12 January 2010

Christian Bale Shouting: The Motion Picture


Terminator Salvation - McG

Now I’m a big fan of the Terminator series, even the third one, I know many of you would gasp at that fact, but I liked the fun it had, I liked the light hearted humour, the terrible acting from Arnie, but I still enjoyed it. I think it was one of the first DVD’s I ever brought; very sad indeed. But Terminator 1 and 2 were legendary films, films that will never be forgotten. And here we are now, looking into the future at the war between Man versus Machine. Something we thought we would never see. And now, directed by McG, yes the name does make him sound like a twat, but he is good at doing what he does best, blowing shit up and making people shout a lot.

The film picks up a little more after number 3 where John Connor and his wife were locked in an underground bunker whilst the world fought against Skynet, the massive corporation who build machines to kill everyone. It’s apocalypse basically; shit is defiantly hitting the fan. John and the resistance are trying to figure out the best way to finally put an end to Skynet. After finding a signal that seems to disrupt the machines and switch them off, they begin to figure out the best route of action. Whilst this is happening, Marcus, a man who is built as a machine with human flesh and organs, awakes in the future to find the world a mess. Resistance members are scattered around cities and Marcus is trying to figure out what’s going on. He meets Kyle Reece, a key figure in this whole series, as the father to John Connor, so the film turns from being a machine versus man future war epic into a travelling film where Marcus travels to different places looking for answers where he finally meets John Connor and they both figure out a plan to destroy Skynet once and for all.

You can pretty much figure out the rest of the film, and includes a strange but cool cameo from Arnie, well his face, not his actual body. The fight with him is very similar to all the fights in Terminator, it has to be in a really disgusting place, a factory of the robots, lots of strange sounds and what you would imagine to smell like a cross between an old shoe shop and an alley full of piss. The films action sequences are cool, on a full-scale, large explosions, cool CGI and everything, the full works. This is what they wanted from this film, focus on the machines, and make them out to be horrible things that destroy places with ease. It’s less about the humans and the dialogue and more about the action. It’s very unbalanced.

One good thing about the film is performances from Anton Yelchin and Sam Worthington, which stragenly enough is better here than in Avatar. Anton, famous for his role in Star Trek and Charlie Bartlett, a great little indie film, plays a likeable role in Kyle Reece, the starter of all this shit and the father of John Connors. Even if the role is small, it’s believable, and shows a real human in a situation like this. He’s given little comedic lines and lines from the past films to link them, but they could of given him more. If they wanted him to be the comedy of the film, it didn’t work.

5/10

Simon Childs

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