It's rare I feel a movie merits any defense, but the buzz around :Salvation has been so damn negative, I just have to balance the debate. The truth is, this film has fallen victim to a PR blunder and then dare I say it, a bit of general ignorance. First of all Bale's notorious on-set outburst sent his career and this movie into PR purgatory. To add to that, the director calls himself simply 'McG' and directed Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle. On paper this is clearly all very bad. Before you know it, people who have never even watched it have labelled it a bad movie and that attitude proliferates until it becomes the status quo.
Who wasn't ready to jump on the hate-wagon? I know I was and I'm a big fan of the Terminator. In the wake of the frankly atrocious Terminator 3: Rise of the machines I was dreading the further disappointment that part 4 would surely bring to what would signal the burial of a franchise.
Yes, the pacing is stilted and Bale is a bit flat but it's not enough to kill the momentum of some of the best action sequences this year. The Terminators are genuinely frightening again and the grimey scenery meshes well with dirty cgi models and animatronics, even CG Arnie's cameo is pretty cool. I'm going to be controversial now. It's not because I think it's a better film because overall it's not, but the important thing is, I enjoyed it more than Star Trek. Which shows maybe there is life in the old dog yet and as the rights for Terminator go up for sale this month, I secretly hope so.
8 comments:
You and I have discussed this one and while I do agree with your assessment of the CGI, the action sequences, etc. the split personality of this story, for me, is what made it fail so miserably. Neither Reese's story nor Connor's was good enough and they really should have just stuck to the original concept (a film about Kyle Reese and minimally how it all ties to the previous movies.
While I also agree that the bad PR surrounding Bale didn't help peoples' judgement of the movie I don't think their judgment was without merit. Ages ago when Christian Bale first signed on to do this film we all heard that it was only going to be a minimal part, since the film would really be centred around Reese, but apparently this wasn't good enough for Bale who had the script re-written (and, for me, gutted) so that he could have a bigger role.
Basically when it comes down to it this movie just wasn't good enough. People waited years for this movie, years and years if you let us just completely forget about Terminator 3 (please let us forget?), and it just wasn't good enough.
Yeah, A film solely about the Reese/Cyborg thread would've been better, could've made a decent film great. Someone (you?) mentioned a rumour that Bale had demanded he was written in a bigger part. Wouldn't surprise me. McG has said he's going for T5 and T6 in future. I will be watching.
As if MY images were large... ahem*
Ahem
http://thefilmbuffs.blogspot.com/2009/10/threesome.html
yeah
You shrunk it. Don't pretend it wasn't MASSIVE before.
.......that's..........what..............she................
.......that's..........what..............she................
I'm a little late to the party here but, like Tom, I didn't mind Terminator: Salvation either. It's certainly no worse than most of the CGI-laden, Sci-Fi spectacles I've seen lately. If you remove it from the Terminator sequel franchise and look at it in isolation, it's a pretty standard end-of-the-world thriller with some decent effects and a grim distopian vision of the future. It's neither great nor awful, just average. I understand that the Terminator fan base had some pretty high expectations for this film and on those terms it's probably an abject failure, but if you take that away, Salvation ain't all bad.
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