Time to terminate the Terminator

If you ask me, what is so good about this movie, Terminator Salvation (or "终结者2018"). My answer would be simple as usual to these summer blockbuster movies, "entertaining." Well, if you haven't seen the movie yet, and you don't want to be spoiled, probably you should avoid reading the rest of this blog entry.


The story continued with John Connor, and it was year 2018 (thus the Chinese title of the movie). He was married (well, I guess there was still marriage in year 2018) and expecting a child (anyone smell another sequel here?). The war was still on-going very badly between the human and Skynet.

In this episode of Terminator, we have a wide variety of machines, T800 (yeah you know this from Arnold), hunter, water machine, motorcycle machine, "farming" machine, etc. And, human, well, still human. But, there is a machine, or more probably should be called cyborg, i.e., combination of human and machine - a new type of terminator, apparently.

Oh, this episode we will see the teenage version of Kyle Reese. You know he was very critical to the whole terminator series, because he was the father of the one and only John Connor - remember? The first episode where the older version of Kyle was sent back time to save the legendary Sarah Connor, aka John's mother, and somehow conceived John during the whole saving process. So, the storyline is about saving Kyle (yeah, first one saving the mother, second one saving John himself, third one saving John's lover, and now saving John's father, i.e., the origin; and maybe next one about saving John's son - did you see that coming?).

The cyborg was a critical character in the whole movie. His name was Marcus Wright. He was a terminator with a human heart (cliche?) And he somehow had no idea what he was until the mid of the movie. Then, he had to choose where he wanted to stand (or what he wanted to be) -- terminator or human. You guess it right, he chose us, the human. When the movie was near to end, John was wounded very badly, and I thought he was going to die (because his heart was failing) and (finally) the series is going to have an end. But no no, Marcus wanted to give him his heart (another cliche?)! So, the cyborg sacrificed himself for the greater good, John Connor. Then the movie ended with the theme, "we are different from machine, because we have a human heart...".

I have to say Sam Worthington really stole the show. He played the cyborg, whereas Christian Bale (the batman who played John Connor) was so-so. Overall, the movie is (again) entertaining. Not a bad choice if you want to be entertained.