The Inaugural WTF Movie Review...TERMINATOR SALVATION

Poor Christian Bale. He must hate Australian actors by now.

Who could have imagined the 2 biggest movie franchise lead roles of his once reputable and much lauded acting career would end up having him overshadowed by supporting actors from down under? After Heath Ledger died and embezzled all the spotlight in the Dark Knight, here comes Sam Worthington, in a meaty performance that blasts Christian Bale's best intense intentions out of the water? No wonder the man had a meltdown.

As you can surmise, Terminator: Salvation, is anything but. It'd be more apt to have named it Terminator: Snarlvation, because everyone's in a pretty bad mood, probably because they don't actually want to be in the movie. Christian Bale of course, is the king of gritting, snarling and growling...In fact the only time that he is every anything but unhappy in the show, he's still got a resolute frown on his face, which confused me as to who was the robot in the end.

Its not a horrible movie. Its watchable. In fact, as a fan of the Terminator series you should watch it! But here are a lists of things you will invariably like and dislike about the movie
Likes
1.)Terminators
2.)Robots
3.)Explosions
4.)Guns
5.)Pseudo Science
6.)Michael Ironside
7.)Moon bloodgood as a futuristically confident fighter pilot who, in our time, would be known as a slut (the future changes perceptions)

Dislikes
1.)No arnie
2.)No arnie
3.)Crappy Kate Connor
4.)Extremely over dramatic scene construction (I.E. CAMP AS FUCK)
5.)Reiteration of Franchise catchphrases in extremely anticlimatic ways
6.)WHERE IS THE GOVERNATOR?

Lets face it, no one can say Ah'll be BACH convincingly in any terminator movie apart from Arnold. Its HIS line! You can't have another actor say it and not expect the audience to groan and cringe in simultaneous spontaneity.

Which brings us to the main cusp of the problems about this movie. Poor direction. Director MCG, whose past hits have included Charlie's Angels and Chuck... waitaminute...Charlie's Angels? That camwhore hongkong action fanboy ripoff movie and even more self indulgent sequel? The director of that cheese fest? Directing TERMINATOR? The mind boggles.

The main problem is SCI FI as a genre is already largely unbelieveable, and the audience's suspension of disbelief is already padded with accomodations for a cheesy plot, and loopy science facts. So that's where the first 2 terminators succeeded, where everyone was kind of acting...but not really. It was an understated, normalized kind of sub reality, where it felt that maybe this cool cyborg assasin could be your own reprogrammed cyborg bodyguard, if you became the leader of the resistance, assuming you survived the nuclear fallout.

What a terminator film doesn't need, is campy action and over dramatic posturing with rehashing the tried and tested movie catch phrases. Definitely not Christian Bale about to depart on his own for a possible suicide mission, with the rising sun back lighting his determined, armed to the teeth, silohuette and turning his head to say...I'll be back. I don't think so buddy.

In a nutshell, the Terminator film has some good parts, high production value, and cool robots. But it crawls through the first hour without advancing the story very much, then confuses by splitting up into at least 3 subplots, barrels ahead without explaining very much, starts to look pretty good in a climatic action finish, then splutters to a halting, disappointing ending...all the while not actually fleshing out the characters past stereotypical future gloom and doom types.

I'm sorry Christian Bale, if you're reading this, its hard not to get overshadowed by the terminator character when you're in a movie franchise that starts with the word "TERMINATOR". Loved you in American Psycho, and Equilibrium.

Lets end with memories of better times, for both Christian Bale, and the Terminator movies.