My favorite scene in Terminator Salvation is about ten seconds long. Blair (Moon Bloodgood) is chained up in solitary for springing Marcus (Sam Worthington). John Connor (Christian Bale) comes in and says, "Why did you do it?" She says, "I saw a man, not a machine." They look at each other for a long second, then John Connor pounds on the metal door to be let out. While the door is opening from the outside, he asks, "How's that leg?" and she says, "I'll live." As he's leaving, he barks (he barks a lot in this movie), "Let her go."
I love that scene. I watched it over about ten times. Bale brings an urgency to it, and an uncluttered intelligence, that is wretchedly lacking in most of the film, in spite of all the yelling and loudness and clattering around that goes on pretty much continually and which I assume is standing in for a true sense of urgency. Bloodgood and Worthington both hold up their ends of the bargain (assuming an actor's part of the bargain is to act well) for the bulk of the shebang; Bryce Dallas Howard is dreadful in the lame-assed role of John Connor's visibly pregnant doctor-girlfriend; Bale's skills kick in and out. You remember the scandal when he freaked onset and threw down on a crew member? Once you've watched the film you understand why: my guess is it was just sinking in that he'd signed several years of his life away (how many sequels did he sign on for? eight? twelve?) in which he's going to live in a hell of badly written, badly directed green-screen sequences.
Someone wrote that sitting through this is less like watching a movie than being stuck inside a video game that someone else is playing, and that's it in a nutshell; that's exactly it. You know the tepid pieces of dialogue that get wedged in between bouts of action in video games? The guy who writes those wrote this. There are plot points that are so flaccid that you have to groan out loud, and the world itself, which resembles what's come before in various incarnations of the Terminator mythos, has nonetheless lost that sense of cohesion it had found by the (sadly lamented and premature) end of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. There is some talk of fuel being scarce, but there's certainly no evidence of it. These supposedly beleaguered troops jet around in armored trucks, helicopters, jet fighters, on submarines, and most of these transports get blown to hell every time someone takes one into battle, yet they seem to have an endless supply of sturdy and high-speed vehicles in this post-apocalyptic future. It makes one long for the verisimilitude of the Road Warrior, and, frankly, the suspense of it. What a magnificent piece of low-key adventure cinema that was. And it had moments of grim humour! Those were the days. Don't look for humour in this, my friend, not grim or otherwise.
In fact, the best way to watch it, and I mean this in all seriousness, is to rent the Sarah Connor Chronicles, any disc of which will begin with the Salvation trailer, and, in case you're living on a distant planet and somehow missed it in the heavy year's push they gave it before the film was released, the trailer is really magnificent. I used to watch THAT over and over again, too. It is truly a thing of beauty, largely due to the genius of Trent Reznor and that incredible song (the elusive "green mix" of "the Day the World Went Away", originally on NIN's the Fragile CD), but I also have to kneel in awe and send out flowery encomia to whoever strung it together. It lovingly snuffles out and gathers up all the best things from this loopy, forlorn mess of explosions and chase scenes and makes it seem actually compelling, actually as if it's going to excite true emotion in the hearts of you, its viewers, with that wonderfully Frankensteinish bit in which Marcus realizes with horror his true nature, and with both Connor's and Marcus' lovely and soft-spoken voiceovers, complete with the sultry slurred sibilants every time they say "machinezh" or "Marcush". By the time the tyrannosaur drums kick in (go, Trent!), you'll be convinced that this is going to be the movie event of the year.
After that, the trick is to avoid actually watching the movie.
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