Set in 2018, the machines have taken over and they do battle with a fully-formed resistance that has access to submarines, aircraft and secret bases. Skynet is far less omnipotent in this iteration, largely restricted to particular zones, and its assorted machines surprisingly easy to kill. John Connor (Christian Bale) is a local commander at this point, about whom there are vague rumors among the populace that he is the prophet who will save them. He spends his time obsessively listening to old tapes left him by his mother, hoping to hear clues that will help beat Skynet, and inspiring the scattered resistance in scratchy radio broadcasts. Connor’s specific goal is to locate and protect Kyle Reese, now a teenager, but the man who was/will be his father, sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor in the first Terminator. The time paradox implications of him doing so, or failing to do so, are never made clear.
Enter Macus Wright (Sam Worthington) a human-cyborg hybrid, who we first meet in the present, on death row, being offered the chance to donate his organs by a creepy Helena Bonham-Carter. The bulk of the movie revolves around Wright’s struggle to figure out what he is, and Connor’s ambivalence about whether to trust him. There are some half-hearted efforts to muse on what makes us human (as opposed to machine), but mostly we get a series of set-piece action sequences, at least in the first half of the movie. The second half is dedicated to a rescue effort at Skynet HQ which operates as a clear homage to the long sequences in T1 and T2 that took place in old industrial plants with plenty of heavy machinery and molten metal conveniently lying around.
This is a grim, humorless outing, but it is effective. The action scenes are well-shot, with jerky handheld cameras that produce a chaotic wartime feel. The movie does reproduce some of the dark, desperate feel of the first Terminator, before the series got all warm and fuzzy (thought there is the requisite cute and mute kid). Bale doesn’t have to do much, but what he does, he does well. Worthington, who is new to me, is a real find, infusing some pathos into his role as an ex-human given a second chance to atone for past mistakes, and Moon Bloodgood brings some humanity and skintight black leather to the movie.
No doubt I will see this, since I am a sucker for the apocalyptic. However, it is hard to imagine the kind of asshole who calls himself “McG.”
You’d probably call yourself McG if your name was Joseph McGinty Nichol. It’s a lot better than JoeyMac!
moon bloodgod?
alas, it is bloodgood, not bloodgod, but i enjoyed the film fine anyway. it’s not really a terminator film though; it feels more like a less pretentious (far less pretentious) entry in the matrix series, almost like a prequel to it. i do wish there had been far less christian bale and far more of the guy with the wandering accent. and also far more of bloodgood.