This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Contrary to popular belief, there is something far worse than a demonstrably bad film and that is a film with boundless but ultimately squandered potential. Terminator: Salvation is such a movie. It arrives onscreen emboldened with such rich promise that it is unforgivable that the filmmakers chose not to mine it for all it offered, satisfied instead for a mere veneer of substance.

Terminator: Salvation is yet another origins story though it has to jump forward, not backward in time to tell it. Unlike the first three Terminator films, which took place in a contemporary setting, this latest offering is set in a dark, post-apocalyptic future mere years after the mechanized complex known as Skynet became sentient and launched a nuclear attack on humanity to ensure its survival. Earth’s great cities are no more than skeletal shells and those few humans who survived have banded together in loose, ragtag resistance cells, constantly ducking zombie-like Terminators, battered and weathered from years of stalking their prey.

Earth of 2018 looks like the American West and evokes the same sort of rugged hardship. It is a distressed, rusted future in which a dirty patina has consumed the already sun-blasted wilderness. Even the machines have yet to embrace cold, functional, utilitarian design, and appear to have merely hijacked preexisting industrial spaces, converting them into laboratories for human experimentation (using imagery designed to invoke the Holocaust).

John Conner (Christian Bale), one of the leaders of the resistance, understands better than anyone what is at stake. After all, Terminators crossed back in time to try and kill both him and his mother, thus preventing a future in which the machines are ultimately defeated. But Conner, who thinks he has seen it all, is not prepared for Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a human machine hybrid who is either the ultimate double agent or the only hope humanity has left.

While some in the public were turned off by Christian Bale’s on set rant earlier this year, the critics were wary of Terminator: Salvation for a very different reason: its director. McG, as he prefers to be called, is best known for helming the insipid Charlie’s Angels films, and there is nothing in his body of work to suggest he was up to the task of orchestrating a massive film such as this. While at times Terminator: Salvation seems like little more than a darker version of the director’s usual unimaginative camera work, there are also flashes of hitherto unrealized talent, especially during several action sequences filmed in long, sweeping takes.

But mostly the film is two hours of uninspired script leading to a rote and derivative conclusion. Much of Terminator: Salvation takes place in front of a green screen where lines, looks and whole scenes from the original films are recycled for diminished effect. New Terminator models are introduced every few minutes, cheapening both the uniqueness and fear factor created by our initial encounter. And don’t even get me started about how loud the film was — either I’m getting old and crotchety, or this film has the most deafening sound palette ever made.

Though The Dark Knight’s Christian Bale is obviously the draw here, his role is secondary to that of Sam Worthington. (Frankly, I am tired of seeing Bale growl his way through yet another movie.) The Australian Worthington is an actor you do not know though you will by the time the year has run its course. Not only does he get his big Hollywood break here, he will be seen again this winter in director James Cameron’s (ironically, the director of the first two Terminator films) 3-D sci-fi epic Avatar. Other terrific actors pop up in mostly thankless roles including Bryce Dallas Howard and Anton Yelchin. B-movie stalwart Michael Ironsides makes an appearance, as does a certain governator via the miracle of modern movie magic.

I went into Terminator: Salvation actually praying that the film would rip off philosophical elements of television’s staggeringly good Battlestar Galactica, a series that examined the human/machine duality and the nature of the soul buried within automation. But Terminator: Salvation isn’t even clever enough to properly plagiarize, introducing ideas that could have made it great but not seeing them through to completion. There is something more than mindless action fare at work here, but, like the dreaded Terminators, it is only skin deep.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.