Spoilers ahead…

Terminator Salvation enjoys showing off its eye candy, and this is why the movie is needlessly fat. This is apparent from the start. The opening title sequence with its colossal block letters sliding across the background is a variation of the first movie’s sequence. Yet whereas its end is the title reveal, Salvation indulges in two grand openings – one in the same size and font as the credits and the other a pull-back of the block letters. Why do something twice when once will do?

Is this being picky? Of course. But sloppy is sloppy, and the movie never stops to clean itself up.

Let’s start with a sampling of inconsistencies before getting to the meat of the review. Little girl Star – or as I’m sure what the writers called her in the first draft, Early Warning Detection System – is able to hear or feel the vibrations of Machines. When the camera cuts to her stunned expression, get ready for some action. She is able to hear that spy Machine which is the size of a frisbee, but absolutely nobody can hear the Harvester stomp up to the gas station until it punches through the roof?

Or what about the lazy editing? The scene where John gets on the radio to convince the Resistance to delay bombing Skynet; it steadily gains momentum and then all of a sudden cuts off as quickly as John ends transmission. And the subsequent scene of Christian Bale delivering THE line that defines the Terminator franchise feels like a rehearsal take. AND the following scene begins with another nod to a previous Terminator movie. This is an excessive and poorly paced sequence. It feels like there were either extended or extra scenes removed for the theatrical release, and I’m not sure if I care enough to rent the DVD to find out because even if a director’s cut puts back the scenes, they won’t save the movie.

So why does this movie fail to entertain? Some of the credit goes to the character of Blair, played by Moon Bloodgood. She is a cliche: the survivalist that has to be rescued from horny savages, the heroine who falls for her rescuer – in a scene where she intimately embraces him so that they can keep warm through shared body heat. Good lord.

The relationship she forms with Marcus Wright is the passionate part of the movie – Connor is already married to Kate, who has about as much purpose as the movie’s title appearing twice, and Connor doesn’t meet Reese until the end. Perhaps Blair would have served better as the character who simply detours Marcus to the Resistance base instead of being the love interest. Blair is an artificial sweetener.

Salvation could have been a popcorn flick (like Die Hard or Taken) yet it takes itself seriously, making its characters announce to the audience the theme through idiotic dialogue and laughable scenes.

And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why Skynet had to use Reese as bait. To kill John Connor? But if Reese dies, doesn’t that prevent John from sending him back? Wouldn’t killing Reese kill John? And how exactly would John die? Slumps to the floor? Fades away? What happens to Kate and her baby? Do they cease to exist also?

And this here is my problem with the Terminator franchise. The story falls apart when you start to show and analyze what happens during Judgment Day. And at the same time this is the beauty of Cameron’s Terminators, especially the second one. Yes, the movie is scifi action-adventure, but the genre is only the setting for a story about the value of human life. And even with the scifi and time travel elements, Cameron focused on one aspect so that he could tell the most interesting story. Not a story about a post-apocalyptic or temporal war but a story about how a boy has to become a great military leader and how he teaches his Machine to be human. “If a Terminator can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too.”

T2 isn’t a great movie just because of its message and how it’s framed. Cameron’s sequel is a fantastic action movie because it is lean, because every bullet, explosion, and collision has a purpose. There is no excess, there are no twists. Look at the structure of T2. The first half hour sets up the major characters and their agendas: the T-800 has to find and protect John; the T-1000 has to find and kill John; John wants to rescue his mother; and Sarah wants to prevent Judgment Day. We get all this upfront so that the rest of the movie can focus on the trio of good guys and deliver a third act composed entirely of one action scene. Since there are no mysteries – like Marcus Wright – there doesn’t need to be coy and convoluted setups that as a consequence will make the audience analyze the film and find details to tear apart.

Not only is the action in T2 clearly defined, they are also framed in a specific way. Again, look at the structure of T2, only this time focus on the choreography of the action. How many melee scenes are there between human and Machine? Two – versus the bikers, versus the Pescadero employees. But more importantly, none were between the major cast of characters, and the reason is that in such an exchange, the Machine will always win. Arnold breaks the biker’s hand without so much as twitching. Arnold breaks open doors by pushing them. Young John is able to call his foster parents because Arnold uses his hand to smash quarters out of the pay phone. So why does the T-800 in Salvation have such a difficult time killing John? Why does it resort to tossing him around? Why doesn’t it simply grab John and cave his face in? Going hand-to-hand against a Machine is the equivalent of letting go of the dryer while taking a bath. James Cameron knows this, and it’s why he never wrote a situation where the human will out-punch a Machine (look at what happened to Reese at the end of the first Terminator).

And putting aside logic, the Terminator throwing John around the factory is just not exciting. Neither is the way he gets the scar on his face.

There is a reason Sam Worthington shares space with Bale above the title. The story of Salvation is more his than Bale’s, and Worthington is the best part of the movie. His performance is strong; he is charismatic, able to convey the right amount of emotion through dialogue and facial expressions. He can be a powerful presence (scene where he is chained up and talking to Bale), and he can display desperation – when Bale growls “what are you,” Worthington responds with a convincing helplessness: “I don’t know.”

I didn’t have a problem with Marcus as the main character, but I felt Connor’s story was underwhelming. I had been under the impression (as in I vaguely remember reading this in an interview) that John’s purpose in this movie is to prove that he has the knowledge and skills to lead the Resistance. And I guess to a point they do get into this territory, but the way it’s executed with the cliched military leader (General Ashdown played by Michael Ironside) unwilling to listen to the advice of his officer, it’s more like the writers got us here by sleepwalking.

And while I never cared for Kate’s character in Terminator 3, there was an opportunity in Salvation for her to be the welcome constant in John’s life, for her to be his last thought at the end of the day.

But instead the intimacy is placed between Marcus and Blair. Because as a plot device to help him escape the Resistance base? Yes, unfortunately. And because at the end of the movie Marcus finds redemption, and the best way to milk the scene is to have Marcus and Blair stare lovingly into each others eyes and cry tragedy while the rest of the cast watch so they too can have their eye-fucking moment with the hero. It’s so goddamn cheesy. Not only that, the message of that scene is a giant curd; whereas in T2 “the Tin Man gets his heart,” Salvation’s gives up his to save John Connor.

_
*the quotations in the last line is James Cameron’s, from the book Four Screenplays (Syd Field, 1994). the full quote: “Essentially you’ve got a character associated with being the quintessential killing machine; that is his purpose in life. Devoid of any emotion, remorse, or any kind of human social code, he suddenly finds himself in the strangest dilemma of his career. He can’t kill anybody, and he doesn’t even know why. He’s got to figure it out. He’s got to, because he’s half human. And he figures it out at the end. The Tin Man gets his heart.”

Aliens is a great sequel. It takes the core elements of the first and expands it without trivializing it. You have action scenes where every explosion has a purpose, and you have characters with trajectories – at that level the movie is the relationship between a mother and a child. Ripley starts by going to LV-426 to make sure the aliens are destroyed; she has no intention of killing them herself because her fear overshadows her hate and because she isn’t trained like the colonial marines. She finds a survivor, and from this point on, Newt is her mission. Yes, killing the aliens is still a part of it, but again, she is still relying on the marines. The moment Gorman stutters is the moment Ripley steps up to become one of the greatest action heroes in movie history, the mother of all mothers willing to run into the worst situation imaginable to rescue a child.

And Ripley’s head-tilt when that egg opens, it’s an attitude more badass than the rage that follows. Explosions can be cool, but a well-placed well-expressed character action, that’s what blows me away.

Terminator 2 is the perfect sequel.

Role reversal is the weapon of choice. Sarah Connor becomes protector to John like Kyle Reese was to her, and when she goes after Miles Dyson, she becomes for a moment the killer who “can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with.”

The villain of the first becomes the hero in the second. The Terminator protects John, who teaches it to act more human, and the unforeseen result is it becomes his father-figure.

The premise is outlandish, but the characters’ purposes and emotions respectfully bring it down to our level of understanding and appreciation.

Why can’t video game sequels do the same?

I marathon-watched season one of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. From the start TV John is uncomfortable and more importantly not confident about his future role – one scene in the pilot has him pleading to his mother that he can’t keep this up (“this” being running), that “I don’t believe what people think I am, some messiah.” His introductory scene has him angry at Sarah because they have to relocate again. John gives her more attitude when they start fresh in a hick town, where he further complains about not having “the right clothes” and having to deal with school computers “from the 50′s,” which Sarah berates him for because he might get caught hacking. His response: “jeez, I know the rules, they are like written on the inside of my eyeballs.”

Let’s look at Movie John. We know Sarah was aggressive with him. In the parking lot scene, John tells his Terminator that she kept reminding him that he is going to be “this great military leader;” also, that they spent a lot of time in “Nicaragua and places like that” with “crazy ex-Green Beret” guys. The assumption is that he was scared and scarred, but later on in the scene where he is in the underground weapons depot, he says “I grew up in places like this so I figured this is how people lived,” which he conveys with excitement. Back to the parking lot, John continues his monologue: his mother being busted and him being told “your mother is a psycho, kid, didn’t you know” which he then confides “it’s like everything I was brought up to believe was bullshit. I hated her for that!”

There is no reason for TV John to be whiny and snappy to his mother since he no longer has any reason to doubt her. He shouldn’t feel uncomfortable because he grew up in the gunrunner’s world – and of course, T2 wasn’t a corset period piece. An argument can be made that just because he was around these adrenaline-fuled situations doesn’t mean he accepted them while wearing sunglasses at night. Thing is, in the movie there hardly any scenes where he is helpless in the fetal position; he never has anyone step in front of him to do something he could do himself – again, Sarah raising him to be a great military leader. Though there are things he figures out for himself:

“You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why?”
“You can’t, ok.”
“Why?”
“Because you just can’t.”

And then:

“This is tactically dangerous. It might anticipate this move.”
“I don’t care, we got to stop her.”
“Killing Dyson might actually prevent the war.”
“I don’t care! Haven’t you learned anything yet, haven’t you figured out why you can’t kill people?”

John Connor is not perfect. He knows from watching his mother what consequences a hothead brings and at the same time he is willing to compromise his cool if his mother is in danger.

A hero with flaws is not enough. Some can argue that after T2, John can take comfort in trying to live a normal life which in turn would give him reasons to be unsure of his messiahness.

But think about it: John can never have a normal life. Yes, torching Cyberdyne could have prevented the war, but nobody knows that. All people know is they are wanted criminals. The Connors won’t know if they were successful until Aug. 29, 1997 so if he is a leader he should fully accept that he is on-call until that date, and even if the date comes and goes without explosions, he should be prepared for the life on the run.

This is his sacrifice.

Sequels for video games haven’t affected me like T2 has. Doesn’t help they are more about refinement of the original’s gameplay instead of continuation of the story. Characterization is important to me, and that is my failing when it comes to gaming. I don’t cross my arms and huff when a game tries to be nothing more than its gameplay, but I will be critical of games that tout its story. The Zelda games never intended to tell anything grander than a simple tale about a boy trying to save the world. Gears of War 2, though, injected itself with a variety of steroids, and while the characters are still insanely thick, their actions and emotions are still limp dick.

My ideal would be to play a game that had T2 values and sensibilities. Thing is, what’s the point of a story where the gameplay contradicts or belittles it? What’s the point in having your hero believe in the value of human life if your hero goes around killing people to advance to the next part of the map?

Does this mean you can’t create a game with this message? Of course not. You just have to be wary of player actions poking holes into your story. Nor am I saying this particular theme is the pedestal. There are other heights games should look to besides the villain crossing the horizontal line to save the world their way. The relationship between two best friends, the relationship between parent and child. The willingness to sacrifice tangible parts for intangible gains. The need to prove a point even if it means you become a pariah.

Because who knows. If games start toying around with mature ideas and infatuations, maybe we can create new gameplay ideas.