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tartysuzTerminator Salvation looks great, but feels uncomfortable.
THE GOOD:
- The look of the film, which was inspired by gritty, news footage (that never deterioratied into shaky-cam territory) coupled with sleek, seamless CGI that made Wolverine look like Space Invaders by comparison.
- The single-take tracking shot of Christian Bale escaping from a Skynet facility by helicopter. However, I had to read about this because the scene didn't read as one shot, embeded as it was in a special effects and edit-heavy movie. I should have caught the clue of Bale losing his shoe: the same thing happened to Clive Owen in The Children of Men, which featured a more obvious, but no less awesome extended single tracking shot.
- Excellent casting and performances from Bale, Blood Moongold (Blair Williams is my new favourite action heroine!), Anton Yelchin and Bryce Dallas Howard. I loved Sam Worthington as human-Terminator hybrid Marcus Wright, but he could not quite convince me that he was a badass in his previous life.
THE NOT-SO-GOOD (little was outright bad):
- Much of the script. "Now I know what death tastes like." Seriously?! The set-up scene with dying Helena Bonham Carter (HBC) and the bookending scene with post-human HBC were examples of meta commentary gone wrong. The sub-par dialogue really undermined these two potentially powerful scenes. And not to be content with letting the dialogue do a disservice to the scenes, they had Worthington hurtle something to smash HBC's image. It's a hollow gesture that read as ridiculous for being a visual cliche and so 1984 Apple Macintosh computers.
- Upper management internal "enemies" who came straight the back of U-sub action figure boxes. Okay, this was outright bad.
- The reality loop (I didn't mind the time loop stuff). Shooting a sci-fi movie with such a pronounced sense of war-time verite gives us something cool to look at, but its emphasis on believability invites inconvenient questions, like, "How does this rag-tag team of losers and techno-scavengers come up with the fuel and resources to run all those fighter jets? In fact, how do they make a time machine?" Oh wait, they have Marcus as an infiltrator who can locate all the fun tech Skynet's been developing -- except it doesn't look like he survives at the end of the movie. I hope someone backed up his CPU!
- It was bold to spend half the movie focusing on the missing link between the all-metal Terminators and the meat-encased Terminators. Worthington was up to it, and the script was stocked with the requisite Frankenstein references: his howling, bewildered rebirth, his tenderness toward a little girl proving his humanity, his rebellion against his creator. But the movie stumbled when it played -- and then over-played -- the heart metaphor.
- It looked like the T600 scanned Marcus's chest, saw a human heart, then crushed it. Later, John Connor jump starts Marcus's heart with cables. But a bit of electroshock isn't going to fix a pulverized organ, so I assumed John was working on a second, mechanical heart. Yet later, when John is dying of heart failure, Marcus volunteers his heart. But is it human or mechanical? This is a mystery to me, but seemingly, not to the characters. I assume that they assume that Marcus's human heart had recovered and is what is being offered for transplant. I found myself disappointed that it wasn't a mechanical heart. I was entertained by the idea that John would have to become part-machine in order to live. This would have set up some interesting questions for the sequel to answer. Instead, we get:
THE UGLY
- Why did John Connor need to be saved? He has led the resistance to the point where its a serious movement. He's assembled a new leadership. He's brought into the fold potentially the movement's most powerful tool: an infiltrator in the form of man-machine Marcus Wright. The reward John has for Wright is a chance to redeem himself by saving the saviour: J.C. John Connor has an unstinting messiah complex. So as a resistence leader, he's done his work, and it would have made a lot of sense to have Marcus, the hybrid being, lead the resistance in its next phase.
- But John's insistence on living at the expense of the movement's secret weapon (Marcus is like Wolverine as well as Frankenstein's monster) contradicts the grassroots sentiments he fomented with his earlier cry of "If you can hear this, you are the resistance." We already know that John is so adamant about his existence that he'll send Kyle Reese back in time to impregnate Sarah Connor and ensure his own birth.
- So I have to conclude that John Connor is not a nice guy -- not that resistance heroes need to be nice -- but that he actually occupies a zone of moral ugliness, without the movie questioning his position. Well, if that's the way they're going to characterize him, I hope they acknowledge John's monomania and explore some tough ideas in future films. Otherwise, what is the point in John's continued existence?
- The look of the film, which was inspired by gritty, news footage (that never deterioratied into shaky-cam territory) coupled with sleek, seamless CGI that made Wolverine look like Space Invaders by comparison.
- The single-take tracking shot of Christian Bale escaping from a Skynet facility by helicopter. However, I had to read about this because the scene didn't read as one shot, embeded as it was in a special effects and edit-heavy movie. I should have caught the clue of Bale losing his shoe: the same thing happened to Clive Owen in The Children of Men, which featured a more obvious, but no less awesome extended single tracking shot.
- Excellent casting and performances from Bale, Blood Moongold (Blair Williams is my new favourite action heroine!), Anton Yelchin and Bryce Dallas Howard. I loved Sam Worthington as human-Terminator hybrid Marcus Wright, but he could not quite convince me that he was a badass in his previous life.
THE NOT-SO-GOOD (little was outright bad):
- Much of the script. "Now I know what death tastes like." Seriously?! The set-up scene with dying Helena Bonham Carter (HBC) and the bookending scene with post-human HBC were examples of meta commentary gone wrong. The sub-par dialogue really undermined these two potentially powerful scenes. And not to be content with letting the dialogue do a disservice to the scenes, they had Worthington hurtle something to smash HBC's image. It's a hollow gesture that read as ridiculous for being a visual cliche and so 1984 Apple Macintosh computers.
- Upper management internal "enemies" who came straight the back of U-sub action figure boxes. Okay, this was outright bad.
- The reality loop (I didn't mind the time loop stuff). Shooting a sci-fi movie with such a pronounced sense of war-time verite gives us something cool to look at, but its emphasis on believability invites inconvenient questions, like, "How does this rag-tag team of losers and techno-scavengers come up with the fuel and resources to run all those fighter jets? In fact, how do they make a time machine?" Oh wait, they have Marcus as an infiltrator who can locate all the fun tech Skynet's been developing -- except it doesn't look like he survives at the end of the movie. I hope someone backed up his CPU!
- It was bold to spend half the movie focusing on the missing link between the all-metal Terminators and the meat-encased Terminators. Worthington was up to it, and the script was stocked with the requisite Frankenstein references: his howling, bewildered rebirth, his tenderness toward a little girl proving his humanity, his rebellion against his creator. But the movie stumbled when it played -- and then over-played -- the heart metaphor.
- It looked like the T600 scanned Marcus's chest, saw a human heart, then crushed it. Later, John Connor jump starts Marcus's heart with cables. But a bit of electroshock isn't going to fix a pulverized organ, so I assumed John was working on a second, mechanical heart. Yet later, when John is dying of heart failure, Marcus volunteers his heart. But is it human or mechanical? This is a mystery to me, but seemingly, not to the characters. I assume that they assume that Marcus's human heart had recovered and is what is being offered for transplant. I found myself disappointed that it wasn't a mechanical heart. I was entertained by the idea that John would have to become part-machine in order to live. This would have set up some interesting questions for the sequel to answer. Instead, we get:
THE UGLY
- Why did John Connor need to be saved? He has led the resistance to the point where its a serious movement. He's assembled a new leadership. He's brought into the fold potentially the movement's most powerful tool: an infiltrator in the form of man-machine Marcus Wright. The reward John has for Wright is a chance to redeem himself by saving the saviour: J.C. John Connor has an unstinting messiah complex. So as a resistence leader, he's done his work, and it would have made a lot of sense to have Marcus, the hybrid being, lead the resistance in its next phase.
- But John's insistence on living at the expense of the movement's secret weapon (Marcus is like Wolverine as well as Frankenstein's monster) contradicts the grassroots sentiments he fomented with his earlier cry of "If you can hear this, you are the resistance." We already know that John is so adamant about his existence that he'll send Kyle Reese back in time to impregnate Sarah Connor and ensure his own birth.
- So I have to conclude that John Connor is not a nice guy -- not that resistance heroes need to be nice -- but that he actually occupies a zone of moral ugliness, without the movie questioning his position. Well, if that's the way they're going to characterize him, I hope they acknowledge John's monomania and explore some tough ideas in future films. Otherwise, what is the point in John's continued existence?
