Having done Batman (twice), Christian Bale now essays John Connor, hero of the human war of resistance against the machines that are trying to take over the planet.
This is going to happen sometime in the near future, say within a decade, so remember his name. Connor is the messiah of humanity’s survival, his birth predicted in the first Terminator (in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was a sort of annunciatory angel and Linda Hamilton the Holy Mother-to-be) and touched upon in the two sequels so far.
At last, in Terminator Salvation, we get to meet Connor himself, grown up and sort of leading the resistance. That is, while leading an underground military cell, he broadcasts messages of hope and bravery to the scattered maquis. But there is an official high command sequestered in a submarine somewhere under the sea, and this sets up one of the conflicts to be played out in Terminator Salvation, or T4 as it is already being abbreviated.
We might as well also abbreviate Connor to his messianic initials, JC, and note that T4 will see him up against a new model of terminator, the T-800 I think it’s called. We might have thought that the matter had been settled at the end of T1, or T2, or even T3, but if you settle matters too definitively you have no sequels and thus no “franchise”. So those films’ endings got unsettled, with, each time, yet another killer machine being sent from yet further into the future.
Interestingly, in T4 we have a visitation from the past. A man named Marcus (Sam Worthington) appears and, like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, moves towards his goal across the ravaged wasteland, towards an inevitable confrontation with JC. When the confrontation comes, it’s a bit of a let-down, but let’s not worry about that for now; there are other conflicts and confrontations to keep us busy. At any rate, for my money, Wilkinson acts Bale off the screen: he has both an inner actorly ease and can transmit internal conflict in a way that makes him much more interesting, in this context, than the JC whom Bale plays with relentlessly clenched intensity.
The landscape of this time and place (we’re in 2018, by the way) is presented in washed-out near-grey, a visual trope that now says “war” in any Hollywood movie. Saving Private Ryan has a lot to answer for. T4 looks reasonably good, though, and the battles and chases and so forth are produced with efficiency, though not with any particular grace. Director McG (yes, that’s what he goes as) keeps moving swiftly from set-piece to set-piece, pausing only briefly for the kind of human emotional interaction that keeps us tethered to the characters and concerned about their fates.
The irony here is that we’re allegedly on the side of real true human flesh and feeling against those nasty inhuman machines, and a homily or two on this subject is offered as a sort of glossary of meaning. But the film itself is so mechanised, its deployment of both action sequence and human emotion so mechanical, that one can only imagine some ambivalence in our real attitude to the computer minds and deadly machines that are supposed to be humanity’s mortal enemies.
In fact, the film dramatises this ambivalence in the figure of a half-human terminator pulled between his humanity and his machineness, which is to say, in the stark terms of the film, between good and evil. We had good terminator versus bad terminator in T2 and T3; the fact that they are now merged into one being is piquant and a good plot development. Melanie Klein wrote that young children occupy the “schizophrenic position”, believing there is a good parent and a bad parent, but when they realise the good parent and the bad parent are the same person they take up the “depressive position”. For all the messianic fervour of Terminator Salvation, you might say it occupies the depressive position.
But this is progress, at least in Kleinian terms. What I can’t work out is the facial hair. I have been concerned about this key area of the cinematic art for some time. When I saw Wolverine I kept wondering how the butch mutant hero kept his bouffant hairdo up and his mega-sideburns neatly delineated. Director Gavin Hood told me, in an interview, that this anomaly of coiffure was simply part of Wolverine’s mutant power. But such an explanation doesn’t work for JC and Marcus, who clearly aren’t managing to wash their faces any time during the war against the machines, but do manage to keep their designer stubble at precisely the right length, without variation, all the way through. If there is a secret here, I think we should be told.