Terminator: Salvation (2009)

Terminator: Salvation is the fourth Terminator movie. While it’s nowhere near as bad as its immediate predecessor, it’s nowhere near as good as the first two films in this franchise either.

I’ve never really had strong feelings about Salvation. The film’s story was a mess, I don’t think it’s a mess in the same way that Rise of the Machines was, because there really isn’t as much they could have done to save Salvation as there was with the previous movie.

The thing with this movie is that it’s very much a product of its time in the sense that it’s quite a dark, gritty movie. While this has been true of most of the Terminator movies when they don’t descend into outright silliness, I think it’s dialed up to eleven with Salvation because it came out when there were a lot of movies with a similar kind of tone thanks to the influence of movies like the first couple of Nolan Batman movies and TV shows like the ’04 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.

To be absolutely fair, this tone does work quite well with Terminator: Salvation. After all, this is a movie set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland caused by the nuclear holocaust brought on by the machines taking control.

Unfortunately though, I think this is the only Terminator movie that I’d describe as being forgettable. Tonally, it got everything right; but it feels so much like a lot of the other movies coming out at around the same time that had quite similar colour palettes that it’s quite easy to forget that this movie existed at all.

After all, what does this movie really do to set itself apart from the ten thousand other dark, gritty action movies that were coming out in the late ’00s? Instead of feeling like a possible revival of the Terminator franchise, Salvation instead felt like a generic post-apocalyptic movie.

Here we have a movie that seems to be attempting to be a quasi-prequel, if such a thing is really possible for a movie in a franchise about time travelling robot assassins, to the original movie. While the attempt to deviate from the traditional Terminator formula was laudable, I don’t think it really worked with this movie because there was never going to be any real surprises in this movie.

You know from the word go that John Connor was always going to survive this movie. You also know from the word go that Kyle Reese was always going to survive this movie as well. While there may have been some cheaply executed twist at the end where these names didn’t actually belong to anyone but were rather just titles that were shuffled around as the need arised, you know as soon as you see what the movie’s trying to set up that this is going to be how it works out.

I don’t think that it’s possible to have any huge emotional investment in this movie because of that. As soon as the movie makes clear that it’s going to be an origins story about how John Connor and Kyle Reese meet and initially bond through their trial by fire, it’s clear that nothing’s really at stake here.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think that a movie about the John Connor/Kyle Reese dynamic wouldn’t work. It’s more to say that I don’t think it really worked as an origin story. Given that Salvation desperately wanted to be this dark, gritty movie about the war against the machines, I think this movie would have worked better if it was about them after they already met.

However, I’m not entirely convinced this would have worked especially well either, given that the movie also wanted to work with the John Connor/Marcus Wright dynamic as well. Given the film’s run time, I think it would have worked better have worked better if it decided to focus either on the John Connor/Marcus Wright dynamic or on the John Connor/Kyle Reese dynamic.

That’s the main reason I describe the movie’s story as being a mess. On top of the dynamic between John Connor and these other two characters, one of whom hadn’t been introduced prior to this movie, there was also the tension between John and the commanders of the resistance. All three of these dynamics never quite work, and rather feel like they were just shoehorned in to make sure the movie had an almost two hour run time.

I think it would have been possible for all of this to work, had some more effort been put into the script and given a good enough director. Unfortunately, as is, the character dynamics never quite get enough screen time to work properly with the fairly regular action sequences the movie had.

The only way for this movie to have worked would have been as a set-up for the next Terminator sequel. I think needing another sequel to really work was a mistake for Salvation because while other franchises might get another installment every three or four years, it’s quite common for there to only be a new Terminator movie once or twice a decade at most.

To be absolutely fair to Salvation, this was really the only way for it to go if the franchise really wanted to break new ground. At least with a movie about the post-apocalyptic world the Terminators are originally from, there’s the possibility that it can be a movie about the main group of characters trying to prevent the war from ever going temporal. I think that would be a story worth telling, if anyone was willing to tell it.

I think the biggest problem for Terminator: Salvation was franchise fatigue. There hasn’t been a Terminator movie that’s near-universally liked since Judgement Day, and at this point I don’t think there ever will be.

This is for three reasons. Firstly, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was groundbreaking in terms of its budget and special effects. I think a lot of studios would shy away from committing to this for a new Terminator movie even if James Cameron was directing because of how the more recent Terminator movies have garnered a lukewarm reception at best.

Secondly, Judgement Day felt like a logical development in the story of the franchise. The story it told was a logical progression of the story from the original movie, and that hasn’t really been the case for any of the Terminator movies since then. If someone were to try to do this now, they’d have to ignore the existence of most of the franchise, which seems like they want to do for the upcoming Terminator movies.

Thirdly, a lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for the first couple of movies. After thirty-four years and twenty-seven years since the first two movies were respectively released, there’s now quite a lot of people who’ve grown up with these movies and have had a lot of time to mull them over.

Even with sequels like Blade Runner 2049 that came a long time after the previous installment but were generally well liked by the majority of people, there was still some people who felt it was a mere shadow of the original. I think it’d be the same deal with any future Terminator sequel that was on par with the first two, simply because of how beloved those movies are and how firmly attached some people’s nostalgia goggles are when it comes to them.

I didn’t think the action scenes in Terminator: Salvation were as tense as those featured in the first two movies. Sure, a Terminator is still hard for a single human to kill, but the protagonists of this movie seem to have a much easier time of it than those of previous movies.

Maybe this is partly because of the characters having better anti-Terminator weapons available and maybe it’s partly because they don’t go one-on-one with a Terminator as often. Mostly though I think it’s because they wanted to focus more on the characters of this movie.

But as I stated earlier, there was never any real risk to the main characters; at least not with John Connor or Kyle Reese. The most they could really do is kill off a few members of the supporting cast, but even with these characters it’s difficult to feel any real connection.

This is an unfortunate thing because there were some fairly interesting machines in this movie. The one that really stands out in my mind were the motorcycle Terminators, which I think was a good addition given that most of the other Terminators introduced at this point had been bipeds.

Sure, there were the aerial machines that were harvesting people, but I don’t think they were really as interesting. They were more or less what you would expect to see in this kind of environment.

While you could argue that you’d expect to see a variety of different machines like of the motorcycle Terminators as well, you never really do. They’re either the bipeds that are the forerunners of the T-800 (or, as shown in other movies, the successor thereof), they’re tanks, or they’re aerial machines. That there weren’t more like this one strikes me as rather odd.

So overall, Terminator: Salvation is this bizarrely forgettable Terminator movie. There was no real risk to any of the main cast, and I think it depended too much on the possibility of the next sequel coming soon for it to really work.