It's hard to say what the first apocalypse movie I ever saw was (Damnation Alley or Planet of the Apes), but one of my favorites was the Terminator. Sure, it didn't take place in an apocalyptic wasteland, but the Kyle Reese's flashbacks to the resistance fighting the machines set the stage for the movies grand mythos.
The premise that a sentient computer decides that humanity must die isn't anything new. Track down a copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project, Tron, The Matrix, Maximum Overdrive, or any number of old Doctor Who episodes. In most machine vs. man stories the action took place covertly as the computer would create a shadowy cabal to do the machines bidding or quietly close all your bank accounts and register you as a wanted criminal, so the action was usually quite limited to running away from the law or shadow assassins.
The Terminator gave the machine a more substantial means of exterminating mankind. Arnold Shwarzenegger and Robert Patrick did a great job in presenting the T-800 and T-1000 as unstoppable killing machines in the first two movies. Things started getting a little silly in Terminator 3 with the T-X's built-in flame thrower, plasma caster, and its the other gimmicks. One could say that every time Skynet and the resistance sent back their hunter and protector they changed the timeline enough so that the Terminators kept getting more advanced (polymimetic liquid metal alloy?!) as they repeatedly tried to kill or save Sarah and John Connor.
!!WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD!!
Now with Terminator Salvation we are finally in the post Judgement Day, era since Skynet nuked the planet at the end of T3: Rise of the Machines (serves you right for not watching the movie yet), and we get to watch John Connor and the Resistance fight the machine; or so you would expect. The Terminator stories have always been about Skynet vs. the Connors. Sure, John Connor and Kyle Reese are in the movie, but they are more side stories that anything else.
Salvation is really the story of Marcus Wright, a convicted murder who donates his body to Cyberdyne before his execution. We then meet as he drags himself out of the mud after John and a squad of resistance fighters attack the Skynet bunker where he had been stored for the past fifteen years. We then follow Marcus, not aware of the war or that Cyberdyne has turned him into a cyborg, as he stumbles through the apocalyptic wasteland until he bumps into a T-600 in LA and consequently saved by a teenage Kyle Reese. He then fails to save Kyle, and his sidekick Star, when they are captured by a Skynet harvester, but bumps into Blair, a resistence pilot who was shot down by the HK fliers and offers to take him to John Connor and the resistance.
Marcus is exposed to the resistance to be a product of Cyberdyne/Skynet and must be destroyed, but Blair frees him before he can be terminated because she beleives he is still more man than machine. John, who's still got a soft spot in his heart for renegade Terminators joins forces with Marcus who figures he can get inside Skynet, find Kyle, let John in, and destroy Skynet. He does and they do, but in the end, Marcus must make the ultimate sacrifice as a payment for being given a second chance at saving his soul. Thus the title of the film, Terminator Salvation.
The thing that bugs me is that Marcus was a convicted killer on death row, a fact we are made aware of in the opening scene of the movie, but he's suddenly a nice guy after his "resurrected" in the wasteland. The main message here is supposed to be that Marcus is given a second chance to be good, but it's a theme that's never discussed until the end of the movie when he makes the ultimate sacrifice. In my opinion, the scene of Marcus on death row should have been used as a flash back at some point in the story when he has to face a major moral decision (kill or spare the lives of the guys who attacked Blair, save/abandon Kyle and Star, save John Connor). Better yet, just drop the death row element all together. It really didn't play into anything important. Marcus could just have easily been some morally questionable commando who was chosen for the cyberization.
Disappointingly, Kyle Reese is taken by Skynet in the first thirty minutes of the film and really doesn't do much more than that. But he does get to say the line, "Come with me if you want to live".
John Connor isn't totally ignored in the movie. We do get to see how he received the scar over his eye (T2), he gets to fight an unfriendly T-800 complete with Schwarzenegger skin, and blow up Skynet San Francisco (one of the many Skynet facilities around the world) but that's about it. Other than that, he's just this guy bumping heads with the leaders of the resistance and making propaganda speeches to the resistance on the radio.
As far as a Terminator movies go, I'm disapointed in this story. It does little or nothing to adavance the franchise and treats John Connor/Kyle Reese as a sidenote. Hopefully, the next movie will get it right. That or we can see a Terminator v. Predator cross over film. That would kick ass!
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