Terminator Salvation had the franchise's most interesting premise and squanders it with a thoroughness that is almost remarkable. McG's 2009 entry takes the post-apocalyptic future that the earlier films had used as a backdrop and makes it the setting for a story of such limited emotional engagement that it makes the glimpsed future of the Cameron pictures feel richer and more fully realised than the one depicted here at length. The future war, which the Cameron films made feel terrifying through selective glimpses, is rendered in such exhaustive visual detail that it loses the quality of nightmare and becomes merely a setting.
At a Glance
Director: McG
Runtime: 115 minutes
Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Moon Bloodgood, Helena Bonham Carter
Release: 2009
Critics Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, a missed opportunity)
Audience Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, disappointing)
Review Breakdown
Plot
In 2018, John Connor is a mid-level resistance fighter whose prophesied leadership role has not yet been established. When Marcus Wright, a man who was executed in 2003 and who wakes up in the post-apocalyptic future with no memory of how he got there, arrives in the story, the two men must work together to rescue Kyle Reese from Skynet's central facility. The plot is the franchise's most structurally confused, attempting simultaneously to tell a story about John Connor's rise to leadership, a mystery about Marcus Wright's true nature, and a rescue mission involving Kyle Reese, without developing any of these threads with sufficient depth. The most damaging structural failure is the treatment of John Connor as a secondary character in his own story, a man whose prophesied importance is asserted repeatedly but whose dramatic function is largely reactive. The film never resolves the tension between its two protagonists, and the result is a narrative that feels divided against itself.
Characters
Christian Bale's John Connor is the most significant casting disappointment, a performer of considerable range given a character of almost no psychological complexity. The John Connor of Salvation is a man of absolute certainty and determination whose dramatic function is to deliver exposition and look resolute, and Bale plays the role with a conviction the material does not deserve. Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright is the most compelling character, a man whose discovery of his own nature gives the picture its one moment of genuine surprise, and Worthington plays the character's confusion and his eventual acceptance with a naturalism and a warmth that makes him the most engaging presence in the film. Anton Yelchin's Kyle Reese is the most enjoyable creation, a young man of considerable resourcefulness whose scenes give the picture some of its most engaging passages and whose performance establishes the young Kyle Reese as a credible precursor to Michael Biehn's version of the character. Worthington is the greatest asset. Bale is wasted in a role that gives him almost nothing to do beyond deliver exposition and look determined. Yelchin is excellent in a part that deserved more screen time than the film allows him.
Tone
McG pitches the picture as a post-apocalyptic war film, and the visual realisation of the future war is the most striking achievement. The production design is the franchise's most ambitious, creating a post-apocalyptic landscape of scale and specificity that the Cameron films could only gesture toward. But the tonal register is too consistently grim and too consistently generic to generate the emotional engagement that the more spectacular elements require, and the absence of the Cameron pictures' tonal range, from terror to warmth, is the most persistent limitation. Danny Elfman's score provides a serviceable sonic backdrop without the thematic distinctiveness of the franchise's strongest musical work.
Meaning / Themes
The most interesting thematic concern is the question of what makes someone human, explored through Marcus Wright's discovery that he is a machine who believes himself to be a man. The suggestion that humanity is defined not by biology but by choice and by feeling is the most coherent thematic statement, and it is handled with enough conviction in Marcus's arc to feel like a dramatic concern rather than a plot mechanism. It is a theme the franchise has circled before, but Salvation is the only entry to place it at the centre of its story rather than its margins, and the picture is more interesting for it than its dramatic failures might suggest.
Direction
McG's direction is the most impressive element, with a command of scale and a visual ambition that gives the post-apocalyptic setting a grandeur and a specificity the franchise had not previously achieved. The action sequences are staged with a physical clarity that makes them the most technically accomplished in the franchise since T2. The Harvester sequence in particular demonstrates a genuine instinct for large-scale machine menace that the film's dramatic failures make all the more frustrating: a director capable of staging that sequence should have been capable of making a better film around it. The gap between the visual ambition and the dramatic achievement is the picture's defining characteristic, and it is a gap that no amount of production design can close.
Cultural Reception
Terminator Salvation received mixed reviews on its release and was a modest commercial success, grossing over $371 million worldwide against a production budget of approximately $200 million. Critics condemned the hollow characterisation of John Connor and the squandering of the future war premise while acknowledging the visual ambition and Worthington's performance. It is now regarded as the franchise's most significant missed opportunity, a picture that had everything it needed to be genuinely great and chose adequacy instead. The on-set controversy surrounding Bale's conduct during filming received more attention than the film itself, a circumstance that has coloured its reputation in ways that are not entirely fair to the picture's genuine visual achievements.
Final Verdict: The franchise's most visually ambitious entry after T2 and its most hollow. Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright is the one genuine achievement, Christian Bale's John Connor is the franchise's most inert protagonist, and the picture squanders its most interesting premise with a thoroughness that is almost remarkable. Terminator Salvation had everything it needed to be genuinely great. It chose adequacy instead.