TERMINATOR SALVATION

TERMINATOR SALVATION. McG (sic), dir. John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, script. The Halcyon Company et al. (prod.) / Warner Brothers (US dist.), 2009 (see IMDb for complex production and distribution ). Martin Laing, production designer. Industrial Light and Magic, visual effects.

TS includes a significant (and rather P. K. Dickian) variation on the theme of the cyborg: Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright is a human being merged with machinery, with a Skynet-controlled computer-chip in his brain; cf. and contrast ROBOCOP. Note also mergings and transgressions of boundaries with small killer machines that are like watersnakes and motorcycles that are both riderless and like mechanical centaurs, with a rider suggested. The usual mise-en-scène is post-apocalyptic Industrial pomo, but Skynet itself is rendered as modernist. As in the first TERMINATOR, we have literalizations of the figure of speech of Nazi extermination camps as factories of death (although some of the humans may face <>: literal mechanization; or not — some points in the film are subtle, understated, or confused).

5. DRAMA, RDE, 22/V/09