlessly staggers through a life of luxury. He lives in a baroque penthouse that looks
similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and stumbles
around in a dirty house robe with a long grey Howard Hughes like beard. Occasionally having pangs of guilt about
selling out all of mankind and outbursts where he smashes one of his
animatronics sex slaves and stares around to see the machines are totally
indifferent to his inconsequential actions.
The film
follows Connor going mad with apathy and being brought back to the edge of
sanity only by impotent rage against the emotionless maze of robot society
expanding around him. He finally
wrestles a laser rifle away from a terminator who shrugs and walks on. Connor staggers back to his penthouse and
looks in his broken bathroom mirror, points the gun at his own head, says “Hasta la vista, baby” and breaks into a mad
cackle. When he regains his wits and
goes to pull the trigger he notices in the reflection that his son, John Connor
Junior, is standing there with a gun pointed at him. Connor asks his son how he escaped the
genocide of all remaining humans when he sold them all out and Junior replies
that it doesn’t matter because it’s all over now. The robot city explodes and crumbles behind
him and Junior shoots his father calling him a traitor and as Connor bleeds to
death he just stammers in shock that the prophecy was true, he was vital to the
human resistance overthrowing the robots because he fathered the man who would
do it and that man was also named John Connor, just a different John Connor, his
son.
Yeah, I’m
fucking with you.
Nothing
original happens in this movie. There is
zero progress.
It’s just prequelitis as usual for Hollywood, except the miracle of
time travel allows for the ultimate circle jerk in terms of making a movie that
just pads out the expository moments from previous movies because although
these events take place chronologically after the events we’ve already
witnessed, we still know how they turn out.
I’ll give the
movie credit for a couple things. They
finally break the formula of one human target + one protector + one robot
assassin = one long chase. This one just
tries to be its own movie and aims for some sort of sci-fi epic along the lines
of The Matrix Revolutions or something.
There isn’t a really recognizable structure to this movie since all it
wants to accomplish is making a bunch of characters meet each other and John
getting his face scratched along the way.
That’s not to say it’s a Robert Altman movie with robots or something,
it still has the characters getting some pretty standard goals like rescuing
somebody or destroying something evil.
We meet John
Connor who is now an adult played by Chris Bale. Connor does little Pump
Up The Volume pirate radio broadcasts to the remaining humans and spouts
enough vaguely optimistic platitudes to qualify him for a premature Nobel Peace
Prize. One of his listeners is his
father, Kyle Reese-Witherspoon, who is played by Anton Yelchkin
in a way that evokes Michael Beihn’s take on the role
but is somehow also good acting. Kyle
teams up with an ex-con named Markus.
He’s not you’re typical ex-con in that the “ex” part doesn’t mean he did
his bid and is now out on parole bagging your groceries, no, he was
executed. Markus loses Kyle to a big a
robot child that plucks humans up and puts them in a little jar like I used to
do with caterpillars and Markus has to get him back before the big robot child
tortures him with a magnifying glass or something.
Markus then
teams up with Blair, played by Moon Bloodgood who
continues her winning streak of tank top acting from The Legend of Chun-Li. She has access to good shampoo that keeps her
hair all pretty in a dirty post-apocalyptic environment because she’s all high
up in the human resistance. She’s
buddy-buddy with John Connor who is starting a family with his pregnant wife
Kate, played by Bryce Dallas-Howard. I’d
like to suggest a number of children John and Kate should aim for, but I’m
drawing a blank. Markus has an
embarrassing moment on his first date with Blair where he steps on a landmine
blowing the flesh off his body and revealing he is a robot. Somethings are
worse than getting a boner while dancing I guess. Being a robot comes as a surprise even to
Markus. John gets pissed and chains him
up and tortures him screaming about how much he hates evil machines. I guess John didn’t see Terminator 2:
Judgement Day or Terminator 3: Rise of The
Machines where a robot saved his life and was his best friend etc. Jeez, a guy gets a sexy lady and forgets all
about his friends. Happens
every time.
At this point
the movie really takes a turn towards what I was kinda
hoping it either wasn’t going or to be about, or that I was hoping it would end
up being about in a smarter way than anything I could think up. But no, it goes towards being about the dumb
thing that I kinda thought it would be in the dumb
way that I kinda feared. It’s one of those ideas that you know would
inevitably come up when the writers are all gathered around the pile of money
brainstorming ideas of how to make one more Terminator movie. And you’d hope some one in the room would
point out all the holes in an idea like that but I guess that guy was looking
down Moon Bloodgood’s shirt or something.
The idea of a
robot who looks like a human designed to get close to
Connor and kill him is kind of a shitty idea to start with, but making it so
that he isn’t programmed to jump over the table and choke the living shit out
of Connor on first sight is just plain retarded. This robot traitor is programmed to suggest to
Connor that he do something dangerous that will result in his likely
death. There’s probably a deleted scene
where the robot traitor tries to pressure Connor into taking up smoking too.
And of course,
they put stupidity into top gear with the obligatory scene where the robot
traitor rips the microchips out of his brain and defies the machines to help
Connor. I’ll give him credit for that
since I can’t even pop a zit without a mirror, but it’s still the lamest scene
in the movie.
I’ll admit that
I probably am not giving this movie its fair shake. I was pretty happy with how Terminator 2:
Judgement Day ended and haven’t been too
enthusiastic about this series continuing since then. It’s strange because the ending to part 2
doesn’t mirror my actual outlook on life.
Philosophically, I probably agree with part 3 and 4 in that I think
human kind is always just fighting for one more day and we’re just putting off
our inevitable demise and that there are no permanent solutions like how part 2
suggests. So it is weird that I feel the
most satisfied with an ending contrary to my own way of thinking, but I
do. I also think there’s only so many
times you can beat the same horse and still expect anybody to take it remotely
seriously. They’ve been really trying with
these second two Terminator features to be credible and somewhat
restrained but I kinda feel like fuck it, we’ve
passed the point where series could have a meaningful conclusion so let’s just
go for a full trainwreck and end this series on an
embarrassing high like Batman & Robin or Alien 4: Resurrection.
I am sincere
when I say that as far as retarded and pointless movies go, this one is
actually pretty good. The action is all
well shot and the actors deliver their lines pretty well or have nice cleavage. The whole human/robot traitor is fucking
stupid, but no stupider than you’d expect this far into a series. I’ll say that the movie does kinda suffer for the lack of a strong villain. A robot who is programmed to give bad advice
just isn’t menacing enough for me. But
it’s not like Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines
gave us some sort of false hope that this series has some big vision behind it
and now we feel betrayed or something.
We know they’re winging it one film at a time trying to wring every
plotline and dollar they can out this.
So when they head into production on Terminator 5: Emotional
Reassurance I say call up P.W.S. Anderson and let’s burry this thing
properly.
If you enjoyed this, here are some other
related readings:
James Cameron’s sci-fi
classic gets re-Indomagined!
The future is a lot like
the recent past.
Resident Evil 2: The
Apocalypse
Here’s the real bloody
Valentine.