Read This If You Want To Live

Read This If You Want To Live

Terminator: Salvation

Directed by McG

Reviewed by Ernest M. Whiteman III

I used to love The Terminator when I was a child. Yep, I was able to see R Rated films in my hometown. As long as you had an adult with you, you could see most anything. I always thought that is what made Riverton cool. They knew it was up to the parents to decide, not committee. They also knew a kid knows the difference between a violent sci-fi actioner and real life. I mean, how many robots from the future do you run into in real life. Me? Maybe two. So far.

I played Terminator as a boy, making up sequels with my little sister so she could play too. It was fun. But before you rag on me about dragging nostalgia into a movie review, thus rendering me a hypocrite, believe me when I tell you that I, unlike many others, know the difference between the nostalgia of watching a sci-fi actioner and real life.

You see? I have grown the fuck up. People do. People should.

Terminator Salvation is the fourth of the Terminator series, the second to go without creator James Cameron and the first to go without Arnold Schwarzenegger as the lead. Directed by McG, the story picks up in the year 2018. John Connor, the supposed savior of humanity is not yet the leader we need him to be. Which is what many had a problem with. It was a good story for the Connor character to rise through the ranks to become the man who shows humanity how to smash those metal motherfuckers to bits.

But since it didn’t have purple lasers, and shiny space tanks rolling over mountains of human skulls, JUST LIKE TERMINATOR 2 DID (!!!), than it, all together now: “raped” childhoods everywhere. For some reason, what becomes popular seems to appeal to our wanting-to-stay-young mentality. The popularity of “Twilight”, “Tweeting”, even “Transformers 2” and now “G.I. Joe”, movies based on childhood toys are making it big. Shit, there was a time when grown men, GROWN men, where chewing on pacifiers, if I remember that dreaded trend correctly.

Attaching nostalgia to something as ridiculous as a movie prevents us from living in the now. Now, some may say, an exciting popcorn flick is needed to distract us from the rigors of our current reality even for a little while. I say, fucking boo-hoo, man up and face reality like the grown ups we are. Geez.

Now, what I disliked about the movie was the weakness of the forced storyline of Marcus Wright. But the theme of a machine learning to appreciate human life is a theme that the beloved T2 espoused. Also, Kyle Reese’s machinations were a little too Rube Goldbergian for me. He must have waited months, after he and that other little kid moved around ten-ton equipment and to get them set just right, all just for a single terminator robot to come traipsing by, so they could spring their trap. Six months of staring at that street FINALLY pay off.

Overall, it was an okay movie, heck, a good movie. Still, I am so tired of the twist ending, like it was all a plot by some unforeseen adversary all along.

Recommend only if you like sci-fi action-ers.

But not if your childhood is based on faint memories that grow dimmer with each passing decade, which only convinces you, more and more, that your childhood memory was so fucking fantastic that if this one movie causes you to remember it wrong, that that childhood movie will be erased forever, from existence.

© 2009 Ernest M. Whiteman III