Terminator salvation what makes us human

Next, he awakes in a SkyNet dominated world with a cybernetic organic host implanted into his system, as well as having major parts of his anatomy replaced. Because he plays a resurrected man who thinks he knows who he is, he doesn't notice how he has already changed as a person, with more skills and knowledge in electronics than before.

I like that he gets rescued by Kyle Reese trying to earn his stripes. I like that it takes gorgeous Blair Williams to work up his heart-rate and snuggle up to him for body heat while they flee back to base after a foiled rescue attempt.

I like the way he is strung up on a railcar axle completely unaware of his torn-apart body revealing his prosthetic innards until John Connor peels off his head restraint and he looks down into his own torso. I liked it when Christian Bale describes how Marcus Wright completely believes in his own humanity.

In the end, John Connor is fatally hurt and it takes the Wright hybrid to donate his heart to save Connor's life. It is cheesy somewhat but necessary sometimes in morality tales to press a point: what does it take to make us human, we hear Connor ask rhetorically at the end. It is the ability to love, to care, to sacrifice. The end of the film leaves open follow-up plotline, where perhaps it will be Marcus Wright's cybernetic memories and brain which will be cannibalised and used by Connor to send the second Terminator back to protect his mother and himself.

Intensity need not be the enemy of personality, but in Bale's work it too often has been. Though his rasping vigilante was perhaps the least interesting character in The Dark Knight , that film was a case where the center didn't have to hold: Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and, in a perverse way, Heath Ledger provided the necessary doses of humanity. In Terminator: Salvation , by contrast, the supporting performances cannot support the film on their own, and Bale's deficiencies are on full display.

Like the enemy with which he is supposed to be contrasted, he is relentless, impervious, and utterly uninteresting. Indeed, his performance is so uncompromising and devoid of nuance that one half-wonders why McG didn't leave in the infamous outtake in which Bale profanely berated a crew member who'd wandered onto the set.

Guns, grenades, and helicopters all have their roles in the battle for humankind, but an obscene tirade of that caliber could've knocked Skynet right out of orbit. You are using an outdated browser. But "Terminator Salvation" is so programmed, so impersonal, that it practically dares you to warm to its characters.

Even the action sequences feel canned: Characters run toward helicopters, yelling, or grunt as they engage in jerky hand-to-hand combat. They may as well have been lifted from a lazily programmed computer game.

But then, this is summer entertainment, brainless fun -- so maybe we're supposed to look the other way as Bale gives what may be the most drab performance of his career. His John Connor is the man who wasn't supposed to be born: "Terminator Salvation" is set in , 34 years after the action of the first "Terminator.

In "Terminator Salvation," those machines don't yet look very Schwarzenegger-like although, thanks to the magic of computer imagery, Schwarzenegger does make an appearance, sort of ; in this movie's vision, Terminators are gangly, unstoppable gunmetal-colored behemoths, with all-seeing red eyes.

But a small, hardy band of flesh-and-blood foot soldiers are fighting back: John Connor is the bravest and most charismatic of all -- he gives rousing, FDR-style radio addresses to his scattered followers, which include Yelchin's young Kyle Reese and the silent but sensitive little moppet, Star played by young actress Jadagrace , who tags along with him.

Kyle Reese will, of course, become John Connor's father -- or already is, except he doesn't know it yet, because it's not yet , the year he'll go back in time to save John Connor's mother, Sarah.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. In "Terminator Salvation," John Connor more a legend than a man, he's never called just "John" or "Connor" also has to tangle with a sullen, mysterious figure named Marcus Wright Sam Worthington , who may or may not be on the side of the freedom fighters. Meanwhile, a resistance babe named Blair Williams Moon Bloodgood strides through the movie on extremely long legs: She's about the only thing in "Terminator Salvation" that suggests McG or cinematographer Shane Hurlbut the target of Bale's infamous F-bomb tirade a few months back have any aesthetic sense at all.