Saw Terminator Salvation. It was pretty silly. It follows the adventures of John Conner & co in the future, where they have to fight terminators of all kinds. There's a much higher element of survivalism in this one. It also therefore has the associated social paranoia. A few times, it is the humans who are the biggest threat to our heroes. It's fairly self-serious and dour but such is the style of modern action films. The film indulges in a bit of that horrible macho posturing which I hate. The rebel command, for example, establishes its friction with John Conner by pointing a gun at his head for no obvious reason and saying "are we on the same page?" John Conner slowly turns to look down the gun-barrel and says "yeah." I wish he had said "Same page? We're on the same book! <awkward pause> I... I don't know. It sounded cooler in my head. Er... look, can we get on with the meeting?" Really, what kind of rebel alliance are they running here anyway?
The film itself has a lot of fight scenes, endlessly struggling back and forth. There's a fight with a four-story-high terminator which was pretty sweet. I wish they had crawled up him ala Shadow of the Colossus, but I guess you can't have everything. There's some scenes where humans are rounded up by Skynet (for obscure reasons) which evoke the cattle-cars of the holocaust a bit. I don't know why the film evokes the cattle-cars here, I think just to reenforce that this is bad, what's going on here.
I don't know. I didn't like it. I think I let the grim/macho tone spoil it for me. It's really just an action/sci-fi with neat and dumb parts. The characters are thin and its plot is disjointed, but the point is the butt-kicking and the explosions, and those are nice, I guess. There's a great show-down scene with Skynet at least. I think I liked that scene because here, at last, was a character (Skynet) who was respected for their intelligence, instead of for their ability to start a truck or to shoot a gun. Oh well, another day, another action-movie dismissed by me.
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