The Terminator movies have loomed large in many ways since the first picture's release in 1984. They made Arnold such a big star that he's now the governor of California (and even then cats call him the Governator). They gave Jim Cameron a running start on his path to become one of the most commercially successful movie directors of all time. The second movie gave Hollywood such a long-lasting boner for CGI that one hopes a physician was consulted. And the last movie gave us the marvelously entertaining mp3 of Christian Bale verbally sandblasting his DP for fidgeting during a take.
Like any SF franchise worth its salt, it's spawned a totally retarded mythology, spinoffs, abundant chances for actors like Paul Winfield, Xander Berkeley, Joe Morton, Jane Alexander, and Michael Ironside to pay the rent and chip teeth on scenery, and of course led to lots and lots of shit getting blown up. Its best lines have become permanent parts of the pop culture lexicon. And last but certainly not least, the Terminator cycle provides fertile ground for me to sustain my doomed and fucktarded quest to champion Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting ability. Fortunately this will not be lasting legacy of the Terminator series.
The Terminator (1984) dir. James Cameron
Where it all started. Jim Cameron, having previously directed some piece of shit called Piranha 2 that everyone diplomatically agrees no longer exists, was unable to secure a terribly large budget, and so for the last time in his career had to find creative solutions to the problem of modest means. But holy mother of fuck did he ever. Let us count the ways:
1) Hiring Stan Winston
The late Stan Winston was one of the great geniuses of the noble art of special effects. At the time Jim Cameron hired him to scare the shit out of everyone with the Terminator, Winston was still affordable (his greatest prior achievement was uncredited work on the effects in John Carpenter's The Thing, which were stellar), but after those glowing red eyes and malevolently gleaming metal endoskeleton, he never would be again.Winston would go on to the only principal creative to be around—actively (explication forthcoming when we get to Terminator Salvation)—for all four movies, as well as lending his talents to Aliens, Predator (the crossover was not a Stan shoutout), Jurassic Park, the first Iron Man, and Avatar (if he was still alive I'd make fun of him about Inspector Gadget, Lake Placid, The Relic, and End of Days, but it'd be mean now, and anyway working on shitty movies is where effects dudes get all their good stories, and in F/X, shitty movies are where Bryan Brown gets all the toys he uses to take down the bad guys).
Stan Winston died way too soon in June 2008 after a years-long battle with a really nasty kind of cancer, but he was still puttin in work while he had cancer, thus (and I mean this a lot more respectfully than it sounds) making Stan Winston the dark horse candidate for biggest badass in the Terminatorverse.
2) Arnold
Another good example of catching a soon-to-be-expensive talent before his rate got massive (and being the driving force behind that rate getting so massive). This was a perfect example of actor and role meeting serendipitously—Arnold, of course, did not come to the cinema through the world of conservatories, Stella Adler, and the stage. Arnold was in movies because he took a lotta fuckin steroids and had really big muscles (and refused to take no for an answer when people pooh-poohed his ambitions due to his goofy accent and, to be kind, stylized approach to written text). He was also blessed with a face that made him look really intimidating when he was pissed (which made the x-ray scene in Total Recall really funny: “Holy shit, Arnold has got some fuckin jaw, boy!”) But, there were the parenthetically mentioned goofy accent and—you will not get me to call it shitty under penalty of death—unconventional (there we go) acting. What to do? Civilians, were the problem left to them, may have spent years and sacrificed millions of lives arriving at a solution, but James Cameron pulled Occam's Razor and cut that fuckin Gordian knot in twain: “I'm casting Arnold as a robot.” Boosh.
3) Shoot the whole picture at night
Because a) it'll look cool, and b) cheap stuff looks less cheap in the dark. Did you just have an epiphany about the visual aesthetic of film noir and its semiotic representation of the protagonists' psychology and the entire holistic ethos of the genre being derived from fiscal practicality? You're welcome.
That leads us to exactly what makes The Terminator such a great movie. Even though it cost considerably more ($6.4 million) than the amount my dad always told me it was ($1 million; source, his ass), $6.4 million isn't a ton of fucking money in movie dollars, and the craft services on Avatar probably cost more than that. So, speaking of Avatar, instead of Jim Cameron being able to fuck around forever showing off his flashy special effects he was forced to strip everything to the bone and just tell a fucking story.
And what a story it is: in a post-apocalyptic future in which self-aware robots are trying to destroy the last of the dwindling human resistance, they send a humanoid cyborg (Arnold) back to 1984 to kill a woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to her son John, who grows up to be Victor Laszlo. John Connor and the resistance (off-screen) seize the time machine the robots used to send Arnold back to send sinewy solider Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) back to protect Sarah Connor at all costs. That's the whole movie. Keep her alive. (Well, and inadvertently get her pregnant at the end of act two).
What makes this so suspenseful is, in retrospect, obvious: when Arnold wants to kill you, your motherfucking ass is dead. The fact that Kyle Reese doesn't die until the end of the movie is, completely independent of all the other mindbogglingly badass things he does in the movie, one of the most impressive achievements ever captured on celluloid. Robots may be big and strong and indestructible and afflicted with incongruous Austrian accents even though their voice software enables them to sound like any person they want to, but human beings have balls. Note the gender neutrality there, because Sarah Connor has 'em too. She not only survives. SHE KILLS THE FUCKING TERMINATOR. WITH A BROKEN LEG. WHILE PREGNANT. Fuck the sequel, read that chain of accomplishments again. God, I love that woman. J. Cameron and I clearly have similar taste (Sarah Connor, Vazquez, Kathryn Bigelow . . .)
The Terminator, completely aside from being the lost cyberpunk classic of cinema (lost as in people forgot it was cyberpunk until nerds' due dilligence set the historical record straight), is executed with complete sincerity, is ferociously suspenseful, and has a fucking great cast. Arnold is legendary (“I'll be back,” “Fuckyou assHOOOOLE,” the eye-razor scene), Linda Hamilton progresses from airhead waitress to Mother Of The Resistance without missing a beat, Michael Biehn was so fucking awesome that if he hadn't also been Johnny Ringo his tombstone (ba dump bump) would have read: “Kyle Reese: 2002-1984,”and the supporting players all get a chance to be on point until they get killed by Arnold. Rick Rossovich gets in a couple nice moments in a nice pre-Slider turn before Arnold fricasees him with his bare hands, Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen are great as a couple world-weary cops, making it particularly sad when Arnold lights them up like Blade Runner, but it's Bill Paxton who wins Man of the Match in the supporting cast, for establishing the template for the retarded Bill Paxton performance (also known as Bill Paxton appearing in a movie). With but two lines (“I think he's a couple cans short of a six pack!” about Arnold, and “Fuck you, asshole!” to Arnold, the latter an invaluable service as Arnold adds it to his memory bank for later classic use) Bill Paxton launched a storied career as cinema's pre-eminent shithead.
And, oh, when Arnold uses that line later . . . when he's loading his guns in his fleabag apartment and he's been shot up a bit and his flesh casing is probably not smelling too good, and the cigar-chomping landlord knocks on the door and goes, “Ey, buddy, ya got a dead cat in there or what?” That Arnold POV shot where he scrolls through possible responses: “Yes/No, Go Away, Fuck You, Fuck You Asshole,” before deciding on the last, and the way he says it, is one of the funniest things that ever has been and ever will be.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) dir. James Cameron
James Cameron's first Most Expensive Movie Ever Made! (Ed. Note: each subsequent entry in the Terminator series would continue to be the most expensive movie yet released, and James Cameron's last two pictures have similarly been the most expensive movies ever at the time of their release)
If it hadn't been spoiled way in advance, and it wasn't totally obvious from the scene in the biker bar where a naked Arnold beats the shit out of everyone but doesn't kill anyone, the revelation that Arnold was the good guy would have been one of the greatest twists ever.
At the same time, it kind of lowers the stakes. As does the fact that thanks to all the intel Kyle Reese apparently gave Sarah Connor off-screen in the first movie, Sarah and John (such a mensch in this picture he's already going through puberty and riding motorcycles at age 10) know what's going on, and the confusion was part of what made the first movie so scary. But make no mistake, Terminator 2 rules. With extreme prejudice.
The deal here: Sarah Connor is in a mental institution. John is being raised by asshat foster parents Xander Berkeley and Jenette Goldstein. Arnold beams in and swaggers naked into a biker bar to show off his post-steroidal physique and get some clothes and a ride, stylishly fucks everybody up, and in one of cinema's most regrettably obligatory needle-drops, rides off with his cool new threads on his cool new bike to George Thorogood's “Bad to the Bone.” (Another way Arnold being the good guy is telegraphed).
Robert Patrick beams in and, despite not appearing to be armed, apparently knifes a cop in the guts (another way Arnold being the good guy is telegraphed) and steals his threads and car, complete with a cop computer on which he looks up John Connor's record.
Young John (president of the Future Crackheads of America, Edward Furlong esq.) and his buddy, the immortal Danny Cooksey of Dukes of Hazzard and Diff'rent Strokes fame, go to play some video games, where Arnold and Robert Patrick converge. But it's Arnold who tells Eddie Furlong:
“Git dawn.”Fortunately, Eddie Furlong has heard all about Terminators and their Austrian ways from mom, so he's able to decipher this command, just in time to see Arnold empty a fucking shotgun into Robert Patrick . . . but instead of bloody viscera spraying everywhere, there are these ripply metal Silver Surfer looking things. Which heal almost immediately. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
While Arnold and Robert Patrick destroy the mall in their robot male-bonding ritual, Eddie Furlong gets his bike and rides off. Arnold's bike goes faster, so Arnold catches up to him, transfers him to his bike, and they try to outrun Robert Patrick, who has caught up to a giant truck on foot and commandeered it.
What ensues is one of the finest chase scenes ever, with brilliant camerawork and editing, the iconic shot of the truck plowing through the barrier and nosediving into the L.A. River that ushers in the climactic act of the chase, and the only way Arnold and his young ward are able to elude Robert Patrick is by blowing his truck the fuck up (a feat that singlehandedly won T2 the Oscar for Best Sound Effects; the sound of the spark that blows up the gas tank is the greatest thing to happen to sound since the Wilhelm Scream). But Arnold's no dummy, he knows Robert Patrick's probably not dead, so he hightails it the hell out of there so they can have some peace and quiet for the exposition scene.
Arnold explains that Robert Patrick is a T-1000, a prototype terminator made out of a “mimetic poly-alloy,” (you people have no fucking idea how many times I had to watch this fucking movie to make sense of that phrase through Arnold's accent . . . my liver hurts just thinking about the frustration). What “mimetic poly-alloy” means is that Robert Patrick can take on the physical appearance of any object of comparable size by touching it (mimetic) and he's able to seamlessly do so because he's made out of liquid metal (poly-alloy). Arnold explains that he was sent back by the future John Connor to protect the kid John Connor, and that he was to obey every order the little brat gives him (clearly future John Connor forgot what an impulsive, scatterbrained twathead he was as a kid, like so many do . . .) This is put to the test immediately when a bunch of dudes try and save him from Arnold—he'd been shrieking—and Arnold immediately goes to kill them, before Eddie Furlong squeaks at him to stop. The dudes run away.
Eddie: Jesus, you were gonna kill that guy!This, of course, will not do in polite society. Eddie decides to order not to kill anyone. Then he decides to make sure the order took.
Arnold: Of coo-ahss. I'm a tuhmeenatuh.
Eddie: Swear?Since the T-1000's next probable move is to find Sarah Connor and emulate her to lure young Eddie in for the kill, Eddie Furlong starts squeaking at Arnold that they have to go save her. Arnold, being rational, protests that this is retarded, but wouldn't ya know those orders get in the way and Arnold is forced to accompany Eddie on his doomed rescue mission.
Arnold: Whut?
Eddie: Okay, put up your right hand and say “I swear I won't kill anyone, okay?”
Arnold: (puts up right hand): I swea-uh I will naaat keel enna-wun.
Eddie: Okay, let's go.
Meanwhile, while the above shit was going on, we've been introduced to the new, improved Sarah Connor—muscular, distrustful of institutional psychiatry, and fucking crazy. Earl Boen, the shrink from the first movie, gets in a bit of exposition leading a group of med students around the facility talking about Sarah's “intricately constructed delusion” (ain't nothin crazy like the truth, baby), and we see that her life in the institution basically consists of them shooting her up with John Belushi-overdose shots of Thorazine and sexually molesting her. That last—a creepy orderly licks her face while she's asleep—led to one of the funniest overheard conversations ever, in the theater the second or third time I saw T2:
Little girl (about 6) to her mother: Ewww, he licked her face. (With cold disdain) His name is Licky-Face.That lady's precognitive abilities were slightly off: when Linda Hamilton picks the lock on her restraints, she's the one who nails the dude, with a purloined nightstick, in one of those classic George Miller splice-in-a-frame-of-white moves to make the hit seem even harder (accompanied, as well, by those dope Oscar-winning sound FX). And she begins to make good her escape.
Mother: Don't worry, honey, the Terminator will get him.
Little girl: Yay!
But Robert Patrick, as Arnold predicted, is also on the scene, transforming into the floor and then into a cop who walks on him. Linda Hamilton's escape draws the attention of the orderlies, but she's almost gotten away from them . . . when Arnold comes out of the elevator. She shits a brick—this is no failure of courage, anyone with a working nervous system would shit themselves if Arnold swaggered up with a shotgun, especially after going through what she did in the first movie—and runs right back into the arms of the orderlies.
Cue Robert Patrick. In a landmark FX shot, the T-1000 melts through the bars of a locked door, only to have his gun clank against the bars; he turns his wrist slightly and gets it through. Earl Boen, watching, just checks the fuck out.
Eddie is able to convince Linda Hamilton that Arnold is okay, since at least Arnold is shooting at that crazy metal thing. Another long chase scene, in which our heroes get away.
This time they get out to the desert, following the Hunter S. Thompson model for stressful situations—not “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird,” the one about going out to the desert and arming yourselves to the teeth. With no T-1000 about, Arnold relays the exact timeline of how Skynet came to take over, and mother and son Connor get a chance to bond emotionally, as do Connor fils and the Terminator (this last bonding led, through a series of events entirely beyond my control, to my cat Mickey briefly answering to the name “dickwad.”)
Eventually, Sarah gets it in her head that if she kills the guy who invents the thing that turns Skynet smart, she can undo the whole future (which would negate the existence of her son, but whatever, she's pissed, she hasn't thought it through to level two yet).
Young John is not pleased by this development, and he insists to Arnold that they go save the scientist. And a damn good thing, too, because the scientist is Joe Morton, and Joe Morton deserves better than to be assassinated by some crazy white lady in military fatigues in the middle of the night while he's typing on his computer. She gives it a good try, and scares the crap out of him, his wife, and kids, but Arnold intervenes, and everyone has a nice little chat.
Once Arnold explains to Joe Morton what will inevitably happen if he continues researching the chip and CPU from the first Terminator that his company hid the existence of after the first movie, Joe Morton realizes, yeah, let's go to the office and destroy any evidence that the shit ever existed. And we're off!
Of course, the cops know someone who looks like Arnold killed a bunch of cops in 1984, and a guy who looks like Arnold sprung Sarah Connor from the bug house, and when they break into the office, the security guard drops a dime.
Eddie: We've got company.Everything goes apeshit. To top it all off, the T-1000 catches up with them again. So the whole fucking building blows up (Joe Morton martyrs himself for the cause) and the last chase scene of the movie takes our heroes to a conveniently located steel mill, where their conveniently stolen tanker truck full of liquid nitrogen conveniently tips over and cracks open, and Robert Patrick conveniently T-1000s his stupid ass right through the middle of it and freezes solid. Arnold pulls some heat, and, as per a conversation he had with young master Furlong about “the way people talk,” composes an epigram for the occasion.
Joe Morton: Police?
Linda Hamilton: How many?
Eddie: Uh, all of 'em, I think.
“Hasta la vista . . . bey be.”BANG. T-1000 shatters into a zillion tiny pieces. Ya know, Arnold's lucky he's Arnold, because there may not be a single other human fucking being on this entire fucking planet who can get away with saying the stupid shit Arnold says in movies. “I'll be back” worked in the first movie because it was simple, ironically understated, deadpan, all kinds of wonderful minimalist things in keeping with the first movie's lower budget, smaller scale, all that jazz. Bizarrely enough, “Hasta la vista, baby” works in the sequel because it's bigger, gaudier, stupider, and because Arnold's trademark was saying stupid shit (still is, too, if you watch one of his gubernatorial addresses).
Anyway, the final showdown in the steel mill is great, and manages to survive the multiple false climaxes, the first being when the liquid nitrogen evaporates and the place warms up enough for the T-1000 to liquify and re-assume ass-kicking mode. The second, after some truly spectacular special effects, the T-1000 “kills” Arnold. The third is when Arnold's eye is flickering out, we cut to a POV shot and the phrase “ALTERNATE POWER” starts flashing—which caused the audience to cheer like fuck in the theater—and Arnold limping after the T-1000 to settle his metal hash. The fourth is when Linda Hamilton, with one arm, pumps about eight shots from a semi-auto shotgun through the T-1000, but right before the last shot that would drop him into the vat of molten steel below, runs out of bullets.
Fortunately, this sets up the actual climax, when Arnold shoots the T-1000 with a grenade, which explodes and tips ol' T-1000 down into melty oblivion. (Cue my dad, after taking a rather large hit off a joint: “You know . . . metallurgically . . . he'd just integrate into the surrounding . . . [exhale] yeah, that mill would be pumpin' out some strange steel.”) But that's not all. Arnold explains to a crying Eddie Furlong that in order to set things right, Arnold has to go down into the molten steel as well. So he does, but not before one last godawfully cheesy bit where Arnold gives them a thumbs up as he melts.
Cue my dad again, so pissed off that he's forgotten he's holding the joint:
Dad: “If the two of them are still standing there . . . by . . . by the internal logic of this movie . . . it didn't work! They're clearly setting it up for a sequel!”Terminator 2 is often cited by people as one of the rare sequels that betters its predecessor. I'm a little reluctant to make that claim, partly because what I liked about the first one—the leanness, the simplicity, the literal inability to figure out how the fuck the good guys were going to win until the third act—was exactly the opposite of the sequel. Terminator 2 is a Big Movie with a lot of talking about complicated shit in between action scenes, where Arnold is the good guy. As cool as the T-1000 is, it's just . . . he's going up against Arnold, dude. Arnold's going to win. Therein lie the only flaws with Terminator 2, though. It's the most popular movie in the series for a reason, and that reason is, it's really fucking good.
Me: “You're telling me you're not going to go see another Terminator movie?”
Dad: “Well . . . yeah, I'm gonna go see it. . . As long as Arnold is still in it, though. Though that reminds me, Arnold should make another Conan movie!”
[three hour monologue about the Conan movies and comics redacted]
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) dir. Jonathan Mostow
Yeah, this is one of my least favorite things about Titanic. Fuck the stupid dialogue, the reductive “poor people good, rich people bad” bullshit, all the other stupid things about that movie, my least favorite thing about it was that suddenly Jim Cameron came down with George Lucas disease, whose symptoms include getting trapped underneath a huge pile of money and are unable to make it to the set to direct a movie anymore. Suddenly that Spider-Man movie he was talking about making? Gone. The Terminator 3 treatment he wrote and was idly fucking around with? Bloop.
This meant that when Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna suddenly found themselves short of cash and in need of a new Terminator movie, Jim Cameron was at the bottom of the Pacific inventing 3D cameras and shit and so they had to go get the guy who directed the unfortunate Kurt Russell vs. J.T. Walsh snoozefest Breakdown but also one of the most hilarious comedies of our era, the wacky submarine farce U-571.
To make Terminator 3, Arnold was necessary. And Arnold, having not made a good movie since True Lies (The Sixth Day was fun but minor) was leaning toward running for governor, and wasn't about to make a Terminator movie without Jim Cameron. Kassar and Vajna were pleading, though, which led to Arnold having a sitdown with Jim Cameron, paraphrased thus:
Arnold: I dun want to make a Tuhmeenaduh moofie unless you duhrect it, Jim.
J. Cameron: Fuck 'em. Tell 'em you'll do it for 30 mil.
Arnold: Thurdy meel? Dat's CRAZY. I dun eefen mek thurdy meel.
J. Cameron: Think of it as a way of telling them to go fuck themselves.
Arnold: Tail dem to go fuck thumsailves. I like eet.
J. Cameron: No, problem, babe, don't say I never did nothin' for you.
So Arnold told them to cough up $30 million ha ha ha. But Kassar and Vajna called his bluff and said sure, we'll give you 29 and a quarter of first dollar gross. I'm sorry, artistic integrity is cool and everything, but if somebody offered me $29 million and points that basically amount to $100 million more (perspective: that's what Terminator 2, the most expensive movie of all time when it was released, cost), I'm going to do it. And Arnold—all my goofing on his accent aside—is smarter than me. So he did it.
The resulting movie actually wasn't all that bad. It shat on series continuity right and left but somehow managed to turn that into a narrative asset. Arnold gets to carry a coffin full of machine guns and blow a bunch of stuff up; the action scenes are by and large quite good if lacking that Cameron pizazz. Nick Stahl does a decent job playing John Connor (Edward Furlong being unavailable due to personal—coughcoughheroincoughcough—issues). Kristanna Loken plays a new-school Terminator, and being a model, is similarly suited to playing a robot as Arnold was/is.
The one really inspired aspect to T3 is the ending. Even the first movie, where Sarah Connor rides off into the desert with storm clouds brewing overhead, at least had the heroine getting away, large with child, safe for the time being. T3 literally ends with the end of the civilized world, with John Connor and his girlfriend hiding in a bomb shelter while Skynet nukes the whole planet. And it turns out there's nothing anyone could possibly have done to prevent it. Any movie with the balls to end like that gets at least a mild tip of the cap.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9)
I never saw it, but my mom did: “Lena Headey is really good as Sarah Connor. And the girl Terminator [Summer Glau] is too. Oh, and Brian Austin Green. It's fun, I like it.” That may sound dismissive, but my mom watching an SF television show every week until it got canceled and not talking about how retarded it is all the time, in mom shorthand basically means it must have been pretty good. Even if it wasn't, any enterprise that endeavored to keep Lena Headey and Summer Glau employed and in the public eye is all right by me.
Terminator Salvation (2009) dir. McG
Billed not as a sequel in the classic mode but as the terribly trendy “reboot,” Terminator Salvation is the first movie in the series to not involve robots travelling through time to kill any members of the Connor family. It was, again, the most expensive movie ever at the time of its release (though it would be only months before J. Cameron dropped Avatar and raised that bar once again). And it was, once again, directed by a guy with a heretofore questionable resume.
McG had previously directed the Charlie's Angels movies, which were the aesthetic equivalent of that slightly sick feeling in one's stomach that comes from eating too much candy in one sitting, and We Are Marshall, which consisted of Matthew McConaughey practicing his serious face and Matthew Fox pretending not to be looking at his watch and wondering when he could get back to Hawaii to shoot Lost. But McG got himself the Terminator gig, issued some confusing statements in the press involving the phrase “gritty realism” and invoked Children of Men by way of explanation (which only deepened the confusion), then went out to New Mexico with Christian Bale and $200 million.
This one started out with a pretty interesting script, which told the tale of a death-row inmate named Marcus Wright who donates his body to science. He gets “executed” but then wakes up fifteen years later in a bombed-out wasteland with surprising physical skills and resistance to pain. He runs across a scruffball teenager named Kyle Reese who tells him about the war against the machines and the resistance, and John Connor. They do battle with some machines, Kyle Reese gets abducted, Marcus meets a cute girl resistance fighter pilot who introduces him to John Connor, who discovers Marcus is some kind of hybrid human/cyborg and ties him up, intending to kill him, but does the dumb movie thing of not doing it right away. The fighter pilot springs Marcus and he goes out into the desert, seeking both Kyle Reese and the truth about his new identity.
In the middle of a heavily-nuked zone where a human being would drop dead of radiation poisoning in like five minutes, Marcus finds an idyllic suburban community filled with golf courses and Midwesterners; in a beautifully strange sequence, this guy welcomes Marcus with open arms and takes him to meet some of the other people. But, it turns out these aren't “people” per se, they're hybrids like Marcus. They feed him this whole song and dance about how Skynet lets them be in exchange for something or other, and they fit Marcus with this chip that regulates his mood, at which time it's revealed that these fuckers run Skynet, and basically are Skynet.
After a while, Marcus rebels, rips the chip out of his head, and gets in touch with John Connor, telling him Kyle Reese—in whose safety Connor is, obviously, interested—is in this complex, which he is. John Connor and the resistance come in guns blazing and kick ass, saving Kyle Reese. But John Connor catches one. And John Connor dies. The end sees Marcus assuming John Connor's identity, and giving a monologue about how it's the idea of John Connor that's important, and all the better if the guy pretending to be him is basically unkillable by normal means.
Pretty good fuckin script, all things considered. A couple stupid lines of dialogue aside, it's a page turner, and in the right director's hands, with sufficient money to make the robots look cool, could have made a Terminator sequel at least on par in terms of quality with T3 (which itself wasn't as bad as it could have been), maybe even better.
So. Kassar and Vajna offered Christian Bale the part of Marcus. But Christian Bale decided he wanted to play John Connor, and The Dark Knight was a big enough hit that they indulged him and rewrote the script with Connor as the lead and Marcus as a supporting character. In so doing, they turned what was a pretty solid SF/SFX script with a really bold and surprising ending into a marginally solid SF/SFX picture with a really stupid ending, in which Marcus (without checking his or John Connor's blood type) gives his heart to save John Connor.
But, $200 million buys a lot of bells and whistles, and there certainly are bells and whistles in Terminator Salvation. Sam Worthington (Avatar, the Clash of the Titans remake), as Marcus, is basically a slightly butcher Orlando Bloom, which gives me the idea: reboot The Producers with Sam Worthington as Bialystock, Orlando Bloom as Bloom, and they're producing a movie about two blandly handsome dudes who can't really act, in a movie with a shitload of special effects but nothing else to really recommend it, thinking that everyone will be like “What the fuck? I like good, well-written movies with people who can act” and the movie will flop. Except it breaks box office records and they become massive stars who keep getting cast in movies. And they go to jail. And then the sequel is about them breaking out of jail with a massive special effects budget etc etc.
Even so, Terminator Salvation doesn't suck. It still has just enough of that earlier script (the stuff with Marcus and Kyle, the fighter pilot breaking Marcus out of resistance HQ) to be interesting, and the $200 million bells and whistles make the action scenes watchable—McG, bad as he is, is still a cut above Joel-Michael Schubay in that you can actually see what's happening in those action scenes—but the ending is fucking stupid, and there are way too many unnecessary homages to the first two movies all over the place, because the director of Charlie's Angels just can't stop winking and being clever. Still, the part when the T-800 walks into frame and he's got 1984 Arnold's face CG'd on is pretty cool.
Terminator 5 is being talked about, but unlikely. Even though Terminator Salvation made a fair bit of money, it got dreadful reviews, and the best I ever heard anyone say about it is basically what I did, that it didn't totally suck. I think that's because it's just good enough to be something to watch and enjoy in the middle of the night on cable when you have insomnia, but people want more out of a $200 million sequel to two movies (the first two) that people really liked that doesn't even have Arnold in it. And really, the thing that the ball rolling in the first place was that Arnold was awesome and Jim Cameron once upon a time was a good God almighty action director, before he became so rich that God can't even get a membership at his country club anymore. Also, lest we forget, any Terminator 5 will have to be made without Stan Winston. To which I say, fuck that.
All right, all right, all right. I gotta do this:
I'll be back.
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