Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Terminator Salvation - DVD Review

TERMINATOR SALVATION
Starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Moon Bloodgood, Bryce Dallas Howard, Helena Bonham Carter, Common, Jane Alexander and Michael Ironside.
Directed by McG.

**1/2

Oh, come on! It was kinda fun. Why did so many critics hate this? Maybe it was a letdown to those paying full theater prices for it, but it was better than the Sarah Connor Chronicles. That's thanks to the star-making turn by Sam Worthington (Avatar) as Marcus Wright, a human/machine hybrid who only learns halfway through the movie he's not all human.

Is it as good as the James Cameron flicks? Of course not. But McG is really good at staging action sequences and being true to the Terminator mythology. Cameron's, anyway.

Judgment Day has happens. The humans still alive are fighting to survive the terminators Skynet has dispatched. John Connor (Christian Bale) leads the resistance, kind of. He listens to tapes his mother left him and knows he has to find Kyle Reese, a teenager now but a man he needs to find so he can send him to 1984 to impregnate his mother.

Meanwhile Wright, a man sentenced to die in 2003, finds himself alive in 2018, having not aged a day and a little hazy on the past fifteen years.

Their stories run parallel for a while, then Wright stumbles upon a scrawny survivor named Kyle (Star Trek's Anton Yelchin).

Does it mean much? No. I'd put it on par with Terminator 3. Bale's performance features a lot of shouting, and there were secondary characters that never really seemed to do anything. (Why was Bryce Dallas Howard hanging around?) But I credit Worthington, McG, and every penny of its budget on-screen for making it a decent rental.

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