Terminator Salvation vs Blindness

I watched Terminator the other day, and was surprised by a few things. First of all, so much of it is bright and sunny. Also, it’s not as violent as you might think; practically every shot fired is toward the camera, so we don’t see the victim getting hit. Terminator has a lot of fire, but barely any blood. And, perhaps most importantly, Terminator, despite all its warnings of a desolate future, is actually pretty witty. The effects are good, but the quickest route to portraying a robot economically is to have it be a humanoid, and what bigger wink to the audience than casting the actor they probably thought was the most robotic to begin with? And to top it off, he ends up being better than anyone else could have been, because Arnold Schwarzenegger is kind of the best actor who ever lived.  He shows up, via CGI trickery, near the end of the newest Terminator, and saves the movie.

Here’s the coolest part, and also the problem, with the Terminator movies: since they’re about time travel, and not set exclusively in the future, as many Terminator movies as you like can be produced, constantly self-correcting any issues previous installments might have caused. Of course, since they’re about time travel, really, they could have stopped after the first one, right? Ah, but that would have meant we’d never have gotten the amazing Terminator 2: Judgment Day. T2 was made with such skill and promise, and it set up all the “Wait, then he sent a Terminator! They sent one too!” that makes the sequels endless and endlessly frustrating. T3 did little to back up the potential of T2, and T4, AKA Terminator Salvation, does even less.

T4 was directed by McG, who isn’t a bad director, but is just so literal and commercial he makes everything look like…a commercial. Granted, it’s a bleak, grayed-out commercial, but one that looks ready for the hydrating power of Sprite, or maybe a rainbow of Starburst to turn things around. T4 plays like a trailer. It ends with the characters in virtually the same place they began, after a series of battles that, while impressively staged, could have happened in any order, and could have contained any combination of characters. It keeps looking like it’s gonna get good, but it never truly does. The robots are great, each one bigger or faster or meaner than the last (my favorites are the riderless motorbike Terminators, who live in the legs of a giant stomper Terminator that might have looked at home on Hoth). It’s the humans that spoil everything. Part of the problem lies in the character John Connor. He’s completely tunnel-visioned, only thinking about killing robots, only talking about killing robots, only killing robots. He’s got a wife (Bryce Dallas Howard, who is cute, makes sort of bad career choices, and gets all of about five lines of dialogue), but he pays her even less attention than the script does. Christian Bale plays John Connor, is the best actor to do so, and does the least interesting job. McG was smart to pursue Bale for this role; Connor’s such a stiff you need a dynamic actor to keep the audience invested in his agenda. But why is he written as such a stiff in the first place? Why can’t he be a scrapper? Why can’t he be smart-ass and funny like Die Hard’s John McClain, or like the youngest version of John Connor in T2? Instead of getting a great actor to elevate a bland role, why not just get a better writer and meet him half way? McG’s like stupid George Lucas, giving us what he heard we wanted, instead of giving us what might make a better story. McG heard fans take Terminator seriously, so he’s made it the most muddled entry in the series. The entire movie is gun-metal gray, every character looks and sounds exhausted, and the timeline is confusing. Does T4 take place in a single day? The only character that makes an impact is the one played by Sam Worthington. If you’ve seen the trailer, his surprise is spoiled. Worthington is good, despite an Australian accent that floats in and out (why his character couldn’t just be Australian is beyond me). Worthington’s character is tough and conflicted, just like John Connor, but he’s also the only fun (semi) human character in the entire movie. Worthington gets the action movie one-liners, throws his weight around, and even gets the girl (Moon Bloodgood who has a name I think she may have gotten from Magnetic Poetry.).

Terminator Salvation goes to great clumsy lengths to show us it’s related to the other Terminator movies. We get a Guns n Roses song, “I’ll be back”, and of course that Arnold T-800 machine at the film’s climax. Besides John Connor, there’s a young Kyle Reese, played by Anton Yelchin. Going down the checklist is probably important to some viewers, but wouldn’t it be better to establish new iconic events and characters?

Terminator Salvation is full of characters hiding underground, scavenging for food, taking apart machines, learning to use weapons. In that way, it’s like Demolition Man, Mad Max, Children of Men and countless others. Terminator Salvation treats the machines like zombies sometimes (they can’t be stopped!) and like Stormtroopers others (they can be stopped with string!). If Terminator had one living human to oppose the war on machines, it might be compelling. Since the villains have no motivation, no dialogue, and obviously aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, we’re just gonna have to make peace with the Terminator movies being a little infuriating and watch other stuff until there’s a Terminator sequel that visits the pre-machines past again.

Believe it or not, Blindness accomplishes a lot of what I think T4 set out to do. It’s a post-apocalyptic story (basically), and focuses on a small band of helpless survivors, led by a surly rebel. Where Blindness distinguishes itself is by creating stronger secondary conflicts between actual human beings. I know the Terminator series has had success without adding humans to the machines’ side of the battle, but until T4, the machines were played by people. Even better, the central dilemma of Blindness—a plague has rendered much, if not all, of the country blind—is one we can instantly identify with and fear. The scariest villains in T4 are also the coolest parts of the movie. And as the rebel leader, Julianne Moore gives a performance on par with practically anything else she’s done. Imagine how memorable T4 might be if Bale had just cut loose and played John Connor like the nut he is. Moore’s character (unnamed in the movie) can still see, but pretends not to, so she won’t be separated from her husband (Mark Ruffalo) when he’s quarantined with others stricken with blindness. No one knows how the plague happened, or if it will go away, and curiously, creepily, once the victims are quarantined, they’re abandoned, left to their own devices to navigate the disgusting quarters they’ve been assigned, distribute food, and fight for survival against a self-elected dictator (Gael Garcia Bernal). 

Blindness has its share of problems. I don’t recall a recent movie that left me with more unanswered questions. But it’s got such a specific look, tone and cast, that I’d probably watch it again. It’s punctuated by truly frightening acts of violence, but also by beauty and kindness. Near the end, the survivors decide to venture outside of the quarantine. What they find is as shocking and terrifying a world as anything in T4, even more so because there are no machines to blame. Blindness was directed by Fernando Meirelles, who directed The Constant Gardener and City of God. Those movies are better than Blindness; they’ve got clearer storylines, more vibrant visuals, and, on the whole, are just more exciting. But after T4, you might welcome a look at a world where problems arise, and the characters just have to deal with the leader they’ve got, knowing that if they screw up too much, she’s not gonna go back in time to fix things for them again and again and again.

Terminator Salvation: C

Blindness: B