Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

I saw the gospel according to Terminator Salvation with Christian Bale this weekend. I really liked it. It was well worth the $8 I spent on the ticket. Some movies you just have to see on the big screen.

Once again, we enter a sci-fi story this summer based on the old time-vortex (like Star Trek). It will Swiss Cheese your mind if you try to figure out how this all started. In fact, I was driving home after the movie with my friends laughing as I said (and we tried to figure out), “Which came first: the Terminator or embrio?” It was a play on the age-old philosophical question on origins about the chicken and the egg. Where exactly did John Connor come from? That will bake your mind a little. Is the nerd alert going off?

Anyway, the story worked well-enough and carried the film just fine. As I always say, you have to accept a little ping-pong with the timeline if you are going to watch and enjoy sci-fi. However, there were dull moments. There seemed to be very little emotional buy-in created, as if it was all a little routine. Overall I enjoyed it.

Christian Bale is a great actor. I have always liked him ever since he carried Empire of the Sun for 3 hours at such a young age so many years ago.

The only bad thing, was the new Terminator and supporting actor role played by Sam Worthington. It’s not that he did a bad job. In fact, he was very good. But his accent kept creeping through, and it was a distraction. Not because it was bad or hard to understand. But because it didn’t seem to fit his character.

The good news is, this gives a new birth to create many more movies. I’ve been watching Terminator now for 25 years. Maybe I’ll be watching it for 25 more!

Terminator Salvation was a good revival of an old sci-fi story.