mondojohnson

I’ve just come from seeing Terminator: Salvation, which surprised me by being primarily a war movie. And quite a good one, I must say.

The film is dirty, dark and bloody, shot mostly at eye-level with chaotic hand-held style. It wisely went easy on CGI — the action is really physical and percussive, leaving you a bit shell-shocked. It reminded me of Saving Private Ryan with its disturbing “you-too-are-there” feel. The film depicts the early days of the war with Skynet, so a lot of the Terminator-tech is in “beta”, you might say. But their arsenal is still impressive, including massive, Transformer-like human harvesters and scary robot eels.

The plot essentially boils down to “Saving Private Reese”… John Connor, after listening to the cassettes of his dead mother, is determined to locate and protect the teenage Kyle Reese, who is of course his own father. He gains an unlikely ally in his pursuit in the form of Marcus, a early cyborg prototype stitched together from the corpse of a death row inmate.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I like the way the Terminator themes have evolved since the original, which was clearly based on cold war fear of nuclear annihilation. The more recent “Terminators” seem to have more to do with our anxieties and fantasies about becoming machines … the technology itself isn’t the enemy, the software — or soul — is.

[And special props to young Anton Yelchin, who got to be both Chekov and Kyle Reese in consecutive summer blockbusters. He must be LOADED....]