Summer Movie Review: Terminator: Salvation

Damn it, there went two otherwise perfectly viable hours of my life. No wonder Jim Cameron declined to give this installment his blessing, according to various promotional materials timed to the release of this weekend’s film.

A franchise killer, this installment of “The Terminator” series is the plastic nipples on George Clooney’s Batman Suit. The nail in the coffin. Not even as good as a middling episode of the recently-cancelled television series “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” but more than twice as long.

I’ll admit I don’t like the whole “The future is a machine-littered hellscape so we were able to film this thing in a junkyard in Wilmington, California” genre of film. You can always tell them at the video store. The cover is usually a conceptual painting instead of an image from the film, and the back also contains no images from the film, or a couple but they’re too tiny to really make out. If I had known that’s what this film was, I probably would’ve waited till the DVD came out and then never got all the way through it.

Besides being from a lazy genre that I don’t really care for, what else didn’t work for me?

No story. I couldn’t reveal any spoilers here if I wanted to. Robots, machines and a resurrected serial killer run around shooting at each other and blowing shit up in a monochromatic hellscape. Uh, everybody is either looking to kill Christian Bale’s character, rebel leader John Connor (if you don’t know the Terminator mythology, shame on you! Go buy the first two movies and begin watching immediately), and his father or is looking to protect them. Then more shooting and running.

It turns out the key ingredient to the success of the three earlier films might have been the time-travel element, forcing at least part of the story to unfold somewhere other than a junkyard in Wilmington. Once you take the time travel out, all you’re left with is another variation on “Robot Holocaust.” Machine overlords? Check. People dressed in rags, living as slaves to said machine overlords? Check. Buff, interchangably dressed and coiffed dudes running and jumping over stuff while they shoot and get shot at? Check. How much longer till this fucking thing is over? Check.

Even the few nods and winks to the earlier films feel dropped in from another mythos, out of place, or given such plodding, heavy-handed treatment you wish they hadn’t even bothered. They’re just fleeting, depressing reminders that the movie experience you can’t wait to end is the death rattle of a once-great film series, not just another anonymous, shot-on-a-thumbnail post-apocalyptic snoozer.

All the press reports ‘let it slip’ that one of the Nolan brothers, of “Dark Knight” fame, gave the script an uncredited polish, which begs the question: Wow, how bad was thing originally?