The thing about Terminator Salvation is that it makes clear how much the earlier series depended on special effects. As sci-fi, there's simply too much action in the story for it to be a story. But if you're going to have some adventure on Earth, this one works, mostly.
Terminator Salvation reads like an action movie, and with director MCG it meets a sort of merging of genres which is useful but nowhere nearly recognized. That is to say, if what I saw is what I think I saw, then TS is the first of a new breed of action films, one that draws from both film and from video games. And that's not as bleak a prospect as it sounds for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is that Iain Banks has written the best sci-fi in the English language. And until somebody starts making Culture films, there is nothing new to see. Thanks JJ for reviving Star Trek but there's a whole lot of galaxy out there and you nimrods haven't done nearly enough with it. Quite frankly, Alien vs Predator has a lot greater story potential to get us out of the Terracentric realm of sci-fi. So as long as we're Terracentric, hell WW2 is more interesting.
The second reason is that video games are not as Terracentric. I mean, there's some bet that JJ got his mining ship idea from Dead Space, which was a fabulous sci-fi horror drama in space. But even if he didn't, there are huge visual vocabularies to ripoff in the future of film. I'm just waiting to see the crossover between video game art direction and that of film. Watchmen is just the beginning.
This brings us right back to TS. Now what I thought I saw were a lot of very compelling scenery in the film which was evocative of video games I've played. First and foremost, post nuke Los Angeles was straight out of Fallout 3. That vision is nailed. Second, when they got off the street into the wrecked garden, the scene with the shotgun lesson, that looked very much like the arboretum from Gears where you used the Hammer of Dawn on that Berserker, remember? Of course you do. The view of the flying contraption in Death Valley, where they were testing the Off Signal - when Connor looked through the binoculars, the streams of heat from the engines in orange was just like the transparent animations of the Final Fantasy movie. Excellently done.
The convergence of these visual vocab is really a great development. I like it. Now if we can only get off Earth. Why? Because the drama of nuclear weapons is extraordinary and we want to see grid fire destroy a planet. Now that JJ has destroyed Vulcan, the quota of boom has been raised. You can't do that on Earth any longer. Besides, the opening cut scene from Star Ocean: The Last Hope is as dramatic as it gets. You simply cannot keep destroying the Earth and imposing draconian utopias in the chastened aftermath, it's so...Japanese.
The good news is that TS makes good use of the Terminators and the human resistance element. It's not as good as JJ's Star Trek or as good as Will Smith's I Am Legend, but I think it's a lot better than most action movies, and certainly better than any of my memories of the Terminator series. MCG gets one shot in one scene just brilliantly, and it's early in the show. I don't think there has ever been a shot done on film that does upside-down better. Best helicopter crash ever.
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