Terminator Salvation

I was really excited to get preview tickets to Terminator Salvation. I loved the original Terminator - those rough Eighties special effects, the lovely 'relationship in peril' of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, the years of watching it on the telly as it was progressively shown earlier and earlier, as the passage of time made it less and less scary.

Then there was Terminator 2, with a buff feminist icon Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), as the hardest mum who ever lived. It was ripe for feminist studies about the hardening of the female body, and don’t even get me started on mad women in the attic. The third hurt me, but I still love Clare Danes in all she does, even if all I can remember from that film is some dodgy underground bunker and a bit of veterinary drug stealing.

But in Terminator Salvation, we have the new hero of the genre, Christian Bale, he of the short temper with guys who work on set (who probably get paid considerably less than he does). However, I love the bones of the man, his on-screen presence is not to be messed with. I mean, hello? Who can be Batman and Terminator at once? Not many. And I’m just fascinated by the way he speaks. And the trailer for this film is the best I have seen in a long while. Though it does give away the main plot twist, which the film itself builds up to for about an hour before revealing.

This version of Terminator shows more of Kyle Reese's back story, though it takes us down a creepy route whereby they don’t just grow skin on Arnie-minators, but implant machinery into those on death row. Some parts of the narrative didn’t add up for me and I thought John Connor's relationship didn’t quite measure up to the love story in the first film. But I loved the twist.

Also worthy of note are the two kids in LA as the ‘LA branch of the resistance’, one about six years old, the other only a teen, handling themselves admirably against the T-800s. Brilliant. Imagine if you had never heard music before. I highly recommend this film, for the frights, the unstoppable Terminators, for the CGI Arnie at the peak of his fitness, and robots that can swim. Go see.