Can we get Arnie back, please? Bale is boring
Andrew M Brown on Terminator Salvation

5 June 2009

The strength of Terminator Salvation lies in its lifelike robots. The humans in the film are not so impressive

Wouldn't it be awful if Christian Bale's four-minute verbal bullying of Shane Hurlbut, Terminator Salvation's director of photography, turned out to be the most memorable thing about the film? The fourth instalment of the series passes briskly enough, but by the following day I could hardly remember a thing about it.

Partly this is in the nature of the plot. The characters' going backwards and forwards in time - for example, the hero John Connor (Bale) has to find and protect the young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), so that he can grow up to be his (Connor's) father - makes it hard to follow. Terminator anoraks may relish the complexity and the delicious accumulation of abstruse details concerning the Terminator machines, and will find this new episode seeded with allusions to the earlier movies. Other viewers may not tolerate its clotted narrative, even, or perhaps especially, if they admire James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Arnold Schwarzenegger's absence is felt as a lack of humour and lightness. One of only two moments that approaches humour in the two hours is Bale's deadpan rendition of Schwarzenegger's catchphrase "I'll be back".

Bale's devotion to his craft was cited by way of explanation for that tantrum of his - on the tape, he can be heard speaking in the character's American rather than his native Welsh accent. The actor's oppressive seriousness affects the tone of Terminator Salvation. In Bale's rendering John Connor, self-appointed leader of the humans' resistance to the machines, becomes an unsmiling, unpitying and boringly high-minded figure. No wonder his commander (Michael Ironside) gets fed up with him.

Sam Worthington engages more sympathy as Marcus Wright, a hybrid. The film opens with a flashback to a gleaming execution chamber where a bald Helena Bonham Carter, as a doctor, has arranged to take over the body of Wright, a convicted murderer, for some sort of medical research. Wright re-emerges as a new model Terminator, but a benign one like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. Wright is a sort of cyborg with human organs and emotions. Discovering he has a human heart and brain but the body of a shiny robot leaves him painfully confused.

The action happens in 2018 after the evil corporation Skynet has razed planet earth in a nuclear apocalypse. The director, known as "McG" (Joseph McGinty Nichol), colours the desert landscape in a metallic, sepia tone which indicates the destruction of the sky by bombs but also serves to create a sombre atmosphere. Skynet's Terminator machines roam the badlands, programmed to destroy human resistance. It's amazing that any humans are left since McG has introduced a greater variety of these machines than before and they're bigger too.

The basic model is the humanoid T-600, a giant but primitive version of the familiar Terminator that Arnold Schwarzenegger personified. It looks like a metal zombie, covered in rags and with tiny glowing red eyes. The newer Terminators - the shape-changing ones - bear a distinct resemblance to Transformers, those vehicles that turn into robots, especially the super-sized Terminator, which is bigger than a petrol station. Additional arms sprout from its thorax and rider-less motorcycles pop out of its legs. This extra-large Terminator made so much noise it shook the floor of the cinema and the vibrations came up through the chair. Most unpleasant and alien-like is the underwater Hydrobot which drills into its victims with a head made of razor claws.

The bulk of the movie is composed of deafeningly loud chases in which a mixture of Terminators menaces Connor and the others. McG takes pride in the photo-realism of his explosions and it certainly looks as though hundreds of gallons of petrol went up in smoke.

Connor has to find Kyle Reese. It's complicated and one needs to go back to the earlier films to understand why - the relevant fact being that Connor's parents are Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor. Reese, when he gets a bit older, will father John Connor, so Connor must save Reese to preserve himself. Reese, though, has been captured by Skynet. To rescue Reese Connor teams up with Wright. It's a tricky partnership, since Connor, who's bad-tempered at the best of times, detests machines and therefore mistrusts Wright. Wright, who has superior physical strength because of his robot endoskeleton, goes some way to proving his good faith with Connor when he saves him from a vicious attack by a Hydrobot. The quest for Reese leads the heroes to a showdown at the factory where new T-800 models powered by nuclear fuel cells roll off the line.

McG tries to give the story resonance by dwelling on Wright's crisis of identity, and he seems to want to say something about the nature of man and machines, but these ruminations fail to compensate for the film's shortcomings. The chase sequences are exciting and expertly choreographed but I think many Terminator aficionados will search for something more and find this a heartless and formulaic exploitation.

The film's strength is in the technical side, above all in the battered, grimy, lifelike robot creatures. The humans are flat, their relationships undeveloped. None of the sketchy female characters replaces Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. For instance, John Connor has a wife, Kate, who's heavily pregnant: what happens to her? Still, expect more Terminators to come. "The battle has been won," Connor says, in his consequential tone, "but the war against the machines rages on."