Wow.
Ka-boom.
This outing in the Terminator series is packed with over the top action, so much so that I thought for a moment I was watching an old Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer film. The special effects were intense and believable, the sound engineering was the best I’ve heard in a movie in a long time, and the action sequences themselves were beautifully choreographed to emphasize the desperation of the characters and the plight of humanity after global thermonuclear war.
I’m not a Terminator fanboy; in fact, I missed the third film, but I did catch the first season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox. I always thought the movies reverted to the same plot: Robot goes back in time to kill John Connor. Someone/something else goes back to protect John Connor. They fight. Someone dies (in a metaphysical sense). Roll credits.
This film attempts to be part thriller, part science fiction spectacle, and part drama. While the characterization is a tad on the weak side to make this truly believable (unlike the excellent attention to character in T2) as a drama, the other two elements are so successful that you’re not left wanting.
Christian Bale is a little disappointing. He uses his Batman growl as a subsitute for real emotions in a couple of scenes, but he manages to redeem himself in tender moments with his pregnant wife (played by the radiant Bryce Dallas Howard). The other actors are a bit superfluous–not enough screen time was spent really developing any of them other than Sam Worthington’s character Marcus Wright. It was, however, a delight to see Michael Ironsides returning to a grumpy commander role.
This doesn’t matter. What matters is the machine body count, the number of explosions, and the speed at which you shove popcorn in your mouth. This is action cinema at its pinnacle with high quality effects, a decent story, satisfying conclusion.
Didn’t see T3… heard it was a cheesy mess. There was a bit of cheese at the end of this one too, but it wasn’t awful. I found myself truly enjoying this film. No Oscars, but entertaining. I saw two problems (neither were all that bad, nor did they ruin the fun for me). (1) The most interesting character was the cyborg, not John. They should have developed this character more, and John’s character should not have been such an ass. Bale seemed to be confusing John with Batman. (2) John was familiar, from T2 (and I assume T3), intimately with cyborg models. He even had one that he programmed to protect his past self. Why then did he have so many issues trusting the cyborg in this film? Even having reasons to not trust, why fear it while he had the nifty power-off freq?