by Brian Swanson Columnist Published May 29th, 2009

By now, everyone in the world knows there is a new Terminator movie out. Naturally, I gleefully hurried to the Jamestown theater to watch the latest struggle between man and machine, this time played out with a grown up John Connor. Does it live up to the hype? Almost. Terminator Salvation provides pretty good action and has some thrilling scenes and special effects, but it falls short with moments of sheer absurdity.

I suppose I should give some plot context for the twelve people who haven’t seen any of the Terminator movies. Essentially, in the future, artificial intelligence is finally realized in an entity named Skynet. Skynet decides humanity is a threat and begins a war with humanity by unleashing a nuclear holocaust. Humanity is left fighting for survival, while the machines begin capturing humans to create cybernetic replicas of people for insidious purposes. The first few Terminator movies are about the machines sending terminators back in time to kill certain important people and are set before the human-machine war. Terminator Salvation takes place during the actual war between Skynet and what’s left of humanity.

John Connor, an aspiring leader to the resistance and an important character from the previous movies, gets plenty of face time and is by now grown up. Played by Christian Bale, Connor wants to protect a certain Kyle Reese from the machines because he knows that Kyle will eventually be sent back in time to save Connor’s mother from a Terminator that has also been sent back in time. It’s a weird concept, I know, but that’s from the first Terminator movie. At any rate, there’s also a guy named Marcus who is pivotal to the plot and spends a good part of the movie trying to figure out what is going on and who he really is. 

As someone who enjoyed the first two Terminator movies, there were parts of Terminator Salvation that were exhilaratingly awesome. Finally, we get to see the war between Skynet and humanity. The film does a good job of creating the atmosphere of desperation: everything looks pretty destroyed and all the people who are left look rugged and unkempt. The parts of the movie that show the war between man and machine are done with impressive special effects and the machines look more real than ever before. The action is great and, like all the Terminator movies, there are plenty of good chase scenes. There’s even a nice plot twist well into the movie, so it isn’t all just guns blazing and explosions. 

There are, however, some serious defects in Terminator Salvation. Some of the dialogue gets a little corny, and there are obvious attempts to throw in famous lines from the previous movies. Yes, at one point someone says, “I’ll be back.” Really wrong here are the inconsistencies and the moments that seem far from believable — and there are quite a few of the latter: things like a nuclear explosion going off but having no effect on the nearby protagonists or moments where the machines could easily kill the protagonists, which is clearly their objective, but for some reason do not. I can’t give too many examples or I’ll spoil the movie, but let’s just say there were many moments where things got ridiculous. 

Negatives aside, this is an enjoyable movie. Action flicks aren’t always known for being completely plausible, and lots of people who go to see this movie will not notice or care that some elements of the movie aren’t logical or don’t make sense. Terminator Salvation is a visually pleasing movie and, while not perfect and perhaps not what I wanted it to be, it does a decent job of being entertaining.

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