Terminator Salvation is more or less a two-hour episode of The Rat Patrol, with much better effects, a bigger cast, and far inferior music.
            Director McG (that’s short-form for Joseph McGinty Nichol) also throws in a post-apocalyptic riff on Philip K. Dick’s famous short story“Impostor,” albeit with a happy ending tacked on. We’ll come back to that.

            Christian Bale plays John Connor, tough but compassionate officer in the resistance to Skynet’s all-out war on humanity. Connor is the film’s equivalent of Sergeant Sam Troy (stone-eyed heartthrob Christopher George), leader of the two-jeep strike force in The Rat Patrol. Charismatic, driven, ramrod straight. Capable of smiling, but not inclined to do so unless the storyline has hit a moment of much needed comic relief, or the credits are about roll.

            For those of you under forty, The Rat Patrol was a prime time TV show that debuted in 1966. Set in North Africa during World War II, it charted the exploits of a four-man (and two-jeep) strike force from the famed Long Range Desert Group. The show was shot in vivid color and full of loud, blossoming explosions and breakneck chases along wreckage-clogged desert highways. Sound familiar?

            Just like Troy, Connor commands a crack team of desert combat misfits. Now, unlike Troy’s back-lot G.I.s, Connor’s troops are hip, multi-racial, and dress like soldier-boy extras in a Prince video. And, as far as I can recall, Sergeant Troy never had arrestingly beautiful women like Moon Bloodgood’s fighter pilot Blair Williams in his ranks. But the concept is roughly the same. Rough-and-ready scrappers unafraid of dirt and bullets.

            Troy often butted heads with the stodgy, desk-bound generals in charge of the Allied North Africa Campaign, usually choosing to forget the more ludicrous parts of his orders. Connor butts heads with the Resistance’s compromised, submarine-bound high command, ultimately choosing to ignore their orders completely and do what he knows in his gut is right. Granted, Troy never had to deal with a furious, leather-faced Michael Ironside in a ratty black greatcoat, but his generals could at least be prickly.

            Just like Troy, Connor faces an implacable but not terribly bright adversary. Troy had to contend with the Nazis, carbon-based Terminators bent upon global domination and—tragically—mass extermination. Connor has Skynet, an artificial intelligence that used mankind’s very own weapons to bring civilization to the brink of annihilation. Troy’s Nazis always managed to overlook a critical weak spot in their supply lines, thereby allowing Troy and his machine-gun-toting jeeps to zip in and blow the convoy to smithereens. Skynet, despite its supposedly superior robot mind, always manages to miss a critical weakness in its master plan—like, say, the human unpredictability factor in its cyborg double agent; or the wisdom of posting just one guard over the nuclear power cores.

            And finally, like Troy, Connor will stoically march out against insurmountable odds, only to have his enemy’s supreme arrogance, the unquestionable rightness of his cause, and the luck of the movieland underdog join forces to carry him through safely.

            Sure, Terminator Salvation has much better production values than The Rat Patrol, but it’s basically the same thing.  

            The good news is The Rat Patrol was a fun show.

            The bad news is The Rat Patrol was not cutting edge science fiction.

            Now there is some science fiction in this flick—gigantic walking robots, a human-Terminator hybrid, some nifty riderless robocycles and genuinely scary serpent-like hydrobots, plus a few passing tips-of-the-hat to the time travel issues that underpinned the prior three entries in the franchise. But it’s all pretty feeble. Terminator Salvation is a bit like James Cameron’s Aliens: that is, a combat story with science fiction trappings. That has a tendency to work well on screen. And it works here, but for the fact that McG isn’t quite as hardware savvy as Cameron and doesn’t have the same instinct for raw, war-zone dialogue.

            Also, Aliens had the immeasurable benefit of James Horner’s pounding, military-flavored score. Terminator Salvation, alas, must make do with another misguided exercise in bombast from Danny Elfman. Don’t believe that matters? Go out and rent Aliens. Watch the scene where the Colonial Marines blast their way out to Ripley, who is waiting in the armored transport. That, friends, is what combat SF music is supposed to sound like.

            Hell, even Dominic Frontiere’s dated theme to The Rat Patrol would be better than the soundtrack Elfman has supplied.

            Getting back to Philip K. Dick and his short story “Impostor.” “Impostor” was about a man who wakes up in his house, sees his wife of many years beside him, then happily goes off to work, not knowing that he is, in fact, a robot—sent by mankind’s alien foe—to unwittingly infiltrate our science labs and then even more unwittingly blow himself up. It turns out that after penetrating our atmospheric defense shield in a small capsule the night before, the android impostor had intercepted the man on his drive home, killed him, absorbed his memories, then erased his (its) own knowledge of who he (it) actually was - so as to be more believable if questioned. Thus, he was nothing more than a walking bomb. Or was he? Was he not perhaps still the man, transformed to be sure, and doomed, but fully realized as to self? A classic story, one that I’m instructing you to go out and read if you haven’t already done so.

            Terminator Salvation borrows from this concept. In the opening sequence, we see convicted murderer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) executed by lethal injection—in (where else?) Texas, in 2003. The film then flashes forward to 2018. John Connor and The Rat Patrol are shooting their way down into a Skynet bunker somewhere out in the desert. We learn that they’re hunting information so classified even they don’t know what it is. (It turns out to be a deactivation signal that could theoretically turn Skynet off). As they race through the underground labyrinth, they stumble across the prostrate and apparently dead body of—you guessed it—Wright.

            Just as Connor and his team finish transmitting the secured information to headquarters, all Hell breaks loose. Connor is able to escape, but barely. Everyone else is killed.

            Later, we watch as a resurrected Wright climbs up from the bombed-out Skynet complex. After a primal scream loud enough to rattle the stainless steel wisdom teeth right out of a Terminator’s jaw, he sets off into the desert. He has no idea where he is or that over a decade has elapsed since his— um— death. By a succession of unlikely events, and perhaps due to something implanted in his brain. he is compelled to seek out John Connor.

            We eventually learn that Wright is a cyborg; part human, but mostly machine. He’s got his own brain, though a chip of some sort has been installed in it; and— for reasons never adequately explained—he has his own heart. The rest is rubber hoses, steel, and flashing lights. Wright’s mission, so far as it can be deduced from the action of the film, and from what Skynet reveals to us in a moment of ill-considered AI hubris is to bring about the deaths of Connor and his father Kyle Reese (played by Anton Yelchin, Chekov in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek). Skynet, you see, has owned the rights to Wright’s body and mind ever since his execution and has now found a way to employ him in the war against humanity. He has been conditioned to get close to Connor and Reese, and unwittingly arrange for their, well, termination.

            The central conceit of the film is that Skynet, being soulless, cannot—indeed, can never—understand Wright’s human need to find redemption.

            So, while Wright may indeed be an impostor, he is nonetheless able to rise above his programming and change his destiny.

            The cast, led by Worthington and Bale, delivers nicely.  Bale, the Industry’s go-to man now for brain-endowed action heroes, imbues his hollow-eyed John Connor with a fascinating blend of grizzled intensity and suppressed desperation. But it is Worthington who truly surpasses expectations. The man has a natural ruggedness and iron-like gaze that is ideally suited to the genre. His tormented, flawed, and at times menacing Wright rings true; frighteningly true. When he chooses to do the right thing, it’s clearly been a hard-fought choice on the inside. It’s our good fortune that Bale declined the role of Wright and requested Connor instead. We were even luckier that James Cameron, who is using Worthington in his upcoming SF film Avatar, recommended the man for the part.

            Bloodgood, last seen in TV’s Journeyman and Day Break, is a surprisingly versatile actress. She provides an unexpected human connection to and for Wright, while at the same time personifying the sort of battle-hardened woman warrior the franchise has become famous for. Ron Howard’s daughter Dallas, as Connor’s wife, combines understated resilience and grace with vulnerability and comes up with gold. Only the rapper Common, so good in the otherwise execrable Smokin’ Aces, is significantly underutilized—as a one-dimensional resistance leader with a personal axe to grind. And only the usually dependable Helena Bonham Carter—as the doctor who convinces Wright to donate his body to Cyberdyne Genetic Research—seems poorly slotted. Look for Jane Alexander in a memorable extended cameo.

            The final question we have to ask ourselves is: Where will the franchise go now? The smart money says Warner Bros will bring the story full circle and show us the circumstances behind Reese’s original journey back in time to save Sarah Connor.

            But I hope they go another direction. Here’s what I think they should do. They need to connect the T-Franchise with the Matrix Trilogy. There’s a simpatico between the narratives.

            In a final confrontation with Skynet, Connor and his allied resistance forces inadvertently “torch the sky.” As a result they are forced to use advanced drilling vehicles to burrow down toward the planet’s core. The civilians left topside are captured and converted into batteries by the sunlight-denied Skynet.

            Connor goes on to found Zion, the last human outpost in the Matrix movies. His descendants start raiding the Matrix for recruits, and in so doing discover the first Neo.

            Now that would be a movie to end all movies.

            But that’s just idle and almost certainly futile speculation.

            Overall, Terminator Salvation is a satisfactory addition to the T-franchise. It is the first film in the series not to rely exclusively on a time travel framework, and this—it turns out—is a sound decision on McG’s part. What he has given us is, in most respects, a straightforward shoot-em-up. The only twist is the”Impostor” slant to the story. What the flick lacks in script  coherence, it makes up for in humanity. When it trips and falls trying to dance away from its continuity shortcomings, it picks itself back up again on the strength of its individual performances.

Terminator Salvation
WARNER BROS.
U.S. Release Date: May 8, 2009
Director: McG
Screen writers: John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris
Running Time: 130 minutes