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That was Pinocchio’s ambition, right, to be a real boy instead of a puppet. I couldn’t help thinking of Pinocchio as our son and I watched Terminator 3: Salvation. This blog will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet and care about having things ruined, stop reading now.
We thought Christian Bale was fine as John Connor. The character was mostly one note, but we didn’t see that as Bale’s fault. Far more complex, and thus more interesting to both of us, was the character of Marcus Wright, ably portrayed by Sam Worthington. Marcus awakens after an explosion not knowing where he is or what’s going on and sets out to see if he can find his family. Marcus soon encounters John Connor (a believable and sympathetic Anton Yelchin, fresh from his appearance as Chekov in Star Trek) and a little girl who seems to have a sixth sense about the Terminators.
As Marcus travels, we begin to realize he’s doing things no ordinary guy, such as he is when we meet him at the film’s beginning, could possibly do. He was on Death Row and signed his body over for research, so we suspected from the beginning that he was a Terminator. But he doesn’t. Even when confronted with the proof, he doesn’t want to believe it. All his thoughts, motivations, and feelings are human, but his body isn’t. And he comes to hate that fact.
The boy and I both felt the filmmakers missed a great opportunity. When Marcus awakens in SkyNet custody, he readily throws off the machine’s control. Seeing him struggle against it, with his humanity ultimately triumphing, would have made a wonderful, conflicted scene. Maybe it ended up in a cutting bin or something, but we felt its lack.
Especially at the end of the movie, when the filmmakers attempted to make a somewhat garbled point about the strength of the human heart over the logic and power of the machine, that conflict would’ve tied into the movie’s theme nicely. And one of our gripes was, if the measure of humanity is the strength of the human heart, what does it say if John Connor’s is failing? The ending voiceover sounded great, but the actions in the film undercut it, at least for us. We found Marcus’s struggle against the truth and his eventual acceptance of it the most powerful elements in the film. More than anything else, that part of the story engaged us.
We also noticed that SkyNet apparently has Joker syndrome. You know the one–it makes the Joker create elaborate death traps and rant and rave instead of just shooting Batman. If he ever just shot the hero, he’d win. The same with SkyNet. If you’re a logical, efficient machine, and you believe that killing Kyle Reese is game over, you win, and the future resets with you in charge, wouldn’t you kill him immediately upon capture? But SkyNet doesn’t.
All that aside, we did enjoy the movie. It has lots of great “boom,” as the Romance Bandits call explosive action. The “good” characters were sympathetic. The premise was interesting. But we agreed that both Star Trek and Wolverine drew us in faster and more deeply.
I’ve had a soft spot for Terminator films since seeing the first one on TV. I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Biehn, the original (and still best, imho) Kyle Reese at DragonCon over Labor Day weekend. The dh doesn’t share this enthusiasm for action movies and boom, and he was surprised that I liked a movie that opened as violently as the original Terminator did. He went with it, though. Sharing those interests with the boy reminds me of my dad. He and I were the ones in our family who liked action movies.
Have you seen T3? What did you think of it or earlier films in the series?
4 Comments
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Someday I’ll have to actually see these in full — I think I saw the first a few years ago on commercial TV, but not the others, and the TV thing just didn’t thrill us. But if it has Christian Bale, I’ll take a look (although The Hub is not enamored of him, and thus has no such interest).