The crux of the film is the resistance movement’s attempt to destroy Skynet’s headquarters in San Francisco. Marcus repairs a long-broken radio just in time to hear a transmission from John Connor, and they head north to find him and his group, accompanied by a mute little girl named Star (single-named Jadagrace), who serves no purpose in the story whatsoever. (The only difference, really, is there’s no more smog.) He meets Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a fierce fighter who appears out of nowhere and seems to not know what’s been going on the last decade or so. If he doesn’t do that, then Connor will never be born, the resistance movement will fail, and the machines will win.Īt this moment, Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) is a teenager hiding in the bombed-out hellhole that used to be Los Angeles. Or, rather, he will be, once Connor sends him back in time. Since the apocalypse, Skynet-powered robots and other machines have been trying to kill the remaining humans, while pockets of resistance fighters - including John Connor (Christian Bale) - fight back.Ĭonnor wants to find and protect Kyle Reese because he knows from the first “Terminator” that eventually he’s going to send Reese back to 1984 to save Connor’s mother’s life and impregnate her. Skynet, a military defense system, became self-aware some years earlier and instigated nuclear war, wiping out much of humanity and bleaching all the color out of the cinematography. It stays faithful to most of the story’s mythology, but honestly, who ever cared much about that? Unstoppable killing machines from the future were the main attraction, not minutiae about what year it is when John Connor meets Kyle Reese.įor the record, though, it’s 2018. Without the time-travel element or Arnold Schwarzenegger starring (I guess he’s busy now, or something), it hardly feels like a “Terminator” picture at all.
While the first three took place in the present and dealt with robot assassins coming from the future to kill various members of the Connor family, “Salvation” is set in 2018, at the beginning of the events that those cyberkillers were so eager to prevent. The “Terminator” franchise turns a corner with this, the fourth film. It’s cranking out stuff that doesn’t even make sense! The factory that makes “Terminator” movies, on the other hand, seems to have gone haywire. This Terminator factory is a marvel of efficiency. He’ll especially like that the human workers have been replaced altogether, so that machines are being made by other machines. The climax of “Terminator Salvation” takes place in a factory where Terminator robots are made, and I believe Henry Ford will be glad to know that his assembly-line process still exists in the future.