Terminator Salvation Blu-ray Review
Why are you trashing my set?!
STORYTELLING: 
Terminator Salvation is about how we define humanity. I know this, because the film said so in the form of a rhetorical question in a voice-over, as all lazy films do.
Set sometime next month in a rundown part of Los Angeles, SkyNet has apparently succeeded in its mission to wipe out most the human population.
That is, except John Connor (portrayed by Christian Bale in a performance that looks like it was borrowed from The Dark Knight), teenager Kyle Reese and a mute black girl that seems to come up with a necessary plot device at the most convenient times. Her character is like the Swiss army knife of lazy writing; she has the right tool for every dilemma, and can shepherd the film from action beat to action beat.
Also somehow alive, after an extremely awkward opening segment with Helena Bonham Carter, (doing her best Nosferatu impression) is Sam Worthington’s character – Marcus Wright. Worthington is about the only bright spot in this otherwise mediocre production, maybe because he knows he has a real career after this movie (thank you, Jim Cameron!).
What entails is two hours of trying to put Connor and Reese in the same room, so Connor can one day tell his new teenage pal to go into the future and impregnate his mom. Now that is a conversation I’d pay money to see; it’d be like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode with cyborgs.
In the mix is Marcus Wright, as the well-intentioned plot device created to bridge these two characters together. Wright has a compelling character arc and personal story, but it’s unfortunately truncated in favor of giving Bale more screen time, which drags the film down as it lurches to its telegraphed climax.
And while you can see the plot twist coming from a mile away, what was unexpected was the insulting denouement; a ridiculous slap-in-the-face that is the final nail in this coffin of mediocrity. I was completely surprised with how McG chose to resolve this installment, considering the many obvious alternatives that would have been much better suited.
A quick Google search reveals that massive rewrites occured once Bale was brought onboard, limiting Worthington’s role and likely tossing out the ending as originally intended. If that is the case, then we have nobody to blame but Bale’s ego for breaking what could have been a pretty good script.
In the end, Salvation is not the slight against humanity that some critics decried it to be, nor is it the imaginative, dark fantasy that many of us conjured up in our heads during recess after seeing glimpses of Judgment Day in Terminator 2.
It’s just forgettable.
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