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"You'll never know how much I love you... from afar!"

Text crawls used to be awesome — at least, they were when I watched Star Wars.  The text retreated backward into the starry expanse of space to awe-inspiring music, for no apparent reason other than it looked quite striking.  More importantly, it conveyed important expository information that you required in order to be comfortably situated in the film’s milieu.  Good screenwriters don’t really need text crawls to convey context, but they’re a staple of sci-fi adventure, so most of us genre fans tolerate it with good humor.

Terminator Salvation also opens with a text crawl that recapitulates information we don’t need to know.  In fact, it restates events that we already saw in Terminators one through three, and the rest of it is restated in expository dialogue only minutes into the film.    The text crawl of T4 assumes two things: 1.) We’re really dense, and utterly incapably of tracking basic plot points along with the film, and 2.) None of us has seen a Terminator film before.  Evidently because an audience shelling out greenbacks to the fourth film in a franchise is rarely familiar with the movies that preceded it.

Terminator Salvation is another mondo-budgeted project designed to render itself irrelevant to its own franchise.  The same week that T4 saw wide release, Fox announced the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a television series that had gotten off to a rocky start, but developed confidence and consistency in its second season.  If nothing else, the timing was poignant: over the course of its final season, The Sarah Connor Chronicles had expanded the scope of James Cameron’s films beyond the question of whether human beings have a monopoly on humanity, exploring diverse questions of free will and destiny, the toll of leadership upon generals, soldiers, and family, the ethics of warfare, and the place of sanity in extreme situations.  The show achieved all of this, plus truly exploiting the dramatic potential of the characters, who had been dependent upon the power of the actors to pass as human (or machine), rather than fully-fleshed writing.  With the much more leisurely pace of prime time television (not to mention budget constraints that would  not allow for nonstop action), episodes centered on character arcs and choices rather than pyrotechnics.

Despite ostensibly being about the titular character, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was more about John Connor than his mother.  Thomas Dekker demonstrated a keen grasp of the growth John had to undergo to transition from the moody emo teen of Terminator 2 to the ruthless, calculating, almost inhuman savior of humanity’s future.

I digress only as a point of comparison: the television series understood that while Sarah Connor was the heroine of the first two films, the series had always been about her son, the legendary John Connor, on whom the entire story pivoted.  T3: Rise of the Machines moved forward with this, to partial success; John was older, but not much more interesting.  At least the filmmakers tried to emphasize his role in the drama, and apparently designed it so that John could take over as the central character in the franchise in further installments.

Unfortunately, nobody told Salvation director McG and his small army of screenwriters about this.  If indeed he even saw the three previous films, the director of Charlie’s Angels and We Are Marshall sticks John in a barracks for half the film, filling his mouth with inert, angst-ridden dialogue about his inability to be the savior, and spending the majority of the film cataloguing the exploits of Marcus Wright, a death row inmate who was converted into (apparently) the first cyborg, sometime before Skynet nuked the world.

Marcus isn’t much of a character in his own right, aside from the not-so-surprising revelation midway through the film that he’s more machine now than man.  Capital crime aside, Marcus appears to be a thoroughly decent chap, helping the wayward characters he encounters navigate the hellish landscape of the future, and quickly proving his worth as a nigh-invincible action hero.  Bland, handsome, and more than capable at conveying an even mixture of determination and confusion, Sam Worthington doesn’t even bother trying to do much with his material, content to let the script mold him into the superman protagonist that the audience requires to shepherd them through jet-fueled sequences of PG-13 ultraviolence. These sequences do little to rival the meticulous, bodyslamming impact of James Cameron’s widescreen kineticism, but are fleet and respectable in their own humdrum fashion.  (At least they’re more visually coherent than the other Big Battlebots movie this summer.)  As Marcus Wright works out his own salvation in post-apocalyptic California, the film builds to a denouement revolving around his “second chance” while John Connor looks on with grim, beatific gratitude.

Shunting John to the side is problematic in itself, considering the screenwriters’ gauche approach to Marcus, the Killer with a Heart of Gold.  John is an untapped wealth of dramatic possibility, unforgivably squandered.  Squandering the talent of a leonine powerhouse like Christian Bale is even more unforgivable.  No greater illustration of this exists than in one of the film’s best “gotcha!” reveals, when John comes face to face with the newest model to roll off the Terminator assembly line: the T-800, with the face and physique of a young, circa-1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger.  At my screening, appreciative laughter thundered from the audience, as well as a few scattered claps.  Though only glimpsed for a few minutes of screentime, even Arnie’s CG-assisted simulacrum outshone Bale’s star wattage.  Without even actually being on set, the retired action star and current governor dominated the screen and earned the most viewer good will.  How sad for Bale and his leading man, Worthington.

Bale’s treatment isn’t nearly as shameful as that of Bryce Dallas Howard, ambling about with a faux-preggers tummy and lending a dutifully feminine moral support to the conflicted, underutilized John Connor.  Moon Bloodgood falls in love with Worthington at an implausible rate eclipsed only by Trinity and Neo in The Matrix.  The rest of the supporting players are fine, and it was nice to see Michael Ironside in a Schwarzenegger/Bale movie in which he didn’t lose one of his limbs.

As brief as this film is, its utter lack of cohesion underpins the inescapable conclusion that this mess of a film — poorly plotted and thematically ill-conceived — was structured around the demands of the cineplex cash register more than the narrative evolution of the series.  While T3 may have undone the labors of its immediate predecessor, its conclusion closed a few continuity questions and laid out bold groundwork for the next chapter, all of which has amounted to naught.

Though Marcus Wright may redeem himself, his salvation is achieved at the expense of a jillion-dollar franchise that has always exceeded the minimum standards of genre entertainment with a sober, clear-eyed approach to philosophical dilemmas and an assertive, elegant aesthetic.  In stripping these trademarks from one of the most easily identifiable (and formidable) franchises in genre cinema, McG’s chance to freshen up the series resulted in a miscalculated misfire that counteracts the most basic tenets of each previous film.  John Connor was always meant to be humanity’s savior, one way or another, and Terminator Salvation has reduced him to a cog in the machine.

Edited by Daniel Swensen.