Terminator: Salvation vs. Star Trek
By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
When Star Trek came out I blogged that it could represent (or be a leading indicator of) a change in the national mood. We went through a post-9/11 period in movies and television where our movies were dark and gritty and our heroes were reluctant, tortured (sometimes literally as in Casino Royale) and the bad guys were ascendant. Think of Lord of the Rings, the Batman films, and Battlestar Galactica , to name a few. J.J. Abrams's Star Trek had a different tone—a planet-killing villain, yes, but its mood is optimistic and upbeat, punctuated by trauma. The post-9/11 era movies were traumatic and stressful but occasionally relieved by success or fleeting happiness. One could describe Star Trek as a Barack Obama movie and the others as Dick Cheney flicks, tonally speaking.
I haven't yet seen Terminator: Salvation, but judging by the reviews, it strikes me as a throwback movie—a relic from the post-9/11 films. The bad guys are winning; the hero is dour and angry (is literally Batman, in fact); everything is destruction and decay. Take this review from TNR's The Plank, which is fairly representative of the reviews I've read:
What's missing is much of anything that could be plausibly described as fun. Director McG—best known for his work on music videos, commercials, and the Charlie's Angels movies—paints his post-apocalyptic landscape in a palette of sand and steel, as if color itself had been bleached from the world. But in contrast to The Dark Knight (one of the obvious models for this reboot), he fails to imbue his grim vision with any depth, texture, or complexity. A slender, silly movie that is upfront about its silliness (say, Star Trek) can be a giddy pleasure; a slender, silly movie that presents itself as an unflinching portrait of human endurance is setting itself up for failure.
I'll be curious to see what kind of business Terminator does both this weekend and going forward, especially as compared to Star Trek. I'm not sure the film will suit the country's mood, but we'll see.
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Reader Comments
Political diatribe masquerading as a movie review...
Really, has it come to this that Barack Obama has become such a new Messiah, that not only BO, but every one thinks the whole world revolves around him? As I recall from my Star Trek, poverty and disease had all been eliminated.
But if Bush's policies put me in the unemployment line, it is Barack Obama who will insure that I have no job for years to come, it seems.
His manipulation of free enterprise and his takeover of banks and the car industry has proven once again that the only organziation less qualified than corporate CEOs is the government. But its not just retail and service organizations and banks that Obama has removed the concept of freedom from. He has done that with health care as well. Joe Biden (admittedly an embarrassment to Democrats as well) admitted that in his healtcare program which is almost verbatim what was passed in the hidden pages of the stimulus plan, that we'd have to come to grips with the fact that old people die and we need to use our resources for the young.
The Obama administration, perhaps has more similarity to Michael Crichton's Coma or 1976's Logan's Run when it comes to healthcare. For the economy, the Obama sci-fi would be more like the bleakness of Bladerunner. How naive to put so much trust in Obama when he has merely escalated the mistakes of George Bush to our country's inevitable demise.
I just saw Terminator salvation , for a long time terminator fan, im disappointed.
It really was not that good at all. I was sooo disappointed....
The story was nowhere from being deep other then john conner rescueing his father from skynet..... Um The digital image of arnold, completely sucked, looked like it came outta a video game. Marcus wright, / sam worthington, played a decent part, but the story behind his character no real importance..
The story was very dryed up , each actor , had small parts.... Machines were cool, thats probly about it......
Im a terminator fanatic and from a 1-10 i give this a 4.5 Very displeased.
Closing statements- The Hype of the movie, was more appealing then the movie itself.
Warped Reality (Revised, with Apologies for Duplication)
I have trouble understanding why you'd write an opinion about a movie that you have not seen. I can't imagine a more flawed premise. It was a waste of my time to read it and I only spend more time on because I hope that you'll realize that this is why people don't pay to read the news any more.
I've seen both, I disagree with your criticism, and for you to sit here and try to graft a post-post-9/11 milieu onto a movie like this is extremely clumsy, about as clumsy as the grafting of rubber skin onto t-600's in the movie you attempt to pan, again without having watched it.
If you knew anything about movies, you'd understand that if a story is going to be as fantastic as a post-apocolyptic struggle-for-the-survival-of-mankind, the last thing you want to do is make it too "fun." Terminator 3 taught us that much. T3 was 'fun,' and it was shot within months of 9/11, debunking your . You are like so many feigned intellectuals who try to make an argument by first deciding on a verdict and then coming up with the evidence necessary to support it.
Your penchant for hyperbole is also unfortunate. A relic? Really? 2001 was 8 years ago; not 800 or even 80 or 18, but 8. To call a movie that was released 39 hours ago (again, that you have not seen) a relic from a bygone era, simply because it falls into a period of movie-making that you have unilaterally declared as having ended (based on the suspect logic that one movie <Star Trek> doth singlehandedly a pattern make and a new period herald), is strikingly shallow. The hero is dour and angry? IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!! HOW WOULD YOU BEHAVE?
Did you think about how ridiculous the movie would look and feel (taking Independence Day as but one examples) if, with the end of the world at hand, and the leaders of your beleaguered band of freedom fighters recently exterminated, you have your protagonist cracking jokes? The truth is that, in times of suffering, people do create an alternative sense of humor, but we all know that creating an accurate-feeling movie tonality is not as simple as attempting to replicate real-world "social physics," as it were.
Lastly, this movie is a sequel in a long series of movies forecasting the end of mankind. T3 simply actualizes the long-feared prophesy of this perfect dystopia and does so in a visually arresting way. How else might this story have been told? Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is that this movie simply should not have been made. Is that what you wanted?
Personally, I thought that the plot was full of flaws, the cut footage likely crippled the story that was left by its glaring omission, and some of the camera angles and cuts lacked any sense of axis. However, your opinion is the only 'throwback' around here. Yours is exactly the kind of journalism that future historians will love to ridicule for its thoughtless, myopic arguments. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
In short, watch the damn movie before you run your mouth.
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