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Tom Hubbard-Green is the E-marketing Executive at Alzheimer's Society and a freelance technology journalist.
His articles have been published in a variety of magazines and industry publications including Figaro Digital, O2 Venue magazine and City magazine.
‘Terminator: Salvation’ explodes with a whimper
Image: Dunechaser (Flickr)
The first two Terminator films were cult smash hits that defined a genre and spawned a generation of teenage boys with pitch-perfect Austrian accents. They were stylish, timeless and eminently quotable; all factors that made the disappointment of T3 even more unbearable. And so we arrive at Terminator: Salvation acting under the bizarre direction choice of ‘McG’ who has previously graced the silver screen with Charlie's Angels and, lest we forget, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.
The film follows an adult John Connor as a commander on a post-Judgement Day planet where humans continue to battle Skynet in a seemingly never-ending world of car chases, ludicrously percussive explosions and cute warrior-children with a surprisingly competent grasp of modern assault weaponry. But hang on, sounds kind of cool doesn't it? Well, that's actually the problem with Terminator: Salvation. Every new shiny killer leviathan, artificially intelligent motorbike and evil Helena Bonham-Carter is pretty much the most exciting thing you've ever seen for the five seconds it takes you to realize that you're just watching a series of criminally uninspired set pieces that collide into each other in no particular order and for no particular reason; it's just that the collisions look so good.
When you strip away the stunning CGI work you realize that the plot of Terminator: Salvation is riddled with so many holes that a shotgun wielding Schwarzenegger must have taken aim at it at some point in the proceedings. It trundles along against the film's single palette background (grey, if you were wondering) devoid of any real story and, worst of all, any sense of impending doom. Terminator 2 was such an arresting piece of work because the moment that Robert Patrick's Terminator appeared you knew that you were never safe. It didn't matter how far away you could get or how fast you ran, you were being relentlessly pursued by an emotionless killer with a solitary, deadly objective. It was a slow, brooding nightmare that you desperately wanted to escape from and it is the exact opposite of Salvation's ham-fisted approach to creating tension which mostly consists of punctuating serene shots of crumbling infrastructure with random, deafening industrial noises.
The only time the film comes remotely close to the kind of suspense that was present in the first two films is when Connor enters the robot city and finds himself face to face with Arnie’s original T-800 Terminator. When you are watching a lone Connor fight the Terminator you are right there in the terror with him. You duck at every jab, you crawl backwards in your seat, you feel that he might just beat it, might somehow outwit this monstrous machine and survive. This is what Terminator films should be like and why you don't feel the slightest bit of fear as you watch soldiers and civilians trying to escape from building-sized, heavily armed robots that look like they could obliterate everything in the nearest ten miles if they wouldn't also inconveniently vaporize a key character that needs to fulfil his role in some outrageous plot twist later on in the film.
Although Terminator: Salvation is not a complete dud, it is the moments where it shines that are actually the most painful to watch because they remind you of what Salvation could have been: a worthy successor to a series of films with such great potential. As Connor rides off into the sunset at the end of the film growling something generic about having won the battle but not the war we can only hope that the inevitable return of John Connor and his allies is in a film that is truly deserving of being part of a franchise that forged cinematic history.