“Terminator Salvation”? Really, that’s a bit grandiose. Given the quantities of distressed metal on display in this sturdy and serviceable sequel — only the fourth “Terminator” movie in a quarter-century — “Terminator Salvage” might be a more apt title. Still, some things are saved, even redeemed, in the course of the movie, including, perhaps, the audience’s interest in killer cyborgs from the future and the fate of the Connor family.
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A detailed recap of the franchise’s empretzeled chronology will not be possible here. But recall that, way back in 1984, a mean and muscular killing machine, the T-800, showed up in Los Angeles spouting Austrian-accented catchphrases and trying to kill Sarah Connor, who was played by Linda Hamilton. Some of us still harbor fond memories of Ms. Hamilton’s way with a pump-action shotgun, and miss her all the more when her voice is heard on old tape recordings in the new movie, from which she is otherwise absent.
By 1991 and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” the first terminator had turned friendly, and devoted himself to protecting Sarah’s son, John (Edward Furlong at the time), from another killer android, who was determined to prevent young John from growing into a leader of the anti-machine guerrilla resistance. But John survived, grew into Nick Stahl and has now matured into Bruce Wayne — I mean Christian Bale, all grizzled cheekbones and frayed vocal cords — while the original T-800 runs the State of California.
And that’s without getting into the metaphysics of time travel, the self-updating allegory of technological anxiety, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” on television or the complex development of a malignant military application called Skynet. Since the last installment, “Rise of the Machines,” a fairly pedestrian action film released in 2003, Skynet, having become “self-aware” (more, perhaps, than the films themselves), unleashed a nuclear holocaust and now wants to wipe out the resistance and the rest of humanity along with it. Eventually it will master time travel, but that will be in a future sequel, which makes the current one an act of extortion by Warner Brothers. If not enough people buy tickets to “Terminator Salvation,” we may never find out just how Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived in California.
After an early bit of foreshadowing set on death row in California in the present decade and featuring a bald Helena Bonham Carter, “Terminator Salvation” plants itself firmly in an apocalyptic future, the terrible year 2018. The death-row inmate, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), pops up for reasons that will become obvious to you long before they are revealed to him. He runs into various ragged resistance fighters, significantly including Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who will go back in time to become John Connor’s dad.
Reese also stumbles into a quasi-romance with Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), one of Connor’s lieutenants and a character who pays homage to Ms. Hamilton’s pioneering action-heroine achievements. (Bryce Dallas Howard, as Connor’s pregnant wife, upholds the maternal side of the original Sarah Connor legacy.)
The palette is a dull steely gray, coarsened by dust and rust and occasionally illuminated by a bright orange fireball. And the action, in spite of some aerial special effects and a few high-tech battles, is accordingly loud and blunt, a symphony of screaming gears, anguished torque and thumping collisions of metal and flesh. As the floor of the screening room rumbled and the walls seemed to shake, I began to wonder if Skynet were not a subsidiary of the Dolby Laboratories, softening up a few human targets before the big battle.
But the movie, directed by McG (yes, him, the one-named auteur at the helm of the “Charlie’s Angels” pictures) from a script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, has a brute integrity lacking in some of the other seasonal franchise movies. It parades neither the egghead aspirations of “Star Trek” nor the thick-skulled pretensions of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” but instead feels both comfortable with its limitations and justly proud of its accomplishments.
Among these are efficient, reasonably swift storytelling — the movie, less than two hours long, is densely populated with semi-important characters and crammed with exposition and incident, but it rarely feels busy or talky — and a mastery of the vernacular of chases, fights, explosions and crashes. McG may not yet have a signature style — he lacks the baroque vulgarity of Michael Bay (“Pearl Harbor” and “Transformers”
or the punchy inventiveness of Brett Ratner (the “Rush Hour” movies and “X-Men: The Last Stand”
— but he manages speed, impact and the choreography of technomayhem with aplomb and a measure of wit.
It has been a long time since the Terminator cycle served as a showcase for state-of-the-art cinematic special effects. The morphing of Robert Patrick’s flesh into metal in James Cameron’s “T2” was something new under the sun, but “Terminator Salvation” seems more like a throwback than a harbinger of things to come. Especially toward the end some shiny, floating video screens appear, but for the most part the aesthetic is mechanical rather than digital. With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to “Star Trek’s” sleek and seamless Eve.
Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence. “Terminator Salvation,” digitally engineered to approximate a rough, analog feel, is less a cautionary tale than a consumer advisory. Enjoy your new gadgets, but don’t let them out of your sight, and don’t forget where the off switch is.
“Terminator Salvation” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Explosions. Fights. Mild profanity. Heaps of scrap metal.
