Terminator Salvation


	HOME-----FILMS-----TICKETS------PICTURES & VIDEO------SUBMISSIONS------ABOUT FRIGHTFEST------CONTACT-----LINKS-----FRIGHTFEST FORUM

The UK's Leading fantasy & horror film festival.

The Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London 27th to 31st August 2009

It's so good it's scary - The Guardian

The premiere event of the year for horror fans - Time Out

TERMINATOR SALVATION - 2009

****

Directed by McG. Starring Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood, Bryce Dallas Howard and Anton Yelchin. Action/Sci-Fi, Adventure, USA, 125 min.

It’s beyond massive, deafeningly loud and sometimes impenetrable from a plot point of view. Yet director McG’s crack at the fourth episode in the undying TERMINATOR franchise is one of the better science fiction blockbusters of recent times.

While not a fan of his CHARLIE’S ANGELS twosome or the boring WE ARE MARSHALL, McG seems to have found his style forte with this dark, grim and unrelenting vision of a post JUDGMENT DAY aftermath. With it’s bleached out/burnished gun metal look, awesome technology, flawless special effects and sudden shocks, there’s a real sense of grandiose horror and loss at play in John Brancato and Michael Ferris’ continuing screenplay from RISE OF THE MACHINES that the former commercials director really connects with and takes to the nth degree of sensation, both aurally and visually. SALVATION begins to the reveal the future only glimpsed in the earlier movies and basically concerns John Connor (Christian Bale, with that deep voice he only uses for his action movie jobs) having to save teenager Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, STAR TREK’s new Chekov) so he can father him with Sarah Connor in order to set all the time travel machinations in motion. Now is not the moment to have a sloppy memory over past time looping plotlines! How he eventually achieves this goal is thanks to a new breed of half human/half machine in the guise of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, acting Bale off the screen) who might be a Skynet agent sent to the future to infiltrate the resistance. Then again, due to his DNA make-up, he might not be a pawn in that controlling artificial intelligence network. The upshot of all this is Connor and Wright battle large with terrific robotic centipedes, monster iron giants and their lethal motorbike parasites that moult off them, huge prison spaceships and, naturally, governator Arnold Schwarzenegger reborn as a nude CGI video game figure. With imagery borrowed from both the Holocaust and Guantanamo Bay giving intelligent resonance to the comic strip action, and the rubble-strewn Los Angeles and hi-tech Skynet HQ adding further epic qualities to the 2018-set vistas, TERMINATOR SALVATION is breathlessly edgy post-apocalyptic pulp. A shame such great actresses as Jane Alexander and Helena Bonham Carter are wasted as the stormy demolition derby spectacle keeps upping its thrill-a-second game.

But it’s not about the acting is it? It’s about awesome special effects, carnage incarnate and gadgetry admiration and to that end it does a fantastic job. Alan Jones