Salvation for a Machine by Prospero Pulma Jr.

Salvation for a Machine
By Prospero Pulma Jr.

Terminator Salvation, the latest chapter in the saga about autonomous, intelligent, and well, killer machines and post-Armageddon humans furiously resisting annihilation, begins with a John Connor showing that he is not the same person who barely fought off the machines sent to kill him in the three earlier installments of the Terminator franchise. He jumps from a chopper and promptly dispatches a disabled machine with several shots to the head. Yes, the boy is fully grownup, armed to the teeth meaning he can shot back at Skynet’s high-tech foot soldiers, and, for the first time, can send other people to do the killing, er, destroying machines, for himself. But he is not yet the heavily hyped future leader of humans who survived Skynet’s opening salvos in its war to exterminate humanity. He is somewhere in the middle of the organizational chart and his command covers an area conveniently located south of Skynet Central.

A few minutes into the film, the attention is on Christian Bale, who plays the adult John Connor. His order to his A-10 Thunderbolts to protect civilians from Hunter-Killer Terminators hunting a teenage Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) brings him close to a mysterious figure who changes his view of his expected future, not to mention add excitement to the plot. Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) only remembers being in a lethal injection chamber and donating his body to Cyberdyne for research. Marcus tags along with Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), one of the Thunderbolt pilots, back to John’s base. The first clue about his real nature comes when a magnetic landmine, designed against anything metallic like Terminators, maims him. John becomes baffled about their unexpected discovery that Marcus has functioning organs, including a wildly beating heart, infused in his Terminator’s body, something that he did not pick from listening to his mother’s tapes.

John, naturally, is extremely hateful and suspicious of Terminators so he decides to cut up Marcus to study him. Unlike in death row where he had no trump card, Marcus’ knowledge of Kyle Reese’s whereabouts saves his hide, and he offers to assist John in rescuing Kyle before a major offensive by the Resistance levels the Skynet complex that houses the young Kyle and other captives. In Skynet, Marcus discovers that, despite his sincere intention to help John, he is merely obeying his programming to lure John and Kyle into a trap. His human nature overrides Skynet’s commands. He defects to the Resistance and rescues John and Kyle but at a high cost as John sustained a mortal wound inflicted by the original Terminator, the T-800. Marcus offers to donate his heart to John, redeeming himself for the crime that sent him to death row.

Terminator Salvation fits neatly with the three earlier Terminator chapters. As a prequel, it depicts the future after the nuclear holocaust initiated by Skynet, before Kyle Reese was sent back to protect a young Sarah Connor and a still-to-be-conceived John Connor. Proof of it is its retention of a pregnant Kate Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard), a character played by Claire Danes in Terminator: Rise of the Machines. However, it veered away from the three earlier installments over its choice of a thinking and feeling Terminator. Marcus Wright, a death row inmate turned by Cyberdyne into an advanced model of a deep-penetration Terminator, displays a wide range of emotions, from great shock from awakening to a world in shambles, confusion about the gap in his memory, and enormous disbelief over the discovery of his true nature. Sam Worthington handles his acting task well up to the point that the audience believes that the story is about a convict seeking redemption and not about humans fighting a war for self-preservation. Had the script given him a more complex role, Christian Bale would have brought his renowned thespic skills to the screen. However, his talent still shone through like in his solo radio broadcast and his John Connor character would have become completely forgettable if it was given to an average actor.

In Terminator Salvation, John Connor did not expect to encounter Terminators as advanced as Marcus Wright, with a metal endoskeleton and a very human heart that sought redemption, a killer who grabbed his only chance of self-cleansing by sacrificing himself.

Armageddon in Small Doses by Prospero E. Pulma Jr.

Armageddon in Small Doses

What is worse than seeing the future? It is realizing that you cannot completely alter it. Apparently Sarah Connor does not believe in the fatalistic belief that fate is unstoppable as she soldiers on for mankind and her child. In “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) continues to fight to keep her son, John Connor (Thomas Dekker), breathing until the day when he will lead mankind after Skynet reduces it to ragtag bands of survivors and resistance fighters. Hunted by Terminator assassins and the law, they are joined a diminutive machine from the future, Cameron Phillips (Summer Glau), initially to protect John before joining them in preventing Armageddon.

Set between “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” the story begins in a backwater town where Sarah was almost tempted to return to normalcy by wedding her fiancée, Charley Dixon (Dean Winters). But she ditches him, unwittingly saving him, as cyborgs - Cromartie (Owain Yeoman), a Skynet Terminator, and Cameron, sent as John’s new bodyguard - crash into their lives. Escaping into the future, Sarah leads the mission to ultimately stop apocalypse after Cameron informs her that it was merely set back by a few years. Along the way, they have to fight a resurrected Cromartie (Garrett Dillahunt) who resumes hunting John, a second cyborg stockpiling materials for Skynet, and a third assassin Vick Chamberlain (Matt McColm) who liquidates a squad of Resistance fighters, leaving only Derek Resse (Brian Austin Green), Kyle Reese's brother, as the survivor. As if fighting Skynet's death squad is not enough, the trio also have to contend with James Ellison (Richard T. Jones), an FBI agent who probes the murder of Miles Bennett Dyson and whose zealousness to throw Sarah to the calaboose for the scientist's death matches the cyborgs' enthusiasm in assassinating John. There's also a techie named Andy Goode (Brendan Hines) who programs a probable predecessor of Skynet. And when Derek hops on board the team, his intense mistrust of things linked to Skynet sparks tension between him and Cameron, especially when she destroys Vick's body except for his chip.

Stripped of the Pentagon-sized budget of its film predecessors, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” still quite delivers, even if everything seems downsized in the TV version, from Lena Headey playing a prettier and less masculine Sarah Connor to John's new guardian, Cameron Phillips, who can pass as a cheerleader, a very cold one that is, perfect for her role as Connor's close in security. She also tickles fans with her shifting mood and her cluelessness about human nature. John is still his old self, whining about the huge load on his shoulders. Together, they are as normal as any family, with Linda as the stern mother, Cameron as the responsible daughter and John as the son who has a knack for attracting killer visitors from the future, except that they are armed and dangerous. The fight scenes resemble the widely enjoyed man versus machine and machine versus machine smack downs in the “Terminator” franchise, although they are toned down a little bit, like everything else in the series. Viewers will also get to visit the future, one marked by mountains of rubbles and shifting battlegrounds between men and machines. But the “Chronicles” has one fatal flaw: it is too damn short, a victim of the writer's guild strike that aborted a promising season, leaving viewers turning in their sleep wondering if Cameron escaped the car bombing in the last episode because it would have been a waste of eye candy if she emerged as an endoskeleton from the wreckage.

What is worse than seeing the future? It's realizing that something good, enjoyable, worthy to waste your time on will abruptly cease with too many unanswered questions. That's what happened to “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”


-Prospero E Pulma Jr. -