I'm a huge fan of Bale, and forever will be, for American Psycho, the Batman films, The Machinist, The Prestige... the list goes on and on.
It irks the hell out of me that so many people have turned on him. There are essentially two reasons for this, and none of it has to do with Bale's acting ability. First is the rant. Look, I'm not defending his actions, but seriously... all he did was cuss a guy out. Did he go over the top? Sure. But seriously, if the worst thing you've ever done is act like a bit of prima donna once and scream at a co-worker, I don't think that makes you a horrible person. And seriously, who really gives a crap about Shane Halibut or whatever his name is? Maybe he was constantly f**king up the scene, and when you're a committed actor, some guy interrupting your concentration can be a pain in the ass.
Second, is the fact the Terminator Salvation was a bad movie. This was not Bale's fault, nor was his performance in it terrible. People needed a scapegoat for the movie. They could blame McG, but if you blame McG then you also need to blame yourself for believing McG could deliver you anything other than crap. You could blame the screenwriters, but that would mean you'd need to point the finger (at least partially) at Jonah Nolan, and Thou Shalt Not Speak Evil of the Nolan Clan. They gave us TDK, which is clearly the greatest film in the history of cinema and should have won and oscar in every single category that year.
So who does that leave? The actors, namely the main characters, Bale and Worthington. Worthington I suppose gets a pass because hardly anyone in the U.S. had seen him in anything before, and because his character was written to be more likeable than Bale's.
But then here you have Bale, fresh off the rant that turned a bunch of people against him, playing a somewhat unlikeable hero that is hampered with bad dialogue ("I'll be back"). Plus, almost all of Connor's scenes were added after the script was written, so it created this awkward back-and-forth between the two main characters that didn't work well at all (mainly because they didn't give Connor anything interesting to do).
So in the end, people turned on Bale because he was an easy target. They wanted the movie to be great and when it wasn't, of course it had to be his fault. The reason I wholeheartedly believe this is because the complaints about Bale in T:S make no sense and can be easily nullified:
"All he did was yell!" They were on a battlefield for most of the film.
"He used his Batman voice!" No, he didn't. His voice was mildly low and gruff, as it usually is when he does an American accent.
"He sounded British." Again, no he didn't, Harry Knowles. Just because you got duped by McG into thinking the movie might be good doesn't mean you have to go making up bullsh** about it.
"He clearly didn't care about anything." Then when did he fly off the handle in the aformentioned rant? Who flips out like that if they don't give a crap about anything? And why did he work with the director and the screenwriter behind-the-scenes? If you want to blame him for the films problems in that regard (the direction and writing) then you might have a valid complaint. But his behind-the-scenes input might have had more to do with the fact that he was working with an incompetent hack of a director than anything else.
There ya go. That's my "Bale-Out" rant on Terminator Salvation.
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