Terminator Salvation

Everyone has a moment from Star Wars Episode 1 where they realised that they were watching a cartoon, not a film. For me, this was in the big droid battle where Jar Jar Binks gets a blaster stuck to his foot and manages to execute four droids by waving his foot at them. There have been many truly awful moments of cinema that have come close to rivalling this moment. In Die Hard 4, for instance, when the car is driven into the helicopter. Or how about in Indiana Jones 4, where Shia LaBouf swings on those vines ala Tarzan... I’m pleased to report that T4 has beaten both of these moments and by quite a long way.

So two of our heroes are escaping the terminators when they are ambushed by a fifty foot tall giant terminator with a laser gun. At this point I actually thought some idiot had switched a reel with one from Transformers but apparently not. The characters perform some fairly entertaining escape manoeuvres and get away from the giant transformer. The giant transformer then opens two hatches on its’ legs and reveals two terminators on motor bikes.

It gets worse.

One of these terminators is taken down by liberal use of an oil slick, which is okay. The other is taken down by a wrecking ball on the back of a truck. Then a Hunter Killer – the flying terminators we know so well from the first three films – appears. It takes out a bridge ahead of the truck, which pulls a handbrake turn to stop. The chain, still dragging the terminator bike, whips round and slams into the Hunter Killer, blowing it up.

I haven’t seen anything quite that ridiculous since I last watched the Power Puff Girls. And that has a certain amount of self referential humour to it.

T4 is awful, really awful. The action scenes are nothing but extremely over the top cartoon sequences, like the ones I just described. The characterisation ranges from standard to hilarious. I lost count of the number of times someone yelled “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Several times it happened as the characters held their hands to the sky.

The script is... Well half of it is quite interesting – the stuff we saw in the trailer with the Terminator who thinks he’s human. That’s fairly entertaining but then there’s a load of utter rubbish involving John Conner and a secret plan to destroy the terminator base. It’s one of those plots where a lot gets said and discussed and yet nothing actually happens.

T4 has so many problems – even ignoring the characters, the acting and the action. The score is terrible (it’s a Danny Elfman one, which gives you quite a nice idea of how bad it is) the plot doesn’t really make much sense, there are too many loose ends, the terminators are nowhere near as dangerous as they should be and they appear to have made John Connor into a total dick.

It’s not as bad as Star Trek and Indiana Jones 4 – there are a couple of characters that I liked – but it’s really, really bad. Save yourself the time and money.