Posted on Fri, May. 22, 2009
Republished from Thursday's editions.
'What day is it? What year?" asks the deeply disoriented dude who seems to have emerged from the primal ooze into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Well, they don't say what day it is, but the year is 2018.
In Terminator Salvation - fourth in the cyborgian series launched by James Cameron in 1984 - the man with the questions is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), and the weird thing is that at the beginning of the movie, he's strapped to a table in a California correctional facility being put to death for murder. In 2003.
Message to Hollywood: Stop with the time-travel stuff.
A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG (né Joseph McGinty Nichol), T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to X-Men Origins: Wolverine on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)
Terminator Salvation ends with a baleful Christian Bale voice-over, a summation of the horrific man vs. machine business we've just witnessed, and a portent of the conflicts still to come.
- Steven Rea
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