Movie Review: Terminator is to die for

Action junkies will love the piles of smoking, twisted metal this flick serves up. And girls, my girlfriend yanked my arm at one point and howled, “Is he going to make it?”
Set just nine years from now Terminator gets off to a surprising start, with a few more surprises in store. We’re introduced to the mysterious, and apparently criminal, Marcus Wright. Director McG uses the heavenly white light of an eclipsing life as his title shot, and it’s no coincidence. Viewers may be too distracted by the action sequences to notice deeply symbolic religious motifs injected into Salvation. They’re there in abundance though, and mitigate the lack of human emotion.

From the first beat, McG sets a high target. Special effects sizzle, and the throbbing, roaring hunter killers leap out of the screen, especially in cinemas sporting Dolby surround sound (such as Rosebank’s Ster Kinekor Classic # 1). Sometimes the level of CGI falters. The plot also has some weak spots. Who is the hero, for example? You’d expect it to be John Connor (The Dark Knight’s Christian Bale), but it’s really a trinity of characters – the father (a teenage Kyle Reese, who is back on Earth after playing Chekov in Star Trek), the son (Connor) and the wholly metal…
There’s transfiguration in this flick – and I think this is a key element in the Terminator mythos. The transfiguration we know is usually represented in Jesus Christ being seen first as human and then more than human, better than human – divine. In Terminator we see the opposite. We see a striking change in appearance, character and circumstances in human beings apparently devolving – horribly – into cold, mechanical, heartless killing machines. But there’s a faint reason to hope. And isn’t it interesting that John Connor shares the first letters of his name with another Saviour.

While McG delivers a quality vehicle, it does have a few screws loose. For some reason, you don’t really connect emotionally with John Connor. The desaturated hues work beautifully to evoke an imminent dystopia – the battle scenes elicited Saving Private Ryan at times. The below ground scenes are in full Technicolor in spite of the bleak industrial coal-powered furnaces, and Skynet is another camera setting again: sharp clinical whites and corporate electric blues. It can be disorientating.

Terminator assembles a riveting crunchfest, but it’s out gunned in the tension department by Star Trek and out plotted by Wolverine. It’s probably still the 3rd or 4th best flick of the year so far. Sowetan readers will love Jadagrace Berry as Star (Reese’s handy sidekick) and the hunky Common (Wanted, Street Kings, American Gangster) as Barnes. Moon Bloodgood, the hot fighter pilot, and Marcus’ muse, will set the boys’ pulses racing.

Yep, the trenchcoats, shotguns, motorbikes and one-liners are all there. Salvation lacks Cameron’s imprint, but it does deliver, and it does ask those important questions. Who are we? What does it means to be human? Of all the movies mentioned above, Terminator comes closest to rendering our troubled situation in the real world right now. The fear when people built the first machines was always that they would learn to be like us, and take over. No one ever imagined that as we spent more time on our computers, we would become more like machines.

My Score: 8/10 IMDB*: 7.2/10
*Internet Movie Database
Director: McG
Writers: John Brancato and Michael Ferris
Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.