Terminator Salvation (2009)

The PS3 game was better. I mean that sincerely, and I'm aware of how damning a sentence that is. When a tie-in video game, a product designed purely to sell off the back of a film's marketing budget, does a more satisfying job of exploring its own premise than the film itself, something has gone very wrong indeed.

And the frustrating thing is, there's a genuinely compelling film hiding somewhere inside Terminator Salvation. The premise alone should be enough: forget the time-travel mechanics and the cat-and-mouse chases of the earlier entries, just drop us fully into the post-apocalyptic war between humanity and the machines. Show us the rubble, the desperation, the grim arithmetic of survival against an enemy that never sleeps and never stops. That's rich territory. Dark, morally complex, full of potential. The world-building here does have moments where you can feel the bones of something great, a setting that's genuinely bleak and atmospheric in the right ways.

But potential and execution are very different things, and this film is a masterclass in squandering the former.

The plot is a slog. It lurches from set-piece to set-piece without building any real sense of momentum or stakes, and the characters are so thinly written that you'd struggle to describe most of them beyond their function in the story. John Connor, the messianic figure the entire franchise has been building towards, should be the beating heart of this film. Instead, Christian Bale plays him as a man permanently on the edge of a screaming fit. There's no interiority there, no sense of the weight Connor is supposed to be carrying. Bale's a brilliant actor, as I've written about before in my review of American Psycho, but he's got nothing to work with here, and what he does with nothing mostly involves clenching his jaw and raising his voice.

The emotional beats the film reaches for, the big moments designed to make you feel the cost of the war, the meaning of resistance, fall completely flat. The twists the story hangs its third act on are either telegraphed so far in advance you've already forgotten you were supposed to be surprised, or they arrive so abruptly that they feel bolted on as an afterthought. Neither is a good look.

The action sequences are fine. They're competently assembled. But "fine" is a long way from what made the first two Terminator films so electrifying. Those films had a raw, relentless energy, a physicality that made every chase and confrontation feel genuinely dangerous. Here it's mostly large-scale CGI destruction, technically proficient and almost entirely weightless. There's no grit. No dread. You never feel like the humans are actually outmatched, which is a strange failure for a film set during the darkest chapter of humanity's war for survival. Compare that to something like Transformers, which at least commits to its own brand of bombastic chaos. Salvation can't even manage that kind of conviction.

What we're left with is a film that had every reason to be bold and chose, at almost every turn, to be safe. Safe and dull and strangely inconsequential. It adds nothing meaningful to the mythology it's drawing from, it tells us nothing new about these characters or this world, and it ends without leaving much of an impression beyond mild relief that it's over.

If you're working through the Terminator franchise and feel compelled to complete the set, it's a passable couple of hours. You won't be bored enough to walk out. But you'll have forgotten most of it by the following morning, and you'll probably find yourself wondering what might have been if anyone involved had dared to be a bit more ambitious. A missed opportunity, through and through.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2009  | Watched: 2025-04-09

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Sony Pictures Core Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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