Home on the Range: HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1

It begins with a massacre and ends with a massacre. Kevin Costner’s return to the director’s chair, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, may be merely the opening of a much longer project—and feels it, baggy with detail and spacious with introductions and set-ups, withholding all payoff for much, much later. But its intentions are already becoming clear. Here’s a movie about American Manifest Destiny: settlers moving west and the indigenous pushed out or pushing back. It’s about the violence it takes to recreate a country in your image; it’s about the hope to uproot one’s life only to replant it elsewhere; it’s about the perseverance to maintain your culture and traditions in the face of those who wish to take it from you. As such, the movie is a sturdy and sentimental work, overflowing with character melodramas played out against the backdrop of the American West. But it’s also a tough and fair story, thus far, and prismatic in the way it turns over the scenarios and sees from multiple perspectives. It opens with a small tent city struggling to become something more—a would-be town called Horizon advertised to settlers back east as a place of potential. The townsfolk are slaughtered by nearby natives, leaving dazed survivors to confront a military man who glumly tells them it’ll happen again. The people on whose land they’re attempting to build will not give it up without a fight. Some settlers want to stay. Some flee to the safety of the nearby army outpost. Soon enough, we meet the natives, and see they too are of split loyalties. A chief chastises a warrior who led the attack. Violence makes them all unsafe, he says. Eventually, this long chapter ends with retribution—a pack of miserable mercenaries slaughter an innocent tribe. And the cycle continues.

Between these two bloody action sequences shot through with the excitement of grief and agitation of injustice, we meet many characters in a huge ensemble, and find a great deal of conflict and rooting interest taking place. There’s the strong widow (Sienna Miller) and her angelic young teen daughter (Georgia MacPhail who, in one scene with all-white wardrobe, underlines her role as a literal manifestation of innocence) taken under the wing of a tender-hearted cavalry officer (Sam Worthington). There are the squabbling tensions of a wagon train under the watch of a tired leader (Luke Wilson) leading them inexorably toward Horizon. There’s a taciturn cowboy (Costner, saving his introduction for over an hour) who becomes suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, invested in the survival of a prostitute (Abbey Lee). She’s stalked by gunmen (with a glowering, pouting Jamie Campbell Bower the most sinister among them) hunting down her friend (Jena Malone), a fugitive who killed their brother—the father of the friend’s child. It’s at once complicated and clear. We start to get a sense of where these stories might go through the conventions of such tales, and the easy rapport the actors build in these characters whose circumstances are historical and dramatic, but shot with a dependable gloss of some more mythic aims. Costner allows for plenty of heroic shots and sweeping landscapes that heighten that larger-than-life feeling as he keeps up a generous pace that’s all rising action. Each sequence is patiently developed in square and sturdy images, sunny and dusty and cut with the grace of a classical engraving. (One character even has a hobby of making sketches for just that purpose.) The film’s playing in the iconographic expected tableau of such an old-fashioned tale, while the complications pile up with the sense that we’re getting somewhere vast and engaging—eventually.

The movie is an expansive, wandering one, content to roll out every kind of Western—historical, pulpy, epic, romantic, bloody, wry—and pile up the tropes of each until they sing anew in a dynamic chorus. Costner is clearly a filmmaker in love with the genre; he’s starred in a few and his entire directorial output is some form of Western—his Dances with Wolves a revisionist take partially from a native perspective, and Open Range a classical rancher shootout showdown. (His The Postman may be post-apocalyptic, but it, too, is all about horses trotting between outposts nonetheless.) With Horizon’s first chapter, he stretches across the plains and the canyons, echoing Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, Eastwood’s Unforgiven and his own Wolves and Ranges, letting each storyline start brewing with comfortably gripping potential and familiar images. He draws his narratives in languorous shorthand, letting the cliche gather the force of emotional expression from a sincere storyteller. The film’s three hours are engaging and expansive, while feeling lengthy yet somehow quick. I found myself leaving satisfied without any resolution, craving Chapter 2.

Ocean Eyes: AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

The great Umberto Eco once reminded us: “Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting.” He was writing about Casablanca, but he might as well have been discussing the films of James Cameron. He’s a filmmaker whose love of towering piles of cliche is the very thing that resolves his contradictions. He’s a precise, technical director drawn to writing sloshing human melodrama. He’s a hard-edged action director with a soft-hearted love of family and romance. He makes gripping, and often intense, genre pictures that turn on protective parents and the warmth of motherhood and True Love. He’s a conceptual, even experimental, hand at pushing the nuts-and-bolts craft behind the camera. (Here, to his use of 3D, he’s added a variable frame rate that’s sometimes distracting, and sometimes enveloping.) And yet he loves pushing this tech in the context of broad, crowd-pleasing, to-the-rafters satisfaction. To do all this at once, and to keep getting away with it at such a high level of success, he simply must make these appealing epics—the Terminators, Titanic, and, yes Avatars that capture an audience’s imagination with the sheer commitment of their tellings, and the total control of one man’s complicated vision. Those cliches that pile up are our way in, and hold us in their thrall, deeper into the earnest plights of the characters on display. To borrow another phrase from Eco, “When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths.”

So here we are with Avatar: The Way of Water, a long-awaited sequel to the 2009 original. It picks up over a decade after that one left off, in the far future, with ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) transmogrified into the body of a Na'vi, the blue giants indigenous to the world of Pandora. In that body, he turned against humankind and fought to repel corporate colonists looking to exploit the lush jungles for the minerals beneath the Na’vi’s sacred trees. Quite a feat for Cameron, making a whole new world full of culture and creatures and geography and spirituality, and then staging a rock-‘em-sock-‘em battle that had audiences hooting and hollering for the death of capitalist overlords. But that was then. Now Sully’s a family man, with half-human, half-alien teenagers, two sons and two daughters, he’s raising with his Na’vi warrior wife (Zoe Saldana). There’s also an abandoned human boy (he grows up to be played by newcomer Jack Champion) who dons an oxygen mask and leaps around in a loincloth as an adopted member of the tribe. They all clearly love each other, and enjoy their humble lives mastering their terrain and honoring their cultural traditions. You can tell right away that this is a sequel more intimate and tender, with a smaller interest in a family unit worth preserving even as the larger machinations of their world (and Cameron’s storytelling) are inevitably going to pull them back into the action.

So when the humans arrive for a second attempt at taking the land and its resources, Sully has even more reason to fight. And yet, after all the fighting that settled this issue in the first film, the heroes are reluctant to do it all again. Here’s a sequel about how the heroes would rather not do a sequel, what with life having moved on to more precious concerns. Alas, conflict imposes, and the villains are literal clones of the last ones. And so, what begins as an attempted insurgency becomes an attempt to hide—this time among the water Na’vi who commune with whale-like creatures—even as powerful forces amass to lure them out for the killing. Three acts: Run. Hide. Fight. Simple enough. Cameron knows how to pump up a conflict, stage memorable character moments, and pace a simple story so cleanly and clearly that we are once more drawn into the emotional investment of the world before we even realized that was happening. Of course we want the vulnerable to stay safe, the heroic to prove their worth, and the dastardly to receive comeuppance. There are those archetypes shamelessly bursting in. But Cameron also knows winding them up and letting them go in a fantastical location is enough to get the blood pumping with the earnest emotions and pleasures of the best pulp sci-fi. If you’re going to paint with a broad brush, you need a broad canvas, too.

There’s clear love for this fictional planet in a film that luxuriates in the world Cameron has imagined. First it gets exposition out of the way in the first hour or so. That’s all plot mechanics catching us up on the state of Pandora and its conflict. The middle hour simply wanders the ocean, meeting new tribespeople (Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet) and creatures while learning their ways. I especially liked the whales that understand sign-language and whose murmurs are subtitled. That’s where Cameron once more surfaces his ecological concerns and real empathy for the environmental erosion that accompanies corporate oppression on the march. As he sees the displaced Sully family try to integrate in this potentially safe space, we see the inextricable ties between these people and their home. And it’s communicated through fluid sequences that dance across and underneath the water that generously allow the audience to study the topography and the tides, the flora and the fauna. Watching these Na’vi swim around their tropical paradise, I found myself remembering the Avatar super-fans who reportedly experienced real depression and withdrawal upon exiting the theater after repeat viewings of the original. They were distraught knowing this wonderful planet wasn’t a place they could actually visit. Here’s a movie that’ll repay that interest, dwelling in that long central passage of pure vibes, setting, and design.

I was also so bought-in to the artifice of it all—the motion-capture performances of the bewitching blue characters, the all-encompassing depth and detail to the landscape and the way the sunlight breaks across a clear blue sea—that I would occasionally step out of myself and remember, with real awe, that I was basically watching animation for vast stretches. It’s an impressive technical achievement. But none of that vivid imagination—a cleanly designed comic-book fantasyland excursion—would matter if the story itself, and the characters within it, didn’t come to life, too. That’s the final Cameron contradiction to consider: the elaborate falseness, the enormous machine-tooled fakery, bringing forth ideas of sensitive smallness. Here’s a big-budget business casting its eye on the joys of close community with others and with nature, the restorative pleasures of family, the spiritual sustenance of the wilderness, and the nobility of standing against the calculating profit motive and doing the right thing. So once more he’s made a concussive epic concluding with explosions and gunfire—and this time includes a self-quoting climactic sinking ship to amp up the watery danger—but he’s populated it with such patient archetypical love for nature and these fantasy people that those depths are worth plumbing. Homer, it’s not. But Cameron’s good enough to fill the screen with spectacle straight from the heart of this ocean.

Into Thin Air: EVEREST

It’d be easy to call Everest a man versus nature story, but that’s downplaying the extent to which nature dominates. It’s never a fair fight. Telling the true story of a 1996 storm that left a group of mountain climbers stranded at the world’s tallest peak, making the return climb treacherous and nearly impossible, the film creates an enveloping sense of natural danger. When the winds kick up and gusts of snow pummel the characters as they stumble along narrow paths, clinging to guide ropes near cavernous drops, there’s a convincing sense of disorientation and danger. One wrong step, one wrong decision, and it could mean certain death. In the film’s most haunting image, a struggling member of the group steps wrong, wobbles, and simply disappears, falling off the edge of the frame while a man in the foreground holds on for dear life. He glances back, notices with horror the empty hooks swinging in the storm, and then continues trudging foreword towards his ultimate fate. As one character ominously warns early on, “the mountain always has the last word.”

Shot with solid meat-and-potatoes sturdiness and completely convincing effects and stunts, director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) indulges in a few sweeping spectacular vistas, but otherwise keeps the epic backdrop in the background. He chooses instead to focus on the people making their way through the landscape, as they joke, bond, argue, succeed, struggle, and die. William Nicholson (Unbroken) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours), no strangers to stories of remarkable survival, have written a screenplay interested in process and procedure, spending a great deal of time assembling the team and taking them through the steps of an ordinary climb up Everest, a fraught and fascinating prospect in and of itself. It’s clear how slow, difficult, and challenging it is to climb any mountain, let alone Everest. There are medical concerns, perilous heights, unexpected delays, deadly cold, and dwindling oxygen. And that’s before the storm even starts.

The main characters are a crew from New Zealand running an expedition up the mountain, a guide (Jason Clarke), a base camp supervisor (Emily Watson), and a doctor (Elizabeth Debicki). Their clients include a mailman (John Hawkes), a wealthy Texan (Josh Brolin), a journalist (Michael Kelly), and an experienced climber (Naoko Mori). Also on the mountain are rival groups, including one led by a brash American (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to reach the summit, and one (led by Sam Worthington) going up the shorter mountain next to it and can only watch in horror as the storm clouds roll in over their colleagues. It’s not always easy to tell all these people apart, especially once they have oxygen masks over their faces and ice-covered hoods pulled low over their goggles. We see only figures struggling up the mountain, and then feeling the panic kick in once they desperately need to get back down.

When a mask is pulled off, revealing the character actor beneath, it’s easier to tell who is where. But maybe the point is to mimic some of the disorientation of thin air and exhausted lungs. The performances are solid physical presences, filling their corners of the frame with a sturdiness and confidence that’s all the more difficult to see fade away. Some are unpersuasively overconfident. Others are understandably worried. There are token characterizations to flesh out the ensemble. We hear reasons for the trip – to be brave, to be accomplished, to be awed – and overhear sentimental calls back home to nervous wives (Keira Knightley cuddling a fake pregnant belly, Robin Wright corralling teens). But these biographical details are sparse, adding only reliable extra gloom as the camera contemplates the thunderous darkness encroaching.

Kormákur shoots the proceedings with a relatively restrained eye. He doesn’t amp up the action, provide CGI dazzle, or find room for unrealistic cinematic heroics. As small mistakes and nature’s fury combine, death comes quickly for some, slowly for others, and narrowly misses still more. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s wide lenses capture an immense sense of beauty and danger, while the sound effects crunch and howl. It never comes to life as a personal journey, the characters remaining too vague to really develop, but as a view of process – of a feat of mountaineering giving way to a struggle to make it back alive – it’s gripping. As it narrows to consider the tiny interpersonal moments that seal each one’s fate, there are moving moments of triumph and pain, flashes in a storm that wipes away all certainty. It’s a big Hollywood epic with a small eye, with stories of survival not through any grand action, but through endurance and chance. It has the trappings of a disaster movie, but none of the thrill. It starts with cautious excitement, turns scary, then left me feeling only sad.

The Titans Strike Back: WRATH OF THE TITANS

The 2010 remake of 1981’s campy Greek mythology monster movie Clash of the Titans has the dubious distinction of being a hit movie that’s terribly forgettable. I remember being downright bored not liking it and that Sam Worthington fought a giant scorpion and everyone loved how Liam Neeson growled “Release the Kraken!” in every trailer and commercial for the movie. Now here’s the sequel, this time around directed by Jonathan Liebesman, who last directed the alien-invasion war movie Battle: Los Angeles, which was one of the most chaotically uninvolving films I saw last year. So you can see why I approached Wrath of the Titans with a large degree of skepticism. It turns out to have mostly been unnecessary. The sequel may be no great movie – it’s still barely above middling in my book – but it’s a significant step forward and the kind of movie that works so well on its own you can go ahead and forget about seeing its predecessor if you’ve so far been lucky enough to avoid it.

Sam Worthington is back as Perseus, demigod son of Zeus. The opening narration tells us that after slaying the Kraken, he settled down as a fisherman in his seaside village where he lived a quiet, peaceful life raising his son on his own ever since whoever played his romantic interest in Clash decided she didn’t want to come back and do the sequel. Zeus (Liam Neeson) shows up at his son’s door to warn him that the gods are losing their powers and this means that they can’t keep all those monstrous Titans locked up anymore. Having delivered the message, Zeus meets up with Poseidon (Danny Huston) and together they head down to the Underworld, where they find that Hades (Ralph Fiennes) has joined forces with Ares (Edgar Ramirez) to kill off divine competition and free Kronos, who promises to restore the gods’ powers. Hades wounds Poseidon and captures Zeus and is well on his way to having his way.

Meanwhile, a giant, two-headed, fire-breathing, dog Titan attacks Perseus’s village. Once that’s dealt with, Poseidon shows up to deliver exposition, telling Perseus the nature of the quest that must be undertaken to restore peace. He even points out who must go with Perseus on the quest and where to find them. So the movie’s off and running in what seems like no time at all. The stakes are set – end of the world – and so is the goal: to unite Poseidon’s trident, Hades’s pitchfork, and Zeus’s lightning bolt and forge the ultimate weapon and only known Kronos killer. Perseus sets off on his flying horse Pegasus to find warrior-queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and his half-brother, demigod Agenor (Toby Kebbell) and gets them to help find the weapons, rescue Zeus, and save the world.

Unlike its predecessor, Wrath of the Titans makes an asset of its thinness. It just hurtles right along, all so straightforward. None of the actors have much to do and none of the mortal characters ever really pop with any personality to speak of aside from generic action quips and interjections. It’s the gods who are memorable here and they’re only used sparingly. Even so, I found myself reacting to the people on screen as actors not as characters, as in, it’s kind of nice to see Edgar Ramirez hamming it up from beneath ancient armor. What fills the void where memorable characters go, what the entire movie rests upon, is how much enjoyment can be found in the monsters. On that level, the movie delivers. Here there be monsters.

Among the highlights are the kind of expensive-looking, effects-driven setpieces you’d expect from a movie like this. The group runs through a forest with a Cyclops duo hot on their heels. They wander through a cavernous underground labyrinth where hallucinations are eerie, but far less deadly than the Minotaur. And, in the terrific climax, a colossal volcanic man drips immense ribbons of lava and fiery debris down upon a puny mortal army. Liebesman stages these and other action beats in a way that’s more or less understandable and shows off the effects work well, incorporating digital effects and 3D tricks in a likably competent way. It may not have the personality of the kind of stop-motion work Ray Harryhausen did, but it displays a similar respect for the sensation of seeing a vivid monster that could only be made real in the movies. The walking lava cloud is especially memorable. I love the way Perseus rides the flying horse through the layers of dripping danger, bobbing and weaving through the 3D depths in a rather strikingly designed series of shots.

It’s an agreeable diversion of an action spectacle that kind of dissolves on impact. But it’s efficient, delivering the big effects moments without letting the exposition bog down the proceedings or spending too much time providing characterizations to the cardboard. It’s a supremely simple-minded movie that just comes right out and says these are the Good Guys, these are the Bad Guys, and these are the Monsters. Then all of the above run around and fight and then the credits roll. The movie doesn’t overstay its welcome and provides an excuse to sit inside and eat some popcorn while avoiding a spring rain shower. (In a few months, it’ll be a fun, unchallenging rental for a lazy Sunday afternoon when you’d rather watch a movie than take a nap). I wouldn’t call this a good movie, or even a particularly involving movie, but I will admit to having a small amount of affection for it nonetheless. To all the journeymen directors and writers out there: If you have to make an unnecessary sequel to a terrible remake, you might as well make it as watchable as this one.

At Last: Avatar

In a year that brought us giant robots, living museum pieces, mutants, super-soldiers, and guinea pig spies and had them all be endlessly dull clattering noises and nonsensical spectacle, Avatar feels like a breath of fresh air. Here’s a story with real characters and arcs that matter. Here’s special effects that have real impact in a plot that has peaks and valleys and room to breathe. Of course, it’s a shame that the plot is a hodgepodge of other sci-fi extravaganzas with a bit of Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas thrown in for good measure, not to mention its sledgehammer metaphors for modern ailments, but at least it’s shaped and developed in a cohesive way. I’m not exactly sure how every aspect of the world operates, and some of it gets a little silly, but here’s a movie that sets out to excite and entertain and actually accomplishes it.

The first thing we see is a too-good-to-be-true jungle as we glide across the canopy, the branches whisking past our faces. The 3D is hardly revolutionary; movies just this year like Up and A Christmas Carol used the technology in similar ways to similar effects, deepening the landscape with a more fluid technique arising from their animated nature. The live action nature of Avatar achieves something closer to the multi-plane animation of early Disney works where the foreground, background, and everything in between look like they exist on separate plates creating a convincing illusion of depth. But because of this 3D technology the movie, to my eyes, looked pretty much 2D. After all, regular movies are perceived to possess depth as well by simply showing us an image that represents the real world as we see it. A normal image doesn’t appear to flatten the background into the foreground, does it? Throwing 3D in to the mix only distracts here, especially because Cameron isn’t interested in throwing things into the audience, the trick 3D does best. For most of Avatar I felt like I was watching a 2D movie while wearing an extra pair of glasses. Now that the disappointment with the most trumpeted revolutionary aspect of the film can settle in, we can get back to the plot.

After the jungle soars by, we meet the man who will guide us into the story, Jake Sully played by Sam Worthington, the young Australian actor who stole Terminator Salvation right out from under Christian Bale. Worthington’s not quite as good here, but his role is just as intriguing. Sully is an ex-marine who is forced to take his brother’s place on a corporation’s mission to a planet called Pandora. His brother had been trained to control an avatar grown with his DNA mixed with that of the natives of Pandora, the Na’vi, a race of blue bipedal felines. This avatar is, well, I’m not exactly sure what it is. Is the creature a separate being that Sully can control or is it an empty biological vehicle that he merely drives? Oh, well. Cameron doesn’t stop to tell us. Whatever it is, the fake Na’vi is controlled by Sully, who uses a wheelchair but when he enters his avatar he has control over a fully functioning, albeit alien, body. It’s an escape but one that leads Sully to end up being torn between Sigourney Weaver’s sassy scientist who wants to use the avatar program to learn about the peaceful natives and Stephen Lang’s brutish ex-military company man who wants to use the avatars to learn how to relocate the natives in order to get at the rich deposits of futuristic minerals.

Luckily, all of this is set up within the first act of the film, allowing for us to ignore the plot for much of the middle portion of the film, which finds the big blue Na’vi Sully interacting with the natives, especially the one played by a motion-capture Zoe Saldana who begins to take a romantic interest in the strange outsider. It’s a somewhat compelling romance, but luckily the true love story is between Cameron and the fantastical world he’s showing us. The film wanders through the jungles of Pandora and, make no mistake, it is some kind of spectacular. There are floating mountains and glowing moss, dizzying drops and lush fields. There are plants that glow when tread upon and a holy tree that can read your mind. It’s a rich and detailed exercise in world building and it’s a delight to explore as it unfolds on screen, every little detail satisfying. Well, that holy tree is kind of hokey, but other than that this is a satisfying sci-fi universe.

The movie zips right along and, despite nagging problems with the details of the plot, I was caught up in the action. There’s a devastating moment of mass destruction that hits about two-thirds of the way through the film that jolted me, surprising me with how much I cared about this world. The movie may not have the relentless forward momentum of Cameron’s Terminator or Aliens, but it does have a comfortable pacing that allows the spectacle to settle in before the massive all-action finale that sends creatures and technology hurtling into each other in a slick and awesome cacophony as good as a Star Wars battle or the kind of comic book panel that feels so packed with carefully choreographed motion and detail that it should probably be a centerfold. Even in 2D, this epically satisfying climax would be totally enjoyable.

So, is Avatar a groundbreaking, jaw-dropping motion picture event unlike any we have seen since maybe Star Wars or even The Jazz Singer? In short, the answer is no, and it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking Cameron thinks it is. Instead, the movie is just a well paced, entertaining, special-effects extravaganza. It has a derivative plot and some thin characters, but I kind of cared about them, and I certainly cared about the planet Pandora. When some in Hollywood seem to have lost the ability to make us care about thin characters in fantastical situations, it’s nice to see a blockbuster that’s actually worth the blocks it’s busting.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

The first Terminator, way back in 1984, is a B-movie blast: a dark – and darkly funny – sci-fi actioner that uses a cool time-travel hook only to get us into a merciless hunt-hunt-hunt kill-kill-kill chase movie. By the time 1991 rolled around, director James Cameron had made, with Terminator 2, the universe of his initial film more expansive with a more daring exercise in mythmaking. The film is looser and longer, but the budget, and the boom, is bigger and more resonant. There’s a real sense of inevitable tragedy as Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor, and Edward Furlong, as her son John, race against time to stop the evil robots from taking over the world, all the while knowing that if they succeed, John would never exist because the events leading up to his birth would never have been put into place. The two movies work so well, both together and separately, that there was never any time to slow down and think about the logic of the time travel contained within.

With the blander third picture and a TV spinoff, there was ample time to consider why the time travel plots used in this franchise open up too many questions that lead down ridiculous roads. If any thought is put into it, the franchise really shouldn’t exist at all. Why don’t the evil robots send a terminator even farther back in time where the humans wouldn’t be able to fight back? Why don’t the evil robots just fill the world with poison which would kill off humanity while leaving mechanical objects intact? But that’s a dangerous road to go down if one wishes to keep enjoyment of these movies intact.

The biggest question I had going in to the fourth film, Terminator Salvation, was whether or not the film would successfully get past the time travel hangups and allow me the pure enjoyment of a summer action picture. The answer is: yes, for the most part. The movie, directed by the relatively lightweight McG, is a big, grim, action movie with satisfying visuals and cool special effects. It suffers from a serious case of mid-film drag but manages to shake loose for a fun climax. It doesn’t add much to the overall mythology of the franchise but at least it entertains. It succeeds in a way that the first Terminator film does; it takes a standard sci-fi trope (the man with no memory and the machine with a consciousness) and uses it for a bit of pathos, but mostly an excuse for more action.

The center of this subplot is actor Sam Worthington, who first appears in the opening scenes of the film as a prisoner on death row who signs away his body to science. He shows up again years later, after the opening credits and an explosive action sequence, mysteriously the same age and with no memory of the intermediate years. He may or may not be a robot now, but he becomes the emotional center of the movie for me. The emotional center of the movie is certainly not Christian Bale, as John Connor, fine actor though he may be. Here he operates in two modes: intense and grim. He doesn’t elicit my compassion or my sympathy, although, to give Bale credit, the script is definitely no helper in that department. I cared about John Connor only because I had seen the other Terminator movies.

This movie takes place in the future, after the robot uprising, and contains thrilling scenes of robotic combat. Although the Terminators have none of the personality or singular scariness of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Robert Patrick’s models, they generate a kind of terror and awe of their own. The gears grind as the mechanical beasts clang forward and shoot and punch. There are slick robotic motorcycles that zoom through the barren landscape, charging down renegade humans, the ones that haven’t been picked up by startling appearances by giant metal claws. Struggling to survive being hunted by these technological terrors is Kyle Reese (franchise devotees will recognize that name), played by Anton Yelchin – young Chekov in Star Trek just a few weeks ago. If Worthington is the emotional center of the movie, then Yelchin is the emotional drive. I cared about him, not just because I had seen the earlier movies, but because Yelchin, with no help from the script, plays at the genuine human beneath the cog in the plotting.

This film has more in common with Star Trek than just Yelchin. It reinvigorates a sagging story, although here it is less radical reinvention and more canonical doodling in margins. It’s filled with all kinds of winks to franchise history that cause me to smile. You can believe someone says “come with me if you want to live” and you would be kidding yourself if you thought no one would say “I’ll be back.” Linda Hamilton shows up in a vocal performance only and I felt a surge of excitement when Ahhnold himself (with somewhat convincing CGI de-aging) steps out of a cloud of steam. It felt earned – it felt right – that the original Terminator was doing battle again. But also, like Star Trek, this movie made my inner thirteen-year-old very happy. It’s not as good a movie, or as satisfying an overall experience, but Terminator Salvation sets out some modest action-oriented goals and meets them, while taking the franchise a step back from mediocrity with fresh promise for future endeavors.