Written by Old Bluffer 10th Jun 2009

Spoiler Alert: This review discusses a new film.

Marcus appears at the start of the movie as a murderer on death row. He is visited by Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham-Carter) to beg for his agreement to donate his body to her research.  She is seemingly dying of cancer and uses this to try and milk some sympathy from the convict.

Marcus doesn't seem especially moved, but uses the situation to bargain his corpse in exchange for a brief snog with the doc (Helena isn't looking at her best in this scene, she has a bald head and seems to still have stray hairs from the Planet of the Apes makeup on her chin - but Marcus is about to die after all, so you can't blame him for taking what is there in front of him!).

The next time we see Marcus, civilisation has collapsed, but he has no clue what has happened.  He soon blunders into the path of a T-600 terminator and has to be saved by Kyle Reese, who explains that Judgement Day has occurred with all its nuclear fury, and there are only a handful of rebel humans left in the war against Skynet's machines.

From this point on we are left in no doubt that:

a) Marcus is a Gruff Mercenary Archetype, not given to emotion but handy in a firefight.  We have seen hundreds of similarly shallow characters in any number of FPS computer games.

b) Marcus is also a Terminator, but he may or may not know this.  This spoiler is really disappointingly obvious as soon as he starts asking what year it is - but from then on the clues get ever more easy to spot (he doesn't eat when food is available, magnetic mines stick to his legs etc etc).

Sure enough, after meeting up (and charming) one of the key resistance fighters, Blair Williams, he soon finds himself in John Connor's base, where the doctor discovers the truth - he is a cyborg - a living human with a a metallic skeleton and Skynet chips embedded in his organic brain.  [Incidentally, we are led to believe that these chips are completely integrated in a rather advanced manner - but later on we find out that actually the rebels could have just ripped them off the back of his brain by hand, and that would remove all the Skynet programming!]

This discovery leads to much predictable hysteria by the humans, and Marcus soon finds himself manacled up and awaiting "disassembly".  Blair was rather taken with him though, and betrays her comrades in arms by rescuing him.

After a fairly length escape sequence, events contrive to allow Marcus to save John Connor's life, and thereby gain his partial trust.  Connor agrees to let him go on the condition that he infiltrate Skynet and disable their defences so a rescue mission for Kyle Reese (Connor's dad from Terminator 1) can be made.

So off trundles Marcus, where he soon discovers he has total access to any Skynet facility, so his mission is actually incredibly easy.

But, there's a twist!  And helpfully, a digital rendition of Dr. Serena Kogan appears (with Helena looking much nicer here!) to smugly explain it to the audience, much like what happens in the Matrix series.

It seems Skynet have been sneaky little devils, and created Marcus to be a completely one-off device to perfectly infiltrate the human resistance and therefore allow them to win the war.  Now this is a completely naff plotline for various reasons.  Firstly, it doesn't really mesh well with the already established and rather cool premise that Skynet is a machine intelligence that mass produces its military units, making incremental technology refinements along the way. A unique human cyborg is glaringly inconsistent with this behaviour.

Secondly, the technology to produce Marcus is in many ways far in advance of the currently-state-of-the-art T-800 Terminator series (OK, not in terms of combat effectiveness, but bio-chemically it is), and in fact, makes the T-800 series redundant in terms of infilitration missions.  In other words, if they could make Marcus, who is so human he isn't even aware of being a cyborg himself, then they would use similar cyborgs to catch rebels in future -but they don't, they use T-800s which have all the human believability of an Austrian body builder!

Thirdly, it completely steals one of the main ideas from the updated Battlestar Galactica series, which does an infinitely better job of exploring the paranoia suffered by humans when they have no idea which of their number are Cylon imposters.

And finally, it's a central tenet of Skynet's strategy that in order to defeat the humans, they just need to kill John Connor.  Now they try various convoluted ways of doing this via time travel, eg killing his mum (Terminator 1) or his dad (Kyle Reese, in this film) but all they really need to do is kill John.  So, if you have the perfect tool in Marcus, why in bejeezus' name would you give him overly complex programming to lure Connor into Skynet's base? Why not simply code a short routine named Rip_John_Connors_Head_Off_And_Spit_Down_His_Neck() and then sod off down the pub for the rest of the day?

Anyway, the above complaints aside, when Marcus learns he has been used as a mere Skynet bot, he rips out his brain chips (as easily as we mentioned previously) and goes on a rampage to help Connor. In the main, this just means we get to see a fight between him and a digitally rendered Arnie in naked T-800 form (I have to give credit, the CGI for Arnie's face is very well done).

I'm not going to bother explaining the various action sequences which then transpire - all that matters is that the humans escape, with Connor's dad, and Skynet's base is destroyed - hurray!

There is a slight problem though in that Connor has a pipe impaled through his chest and his heart has been irrevocably damaged.

He's in luck though!  Earlier on Connor's doctor (and also his bed-warmer as far as I can tell) makes a big point about telling us that Marcus has a genetically enhanced Super Heart.  Skynet also handily made this a Plug and Play device, so once Marcus moodily tells us that he's prepared to meet his "Salvation" (I'm paraphrasing here) they butcher him up and pop his heart into Connor.



Old Bluffer's Thoughts

After getting a hint of some damning reviews, this movie wasn't actually as dire as I feared it would be.  Yes, there were silly CGI set-pieces (why would Skynet think a walking robot the size of a tower block with motor cycles in its legs would be a useful design?!) but the rumours that the film is just an extended video game sequence are thankfully exaggerated.

The main problem I had with it was that it simply wasn't very interesting. Short of any ideas even approaching novel, the film all too often seemed like a pastiche of other (better) films.  Now some of these were homages, but when the rest of the entertainment is so lacking, they quickly become cause for yawnage.

I had no problem with the cast, there just isn't much for them to get their teeth into.

In summary then, this was Terminator-by-numbers, with the creators hoping that paying token lip service to the fans would excuse them from coming up with anything original or truly engaging. The film tells the (very) simple story of how John Connor rises to lead the resistance, but that's about it.  If you're a die-hard Terminator fan, I'd imagine you'd quite enjoy seeing this "historic" event on the big screen. More objective viewers are going to be underwhelmed though.


What I would have liked to have seen instead

I was hoping that Skynet would be shown in a really fascinating light.  Consider, at this point in history it is a relatively new form of artifical life, and its technology and tactics should have been crude and at times naive.  To make up for this it would have ruthless and untiring machine logic, to crush any remaining humans by sheer weight of numbers. For me, what makes the concept of the War cool, is how the humans can outthink the machines, but need to be ever more crafty in order to deal with the advancements in each iteration of Skynet's forces.

I *especially* hated the humanisation of Skynet via the cheap device of Helena Bonham Carter as the Chief Explainer. Skynet should not be that sophisticated, and by making it so, the enemy becomes far less interesting.

It would have been far cooler to have Skynet completely baffled by the human condition, and communicate to the audience by means of human slaves that they use to try and make sense of their foe.  For example, John Connor could have used colourful idioms and plays on words during his frequent transmissions to the rebels, in order that Skynet couldn't understand them (instead he just articulates in Plain English on unscrambled radio such secret information like "We're all going to attack Skynet tomorrow!" which even my mobile phone would have little difficulty in translating).  Skynet could have responded by using human captives to listen to previous recordings, and asking them simple questions about each one.  Those who are found to be lying would just be killed - eventually leaving a small pool of "trusted" slaves that betray their own kind in return for life.  As well as being a memorable scene, that would have been a wonderfully nuanced way of dealing with the vast differences between human and machine intelligence. But no, instead we get a pretty face the dumb audience can empathise with instead.

Put another way, instead of getting a more advanced version of WOPR from WarGames, we got a less interesting version of the Borg Queen from Star Trek.