MOVIE REVIEW: "Terminator Salvation" (2009)

I know, I know: the only thing you’re really interested in is whether or not this movie contains the first-ever nude scene for an active republican governor. Well I’m not gonna’ tell you that.

This is a pretty good movie, better than the reviews, but it could have easily been a great movie. It just narrowly misses the mark, which makes it a bit frustrating. It is way the hell better than T3: Rise of the Machines, however.

John Connor is an interesting character. He’s a messiah, effectively. We learn about his superhuman status second hand, from someone who worships him in the first movie, but he remains essentially a Macguffin. In the second one we meet him *before* he becomes a messiah, he’s just a smart whiney-assed kid with a crazy mother. In T3 he’s front and center, but he’s curiously lacking in a personality or in that quality that will make men gladly live or die by his word, which is, at root, a large part of what’s wrong with that movie. For the record, my favorite John Connor was the Thomas Dekker iteration from T2.5: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I felt captured a lot of the nascent superman that was missing in the other films.

So the question becomes one of ‘how do you present a messiah?” It’s easy to *say* someone’s a hero, and accept it on faith, but movies operate on a ‘show, don’t tell’ basis, so we need to actually see the hero being heroic (Also missing in T3). The problem is that we’ve heard such hype about John Connor (Who not-at-all coincidentally shares the initials of the real Messiah) that nothing can really live up to our expectations. No matter what he does, it’ll still seem weak tea at best. Mel Gibson had a similar problem when he did “The Patriot.” All the major figures of the American Revolution are so steeped in myth and patriotic fervor that you can’t really tell a story about them because at this late date virtually anything you did would appear a poor second to the cult of personality that surrounds them. Gibson decided to sidestep the issue by telling a story that was effectively offstage from the “main” story of the Revolution, in which the Founding Fathers only have cameo roles. It was a wise move, as it freed him up to tell his own story rather than being a slave to people’s expectations.

Word on the street is that in the original script for Terminator: Salvation, John Connor was barely in it. We follow others around for half the film before we meet him, and then he’s a massive force to be reckoned with, not ‘one of the gang.’ I believe it. The structure of this film has all the earmarks of having originally been a “We’re off to see the Wizard” plot which was then overhauled to give the Wizard more screen time. This is, I think, ultimately to the movie’s detriment because if you squint real hard you can see a better movie buried beneath plastic surgery inside of this film, and you really want it to come out.

Alas..

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In 2003 a murderer named Marcus is on death row. He signs his body over for scientific experimentation after he dies, as a way