This Borg Needs Blood… and a Brain

Terminator Toy A death row inmate shows up in the future and meets a young kid living in the nuked out center of Los Angeles. He immediately asks the kid what happened and what year is it. The kid seems surprised at the questions, but answers them anyway (um, the whole world was just destroyed by robots, remember?), and without further suspicion, becomes best friends with the brooding stranger, helping him on his cross-country quest to find resistance leader John Connor.

A segment like this might make sense in a children’s book where, say, Mr. Rabbit meets Mr. Squirrel and they go a questing together, but it seems remarkably juvenile for a movie series that started out with relatively adult standards for trying to make sense. Terminator Salvation, despite its heavy hardware, is remarkably light in the believability department. And I’m not talking about the movie’s premise of a machine apocalypse (which will someday happen for real). I’m talking about the little stuff… you know, characters ducking atomic bombs, leaping from one flying robot attack ship to the other, conducting battlefield heart transplants… little things like that.

This doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t afford its pleasures. If you are down with watching robots and humans lay bloodless digital waste to one another, Salvation delivers the goods. But when it comes to things like tone and mood and emotion and even, gasp, story, oh how the mighty have fallen. What started out as Rated-R in the original Terminator is now PG-13 in the latest installment of the series. Huh? Since when is World War III a PG-13 event? What started out as Arnie in the 80s is now Christian Bale in the 0s. Sure, Batman might be a better actor than the Governor of California, but he isn’t half as fun to watch in a Terminator movie and his leadership skills are dubious (John Connor actually accepts a human heart transplant from a dying cyborg when his own ticker is failing – sheesh, and I thought CB was a dick to that cameraman).

The sad part is that it could have been so much better. We know this because it already was so much better. The “flashforward” scenes of the robot apocalypse in the original movie are more compelling than anything this movie has to offer. They are dark, brooding, claustrophobic, miserable, and almost believable despite the 80s teased hair and smudge stick makeup. But somehow, in trying to expand those simple pieces from the original movie into a full blown world, too much light has entered the picture and ruined the shot. In some cases literally. The bright desert landscapes that dominate Salvation might serve as convenient backdrops for digital explosions and effects, but they lose the mood of the original. Film noir has become space opera — and why? We already have Transformers tearing one another apart for the 13-year-old set, and the Star Trek franchise has been recently lobotomized too. Can Hollywood give us old fuddy duddys at least one smart science fiction series to enjoy?