Intelligence Terminated

So, I'd been warned (and by people whose opinion I trust) that recent movie Terminator Salvation was bad. It was a strong enough warning that I passed on it while it was in the theater a few months ago.

But this week it arrived on DVD, and when you can just toss it in your Netflix queue... well, I don't know about you, but somehow tossing one bad movie in doesn't seem terrible; it feels like you're getting it for "free" or something.

And I mean, what a cast! Christian Bale, Helena Bonham Carter, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michael Ironside. I've liked all of them -- a lot -- in other movies. This movie couldn't be completely devoid of entertainment value, could it?

Well, it wasn't. But it was devoid of intelligence. This is the biggest, dumbest Terminator movie yet, and while some people might jump in quickly and say, "well what more do you expect from a Terminator movie?" the answer is simply, "more." The franchise did not start out that way. The first two movies were action movies, yes, but smart action movies. There was a logic to character behavior that naturally led from one action sequence to the next. And underlying all that, just a hint of a dramatic message to lend another texture to the proceedings.

Terminator Salvation is just about blowin' stuff up. And make no mistake, it looks pretty. The CG is impeccable. The Terminators are rendered with complete credibility -- that includes one particular Terminator that I knew was going to be in the movie and fully expected to look fake. It honestly didn't.

But no matter how beautiful the action is, it really needs to make sense. And the scenes have to have a connective tissue that makes sense too. The logic of Terminator Salvation gets more tortured the longer the movie goes on. And if you don't want to know any specifics, you might as well skip on to the last paragraph here, because explaining what I mean is going to require revealing chunks of the plot.

What exactly does Skynet know? Given that Kyle Reese is #1 on their hit list, it would seem they must know that he is in fact John Connor's father. So I cannot fathom any reason why they wouldn't kill him five times over, given the chance. So in this movie, Skynet actually catches Reese, and what does it/they do? They hold him prisoner so they can lure John Connor to their base... to kill John. Ummm... do they not realize that they can kill John Connor -- instantly -- by killing Kyle Reese?

Then there's the whole Marcus Wright Terminator subplot. While it paves the way for a bunch of awesome special effects, and actually lends the movie its only scenes of anything like genuine emotion -- it makes no damn sense. We're meant to accept that the only reason Terminator after Terminator has failed to kill John Connor is because all of them knew they were Terminators?

Not that the human motivations in this movie make any more sense. Even if you accept that the Blair Williams character wouldn't empty her clips into Marcus the second she found out he was a Terminator, there's just no possible way to believe that John Connor wouldn't. And yet he does, just to move the plot along.

Yes, the movie looks incredible. And it's stuffed to the rafters with beautiful visuals and thunderous noise... which still doesn't amount to enough to switch off my brain. I'd rate it a C-. And I can't say I wasn't warned.