Terminator Salvation

The Terminator franchise is one of the most iconic in Hollywood, but could it be, perhaps a tad overrated? I’ve got no problems raving until the cows come home about The Terminator being an extremely tense and economical action thriller in its own right, but I’ve always felt that the wheels were beginning to wobble off a little by the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day came trundling along. It provided some excellent action spectacle but always felt a touch too bloated and poorly paced to me. Of course, it’s a perfect masterpiece in comparison to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which just unimaginatively retreads the exact same beats as its predecessor. I would have been glad to see the franchise die a thousand deaths by the end of that one, but now the irritatingly named McG has stepped up to the plate to resurrect a fading film series with Terminator Salvation, which has the immediate advantage over part three in that it is providing the first act in the “Future War” story that James Cameron so evocatively eluded to in the first two films.

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In 2003 Marcus Wright, an inmate on death row, signs his body away to medical research mere minutes before his execution by lethal injection. He awakens 15yrs later to a world that has been severely scorched by the nuclear holocaust of Judgment Day, when the machines decided to wipe out their human masters. Marcus’ world is now just a pile of crumbled ruins, and he is soon drawn into the ongoing war between man and machine when he runs into resistance fighter Kyle Reese. He and Reese spark up an immediate friendship, but Reese is soon captured and transported to the machine’s headquarters. The only hope for Kyle is for Marcus to team up with resistance leader John Connor, who has been prophesised as the human race’s saviour thanks to his prior run in with Terminators sent back in time. Connor is in fact the son of an older Kyle Reese, who will eventually be sent back in time to save Connor’s mother from a T-800 Terminator on a mission to assassinate her and prevent John’s birth, so he has extra motivation to rescue Kyle, but when Connor and Marcus do eventually meet it is under extreme circumstances that forces the men into conflict rather than co-operation. With the fate of mankind in their hands, sacrifices will have to be made and uneasy alliances must be forged.

Ok, lets get this out in the open from the onset: McG is a cinematic thief of the most obvious kind. Watching Terminator Salvation is a bit like flicking through the highlights of your favourite post-apocalypse, war and sci-fi films. The setting is pure Mad Max, Skynet HQ is pure Blade Runner meets The Matrix, there are numerous flame-lit night time shots lifted from Apocalypse Now, the action finale with Connor and Reese in the belly of the enemy’s headquarters is basically Terminator 1&2 meets Aliens, but somehow McG makes the thievery work. He’s not as bland as a Brett Ratner or Paul W.S. Anderson, who just soullessly plunder from better filmmakers over and over again, he takes ideas and imparts his own style and attention to detail to them - plus he’s not afraid to take an established franchise in new directions – and more crucially he can actually direct a decent action sequence! Attributes that Jonathan Mostow sorely lacked when making Terminator 3.

Terminator Salvation is stylish, and it has some awesome attention to detail and neat little action rhymes with the first two films. Martin Laing really deserves a lot of credit because the production design is excellent, you can really feel the decimation of the nuclear holocaust and the war being fought on a very barren and worn-down front from both sides. I particularly like how McG presents the evolution of the Terminator towards the T-800 model, showing the oversized, cumbersome and degenerated earlier models that Reese would later tell Sarah Connor “they were easy to spot”. Also, when the T-800 does eventually make an appearance, it’s done so with a wonderful nod to the original films. Pacing is also never an issue because the film is never more than 15minutes away from the next whizz-bang, BOOM! action sequence, and it definitely ticks the box as far as action spectacle is concerned, doing justice as a follow up to Cameron’s work on Terminator 2.

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The problem is the script: It’s dumb, really dumb! The kind of script you end up with when a director is thinking “Ooh, that would be a cool idea! This would be an awesomely bad-ass moment!” without stopping to consider if he’s covered his tracks when it comes to the internal logic of the situation, so as you watch the film you start gathering up questions like a rolling snowball: Why is Kyle Reese No.1 on Skynet’s kill list, surely by this point in time they are unaware that he will eventually father John Connor? Why is John Connor so obsessed with maintaining the timeline when the whole philosophy imparted by his mother was that the future is not set - Doesn’t he have any faith that humanity will prevail without him? How come the resistance has so much technology at its disposal if Skynet nuked the planet? How come the terminators conveniently never go directly for the kill when in close combat with their targets? Why have Skynet created motorbike terminators that can be hacked in five seconds and comfortably ridden by a resistance fighter? How can Skynet create an average-sized cyborg body that so accurately replicates human functions that the user doesn’t know their body isn’t human any more, when their most advanced Terminator is a piston-controlled, lumbering brick shithouse? Why does Skynet just assume a human mind will side with them if the human’s body is mostly machine? The end result of all these niggling issues is to draw you out of the film. Much of the shady logic can be explained away if you really think about them and apply an awful amount of effort into an explanation – but a good script should make the explanations obvious and immediate. Terminator Salvation does not do that at all.

Of course most of these problems would have been addressed or removed entirely if it wasn’t for the decision to go with dual narratives that eventually intertwine. You may or may not have heard about the rather turbulent pre-production evolution of the script, but originally the idea was to focus on the Marcus Wright character and his Wizard of Oz style journey towards Skynet, starting off as a detached murderer and eventually learning what it means to be human through his interactions in the post-apocalyptic future. You can certainly feel the remnants of this early draft in the finished film, Marcus’ character arc is much more involving and ultimately frustrating whenever we cut away to John Connor - a role that originally should have been a minor supporting one, but once Christian Bale expressed interest in coming aboard as Connor the character was boosted to joint lead.

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There’s nothing wrong with boosting the Connor part in principle – he is after all supposed to be the series’ main protagonist – but McG and his writing staff don’t have much of a feel for the character and even less ideas on what to do with him. The end result is a very dull one-note characterisation where Connor just runs about looking grim and spouting on about how important it is to ensure he doesn’t die - in fact 90% of his dialogue in this film simply reiterates things that the audience already knows. The previous films established that Connor is an altruistic hero, but his motivations in Terminator Salvation are all ultimately self-serving, making it harder to sympathise with his cause. A good actor would be able to gloss over this weak characterisation, and Christian Bale is an excellent one, but his approach to characters can be so dour and serious it borders on pretentiousness, and he spends almost his entire time in Terminator Salvation furrowing his brow and growling like a man possessed. Sam Worthington and Anton Yelchin are much more charismatic as Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese respectively, but then they’ve been given better developed roles – particularly Yelchin, whose part is very similar to the John Connor of Terminator 2.

I think if Terminator Salvation had not been the fourth part of a franchise it would have garnered a lot less criticism, it is ultimately a pretty tight and enjoyable action thriller that simply suffers from the weight of expectation and the mythological commitments that are required from a new entry into an iconic film series.

Director’s Cut

McG originally envisioned and intended to release Terminator Salvation as an R-rated film, but as is the norm in Hollywood these days the studios told him to deliver a PG-13, which resulted in certain trims to sexualised content and violence. The Director’s Cut re-instates approximately 3minutes of excised footage, which has the effect of making the fight sequences slightly more violent, but also flow noticeably better. There are also edits/alternate takes for a few scenes here or there alongside some additional scenes, like an extension to the scene where John Connor first addresses the leaders of the resistance where Michael Ironside’s character puts a gun to Connors head to highlight that the prophecy about him can be broken in three seconds. The biggest addition is a semi-topless scene for Moon Bloodgood that feels completely unnecessary and doesn’t imply anything about Blair and Marcus’ relationship that you don’t pick up on from later events. Personally I prefer this slightly extended Director’s Cut purely for the extra violence that improves a couple of fight scenes.

Presentation

To assess the presentation of Terminator Salvation I first have to try and bore you with talk about file structure! Basically, on any Blu-ray disc you will find the feature film content in what are called MPEG-2 Transport Stream (.M2TS) files. Usually the entire feature can be found on one single M2TS file on the disc, but if the disc incorporates multiple versions of a film then they either have to repeat said film across multiple large M2TS files, or break the content up into numerous small ones and use branching to build up the multiple edits. This is what Sony have had to do with this Terminator: Salvation UK Blu-ray, as there are in fact 3 versions of the film on one BD-50 disc: Obviously you have the Theatrical Cut and Director’s Cut, but you also have the Maximum Movie Mode that presents the film with video commentary interruptions by the director: McG.

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This means two things; 1: It’s a royal pain taking screengrabs from this BD, and 2: The total 1080p content on this disc amounts to the complete Theatrical Cut + The extra segments to make up the DC + The McG video commentary segments. Now, obviously this is better than having the entire film repeated three times on the disc (which would add up to just under 6hrs of 1080p footage), but there still remains around 2hrs:38mins worth of 1080p footage on this disc. Combine this with the fact there are two high bitrate DTS-HD tracks accompanying all this footage (Original English and an Italian dub) and the end result is that all the Fulll-HD, AVC footage has an average video bitrate of just a touch under 20Mbps. This is low, and you can feel the strain frequently throughout the film (regardless of which version you’re watching) in the form of compression artefacts like banding and most gratingly: obvious blocking. Just watch the early sequence where John Connor is navigating the dark tunnels of the Skynet human observation lab (where we first see Marcus Wright’s body) and you’ll see annoying compression problems.

Aside from disappointing compression foibles, Terminator Salvation looks very nice. Both the Theatrical and Director cuts of the film present the same high-quality video, so I’ll just speak about both versions as one here: Colours are especially vibrant – I know, I know, the post-apocalyptic future look is bleached out and very muted, but there are many night time and dark interior sequences that are heavily lit with primary colours where the colours positively pop off the screen, and the only bleeding that is particularly noticeable is a tiny amount in the opening credits. In keeping with the gritty approach to the future world, grain ranges from a light, reasonably sharp layer to a very nicely defined thicker layer that really has a lovely texture to it, which alongside the occasional pop and fleck would suggest that the transfer hasn’t been nuked by noise reduction, but some FX heavy scenes do look unnaturally smoothed out - like when Marcus gets his first look of the post-apocalyptic world he’s woken up in.

For the most part the picture is suitably sharp, this is not the most detailed transfer on the medium but there is a very satisfying level of fine detail in both close ups and long shots. Edge Enhancements are in play throughout though, sometimes with noticeably thick halos. Given the bleached-out look of the film, contrast and brightness have a tendency to look blown out, which seem obviously in keeping with McG’s intentions, black levels are excellent and shadow detail is good. Really it’s just the compression issues that particularly irked me, and the main reason for that is because Warner Home Video’s upcoming US release will be giving both cuts of the film their own disc each. How much do you want to bet that the video bitrates for both versions will be considerably higher on that release?

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Audio comes in the form of a very meaty 24-bit English DTS-HD MA 5.1 track, and when the infamous Terminator bass line kicks in during the opening credits you know you’re in for a sonic assault. This is a really loud, bassy audio presentation, with the sound sometimes dropping so deep that it will find new recesses in your system - It certainly makes the action feel very, very forceful and weighty. Bass is just tremendously punchy and yet remains very tight, while dialogue is never drained out by the action, remaining audible and clean throughout thanks to impressive audio dynamics that provide solid clarity to each element of the sound. Directionality is particularly excellent, you’re placed right in the center of the action as all manner of sound effects go whizzing all around you, so this is a great disc for demonstrating a surround sound set up to anyone. There’s only two things stopping me from giving this audio track full marks: Some of the later scenes with Michael Ironside sound a little muffled, as if he’s delivering his lines into a plastic cup, which I can’t be certain is down to the original recording or not. The other is some minor tearing in dialogue in one or two places, usually during shouty moments.

Also present on the disc is an English 5.1 Audio Descriptive Track, which does exactly what you’d expect of it, and there is a 16-bit Italian DTS-HD MA track that is pretty close to its English counterpart, even the dub itself sounds pretty naturalistic! Optional subtitles are also included in English, English SDH, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Swedish.

Extras

There’s not a tremendous amount of extra material on the disc, but we do see Sony branching out into new territory in how they present their extra features, let’s get started:

NOTE: Maximum Movie Mode aside, all extra features are presented in fullscreen 1080p AVC with English DD2.0 audio and optional subtitles in English and Italian.

Maximum Movie Mode: This is the core of the extra features, it’s basically the same thing as Universal’s U-Control function only you can’t choose to skip directly to the extras that appear over the film as you watch it. This aspect isn’t much of a nuisance as there is almost always some form of extra footage playing over the movie. The general gist of this feature is that it ultimately acts as a video commentary by providing info on all aspects of the production from almost the entire principle cast & crew. For instance McG has recorded a few video commentary segments where he appears on screen at certain moments in the film, with the feature playing in a window to his right, and production footage in a window to his left, he will then take us through the scene on the screen to his right and explain his goals. The Maximum Movie Mode function gives McG more versatility as a commentator because it allows him to pause the film at will and really go into depth about a single brief moment.

Other features that crop up in the Maximum Movie Mode are mini-production featurettes that appear as a pop-up prompting you to press enter and switch over to watching them (automatically returning to the film after you’re done), a timeline pop-up that gives info on when certain pivotal events in the Terminator universe occurred; and there are lots of Picture-in-Picture style vid-screens that provide a fair chunk of behind the scenes footage and input from the cast & crew.

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Sounds pretty nifty, right? There’s just the slight problem that it’s implemented absolutely appallingly! I own a Sony S350 player and I could barely play the Maximum Movie Mode at all unless I switched the audio output to mix instead of direct out, as the pop-ups would just freeze the film for a few minutes whenever they appeared. Setting the audio out to Mix allowed me to explore the Maximum Movie Mode properly, the pop-ups worked ok for the most part but from time to time they would cause the film to freeze until I hit rewind and play and watched the now seemingly-fixed pop-up play properly. Apparently this mode plays fine on a Playstation 3, but I shouldn’t have to own a PS3 in order to watch some extra features, and I certainly shouldn’t have to buy a new player to do so!

Reforging the Future: This is the closest you’ll get to finding a Making Of featurette on this disc. It starts off by focussing on the very impressive production design poured into the film and then switches to how the action and stunts were pulled off, before settling on CGI work. At 19minutes it is simply too short to be massively informative.

The Moto-Terminator: The motorbike Terminators get their own featurette about the original concept designs and evolution to the production of a finished model; we also get to look at the excellent digital double work they did on the bikes. This is a pretty cool extra feature that should prove a highlight for bike enthusiasts.

Focus Points: As the title suggests, what we have here is around 30minutes worth of mini-featurettes that offer a more focussed look at a specific aspect of the film’s production. There are 11 of them in total, covering a wide range of elements - like McG’s collaboration with the US Air Force for the use of their flying machines for the film, or a look at the pyrotechnics work on the film. The highlight is probably the “An Icon Returns” focus point, which takes a look at how a certain CGI model is pulled off (I’m trying to avoid spoilers, so I’ll just say this is the big CGI sequence of the final act). You can play the Focus Points separately or all in one, they also appear as part of the Maximum Movie Mode.

Trailers: No trailers of the film here, just ones for Blu-ray as a medium and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The former is presented in MPEG-2 with DD5.1 audio, the latter is presented in the usual AVC/English DD2.0 combo.

Also present on the disc are BD Live features that allow you to download some mini-videos as well as Sony’s CineChat and MovieIQ features, but sadly I am not set up to receive them.

Overall

An engaging science fiction actioner that is let down by a sloppy script, Terminator Salvation nevertheless manages to banish the memory of Terminator 3 once and for all. Sony have provided a first rate presentation of the film on Blu-ray, but their extras are severely compromised by the decision to place most of the footage in their Maximum Movie Mode, which simply doesn’t work as it should do.

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