Thoughts on Terminator Salvation and its ties to Project H's future

Just watched Terminator Salvation and I thought it wasn’t near the travesty most critics were making it out to be. As I was watching I thought, ‘okay, so when is this going to get bad like Die Hard 4.0 became’, but I just kept on watching and thought that it might go off towards the end, and even though it did, those faults weren’t to the film’s detriment.

The critics seemed to be comparing it to the first two films that were basically chase/stalker suspense thrillers, but this is a different genre of movie altogether – warfare of the post-apocalyptic kind where a band of human resistance fighters battle artificially intelligent terminators who see mankind as a threat and want us to sleep with the fishes (bada-bing!), a scenario that was envisioned via brief glimpses in the first two movies and then initiated in the third.

I wasn’t really too thrilled about Terminator 3 because it followed the same chase movie motif as the previous two cracking films and thus was a just a poor imitation, although it was redeemed by its unhappily-ever-after ending. Salvation was a refreshing change of pace for the franchise and was good despite several gaping plot holes, stuff that just didn’t make sense and plenty of ‘yeah rights!’

It may not have been great but I loved the dark ideas and themes expressed in the movie (like the origin of the T-800s and harvesting flesh from humans) and the potential it may hold for future instalments (it would be cool to see the origin of Robert Patrick’s T-1000 liquid terminator.)

Where the film really excels is in the staging of the actions sequences. I think Michael Bay-hem can learn a few things from this guy as how to film chaotic action scenes that is engaging and not confusing. The action scenes were really well executed, exciting and all-over-the-show but somehow still coherent. Needless to say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen won't be on my must-see list, unlike, of course, the much-awaited Avatar (Cameron's, not Shayamalan's).

From what I’ve read Michael Ferris and John Brancato’s previous script drafts had an altogether different flavour from the one that was filmed, and some of the ideas proposed in those previous drafts did seem more appealing than what was eventually filmed, including a totally different ending which I won’t spoil here but it seemed like it would have really blown the roof off the Terminator franchise and would have been very shocking to hard-core fans but a very exciting way to breath new life into the mythology compared to that very silly ending at the moment.

Terminator Salvation was one of the few movies where I was willing to overlook its staggering flaws because the film as a whole managed to make up for it with sheer kinetic energy and post-apocalyptic woe.

The Terminator series echoes other film franchises like The Matrix films and Star Wars with its resistance angle, and this is also the direction I intend taking my own Project H in, except that the battle by necessity must be more ideological than physical because the villain cannot be killed physically, but it will also eventually progress into a physical battle when certain other plot elements come into play.

If it ever happens, it should be good, something not really seen before within that genre, some new and exciting ideas to play with.