Terminator Salvation (c) 2009 Warner Bros.

Warner Bros – 2009

Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Common, Helena Bonham Carter

Director: MCG

Wow.  If you haven’t seen Terminator Salvation yet, and you know who you are, prepare to be blown away.  Terminator Salvation gets across the board marks for action, story, character development, and faithfulness to the franchise.  Quite simply, it is the blockbuster of the summer.

For those of you in my approximate age group (late 20s – late 30s), the Terminator franchise is a part of our cinematic and cultural history.  It gave rise to a new type of sci fi horror film – one in which blended aspects of science fiction and action gave us a stark and sobering look into one potential future.  The relentlessness of Arnold Schwazenegger’s “character” in James Cameron’s 1984 Terminator taught audiences that a predator needs neither to be fast or cunning in order to hunt you down and kill you.

It’s 2018.

We land in the time and space between Judgment day and the first meeting of John Conner and Kyle Reese.  The resistance, located in pockets around the globe, believes its found a hidden frequency, or “off switch” that may hold the key to ending the war.  But, there is also a new threat: a new Terminator model, the T800 (Arnold’s model in the 1984 original), and a hidden danger.  Not all humans are hunted for extermination.  Some are harvested for experimentation at Central Skynet, where tests in cybernetic application have been underway for nearly twenty years.

This latest installment, starring Christian Bale as the adult John Connor, wants for nothing.  From the title sequence to the end credits, the film tosses down with extreme fervor matching, if not overtaking, Cameron’s original vision by throwing never ending, relentless, absolutely tense action at you amidst the very human struggle for survival and meaning.

You will be struck by the film’s desaturated look and feel – as if the very life has been drained out of the world in the wake of Judgment Day.  This stark, bleak future is comprised of gray tones, sepias, with an occasional smattering of red…or blood.  The sound production is positively mind bending – take for instance the desert 7-Eleven sequence in which Marcus (a resurrected murderer), Kyle Reese, and a child named Star flee from a collector machine sent to harvest humans who have created an underground safe haven there.

The final word: Terminator Salvation is 2 hours of action-filled goodness that will remind you what Memorial Day weekend and the Summer box office were meant to provide – pure, unadulterated excitement.  Don’t miss it – it is worth seeing on the big screen.