John Connor: "Ain't found a way to kill me yet"

Terminator Salvation dispenses with all the unpleasantries in the first scenes: the world has ended, machines are the ruling class and man is living in a gritty, subhuman existence in the rubble of his crumbling empire. This is a bleak movie, a hopeless assault on our future. Afterward you’ll want a hug, or a warm shower.

If you’ve followed the Terminator franchise in the slightest you had to know this time would come. And here it is. Nukes have leveled our cities and killed billions, and Skynet’s self-aware machines, in all kinds of horrific shapes and sizes, patrol the skies, oceans and everything in between. The only hope the tattered survivors have is in their revered — some say false — prophet, John Connor, who has seen the machines back before the war was known as Judgment Day.

A reviewer could dissect this movie quite thoroughly without ever discussing the special effects or its action-movie roots. It works on a level deeper than that. It examines, in broad strokes, what being a human is. Its closest kin is not the other Terminator movies really, but TV’s just-finished Battlestar Galactica, which took a profound look at the human condition, its successes and failures. By creating artificial intelligence so perfectly, machines have given their creations hearts, minds and even souls, sometimes to their detriment. This puts the real humans and the machines that think they’re humans in a head-spinning predicament that spans throughout this Terminator reboot. There's also elements of faith, which can be a little trippy when considering John Connor's initials.

Weighty stuff is in play here, but don’t think this is an art-farty melodrama, or even a religious allegory — Salvation is still a summer popcorn flick. It will entertain the hell out of you with its guns blazing at titanium exoskeletons and hot brass injected into our laps.

Salvation director McG (Charlie’s Angels) doesn’t just serve up a belligerent action clunker to the Terminator franchise, but adds real mythology to the saga. It’s wonderfully paced, electrically charged and filled with enough larger-than-life spectacle to do its predecessors, classic action thrillers themselves, very proud. Credit also goes to John Connor’s first adult actor, Christian Bale, whose personal and immersive acting brought Batman, and now rebel leader Connor, back from the dead. With his acting chops, and his track record at reinvention, Bale could reboot the Scooby-Doo franchise and make it breathlessly compelling cinema. And say what you will about his temper, the guy can act.

Salvation gives him plenty to do, too. Connor’s not quite sold on a resistance counter-attack so he hacks the machine’s most-wanted list: He’s No. 2 and above him is Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who will eventually travel back in time and become his father (see Terminator). While forces mobilize for a make-or-break game changer, Connor rallies his own troops to rescue Kyle Reese from a bombed-away Los Angeles, where chaingun-wielding Terminators, with their decomposing rubbery skin, stalk the streets picking at the bombs’ leftovers.

Entwined in Reese and Connor’s stories is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a machine utterly convinced he’s human because he once was, until the machines reconstituted his important organs into an “advanced infiltration unit.” The machines, trying to create an authentic humanoid robot, didn’t comprehend the implications of porting over the brain and heart — human compassion. But will the Skynet programming override the morality tugging from within Marcus’ soul? I’ll let you discover that much, even though the trailers seem content to spoil every surprise.

This film is a thrill-ride of the highest caliber. The special effects (dedicated to the original Terminator designer, the late Stan Winston) are remarkable and wholly convincing in the landscape they appear in. We’re shown some familiar robots —the raptor-like jets and human-shaped skeletons of metal — and we’re also given wormy water bots and, during a kinetic chase sequences throught the wasteland, Terminator motorcycles deployed from larger harvesting machines that grumble in frightening staticy tones. These robots all fit into a world that’s been fully realized and developed, and at no point do you ask yourself, “How did the film get here?” because its movements, characters and effects are justified at every moment within the story.

I must mention cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, who deserves an Oscar nomination for his terrific lighting and technically challenging camera movements. And I’m not just saying that because he was the unfortunate victim to Bale’s on-set tirade; he truly deserves the honor. His colors are sullen and ashy, his frames are packed with things to marvel at (notice the way he uses flares to light rooms), and he challenged himself with long, unbroken shots. In one of his single takes that lasts several minutes, the camera follows John to a helicopter, mounts beside him outside the cabin, rotates behind him as he evades a nuclear bomb, and then tumbles to the ground upside down as John clambers out of the wreckage. Whether or not it was a real one-shot or was digitally stitched together from three or four shots (think Children of Men) hardly matters because they’re both complex camera tricks. And Hurlbut nails it perfectly.

If you can’t tell, I’m ecstatic about Terminator Salvation. I’m thrilled that directors are putting art into their action films after so many years of using explosions as vapid plot fillers. Explosions, car chases and shoot outs should only be punctuation in a film’s story. This new Terminator has ample punctuation for sure, but it’s the words and the sentences that give it its life.