I wouldn’t say I’m a “fan” of Christian Bale, but I did enjoy him in movies like American Psycho, The Machinist, The Prestige and even Batman Begins, but the more I watch him lately I’m coming to the conclusion that he’s just not a good actor. Ok, ok, I know that Terminator Salvation was not the greatest movie in the world and McG apparently can’t direct his way out of a paper bag, but even the lines that Bale spoke in this movie were just ridiculous.
Terminator Salvation is the 4th film in the series and follows John Connor (Bale) as he tries to rescue Kyle Reese from being killed by the machines, which he has to succeed in doing since Kyle Reese is his father and if he doesn’t survive then Connor cannot send Reese back in time to protect his mother and subsequently knock her up. I get a headache sometimes when trying to piece together everything that has happened in the Terminator series because some of it just doesn’t make sense, like where does Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fit in to all of this?
But anyways, the movie itself wasn’t very good, it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen this year, but it wasn’t good. And my biggest complaint about it isn’t even the directing, but the fact that they tried way to hard to pay homage to the past Terminator flicks. I can think of a few instances off the top of my head where they just stole scenes or lines from the previous films. For example, when Marcus Wright first meets Kyle Reese, the first thing Reese says to him is “Come with me if you want to live”, which was uttered by Arnold in part 2 and I believe it was also said by Reese in part 1 (it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original). Then there is scene where Reese and Wright are trying to escape from motorcycle Terminators. Reese and Wright are driving in a modified big rig trying to get away when they notice that the one motorcycle has disappeared, but of course it reappears as it jumps off a bridge and lands in front of the truck they are driving. This is exactly the same as in Terminator 2 when John Connor is being chased by the T-1000 and Arnold takes his bike off the bridge, landing in front of the semi truck. Then of course we get John Connor playing “You Could Be Mine” by Guns N Roses to try to lure out a motorcycle terminator and of course that song was the theme song of the T2. We also get to see him use the sweet computer hacking skills he learned from T2 and hacking ATM machines, to gain access to skynet later in the movie. There are also multiple instances of single handed shotgun pumps which of course Sarah Connor made popular in T2 and the use of molten steel to destroy a Terminator, even the catwalk/shotgun scene in “Salvation” is almost identical to the same scene at the end of T2. It just seemed like they were trying way to hard to make this movie something that it wasn’t. And from what I read, the early leaks of the script were fairly decent, but some how something got lost in translation. Whether that was the director wanting to take things in a different direction or just the director fucking up based on the writing, I don’t know, but the final product is not something I would be proud of.
