The Terminator movies are one of the most brilliant and enduring series ever committed on celluloid and you can't help but getting excited whenever a new instalment comes to your local cinema.
In this fourth instalment, Terminator Salvation, which assumes some familiarity with the Terminator saga, we leap into the future where the war against the machines has begun and is raging full-on. The messianic John Connor (Christian Bale) has taken on his role as rebel leader of the Resistance, which comprises a core body of trained militiamen that report to a roving HQ, and pockets of rebels scattered around the world --a post-apocalypse world depicted as war-torn, bleak, and where humans are no longer top dog on the food chain.
John Connor's world is violent, harsh and quiet, with the silence disrupted only by explosive sounds of warfare. Survival is the only thing on the minds of survivors and everything is geared towards that end. There's no laughter, and conversation is sparse at best. Survivors battle the machines, though they also prey amongst themselves.
Unlike in the three preceding Terminator movies, here the machines have the upper hand, however the mood and tone of the earlier movies are much preserved in Terminator Salvation.
Such is the brilliance of the series; it's foolproof. Any director worth his or her salt can pick up the story where it was left, mesh it with James Cameron's template, and make a decent film. McG, the director of this movie, has apparently opted to turn Terminator Salvation into an action-packed war movie. The pace is frantic and there are no breathers to establish a larger degree of intimacy with key characters and the environment. In a perfect world it'd be James Cameron back at the helm, but that is not to be.
(Running time: 115 minutes)
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