Terminator Salvation (2009) - by Leon

It is fitting that the release of Terminator Salvation arrives during the death of so many American automotive franchises. GM won't be selling any more Pontiacs and Chrysler is owned by Mr Bean’s favorite car company. In the detritus of so many American mechanical institutions lies the rubble and remains of a singularly American film series. Terminator.

In the finale of this fundamentally flawed film Marcus, the cyborg protagonist, gives John Connor, the hero of the human resistance, his heart. It is a particularly bad scene, dripping with the kind of ham handed emotional opportunism I haven't seen since Sunday mornings at church. Perhaps doctor/director McG hopes to symbolize a heart transplant for the Terminator franchise that has grown decrepit and defanged along the same precipitous trajectory as Arnold. Unfortunately for McG, reality is not his kind of movie and without some hard drugs, his transplant is rejected.

Which by the way a post-nuclear holocaust society still under the savage eye of a sleepless enemy would NOT be capable of having the necessary equipment and medicine to perform open-heart surgery! Nor would it have a huge military infrastructure consisting of planes, helicopters, submarines, and a glut of various wheeled vehicles... nor would it have the refined oil and complex electrical components with which to run all of these machines!

But friends we are not here to quibble over minor plot points. We are here to discuss the heart of the film... and McG literally shows a beating heart three times and mentions Marcus's by word no less than 5 times. How did the heart reach an importance in an action film previously only seen in cereal commercials with their concurrent claims about high fiber?

Let’s look to the only honest scene in this film. John Connor is sitting at a bare pockmarked desk with only an 1980’s tape recorder, which is playing the prophesying words of his mother. He feels alone in this war because she told him it was coming, but everything else that she tells him is still to happen in the future. So now it is a little past Judgment Day and the world is to shit and what is he to do till the next prophesy comes true... Or to paraphrase DH Lawrence: "Who is the father and do I worship my mother?"

For the last 30 years all that John has known is that he is the savior of the human race. But how? The only instruction he has is to save his father before he ever meets him. And his mother is a specter from the dead, living forever in those ancient tapes telling him to live. The madness of that kind of responsibility, the deadliness of an enemy that defies categorization and a mother/father complex that is debilitating, it is obvious who John Connor symbolizes... George W. Bush, our past president and our very own self-assured saviour of the human race.

So, Terminator Salvation is an obvious commentary on the past regime. And we all felt the thrill of watching the military leaders being killed in the submarine, because we all thought Cheney might be in there with them. But what is the commentary, what is the heart of this film really saying about Bush and Connor?

We will never know, because McG doesn’t know. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, McG admitted that his original script for the film had John Connor dying and the cyborg Marcus taking on a John Connor mask/persona, and then soldiering on in John Connor’s image to save the human race that would never accept the truth of his metal body and human heart. In the end, McG did not dare disturb the fanatic idealization of the human John Connor we have always known and loved. And that is the true shame and failure of this movie because the one quality it definitively lacks is the one thing it talks about the most... a courageous heart.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile (edited by Lighthouse)