The Angry Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

In Terminator Salvation, the latest installment in the series of movies that pits man vs. machine, the scene shifts from the pre-Judgement Day setting of the first three movies, to a post-apocalyptic landscape in which the humans are being hunted down by SkyNet.

For the most part, Terminator Salvation is an entertaining and faithful follow-up to the Terminator series. The acting is on par for an action movie, with Christian Bale bringing his trademark intensity to the role of the protagonist John Connor.

However, my problem with the movie has nothing to do with the slightly convoluted plot, Sam Worthington’s not-really-that-good American accent, or the major plot holes, but rather the fact that Moon Bloodgood’s character looked like she just stepped out of a photo shoot.

What's up.

When her character, Blair Williams, isn’t too busy shooting at robots, she spends her time being ridiculously, almost unfathomably hot. Which, for the record, I’m okay with. Just because a nuclear winter destroyed the planet and effed up everything, that doesn’t mean that boobies still don’t have currency.

But there is a way to have the fantastically hot girls in the movies without making them look like fantastically hot girls. How, you may ask? Well, for one, you might want to maybe put some dirt on their faces or underneath their fingernails. If this lady is a fighter pilot, then odds are she’s been elbow deep in engine parts and grease.

Two: Their teeth. In a future where killer robots are killing folks like so many ants at a picnic, I can’t imagine that a decent dental plan still exists. I mean, the human resistance has their hands full with trying not to be made into a delicious soup, so I bet the guys over at Invisalign aren’t filling up their date book with fittings for braces.

Three: Their hair. The lovely Miss Bloodgood, or Goodmoon, or Gobstopper, or whatever her name is, has nice hair. Pretty hair. Flowing hair, even. But in 2018, I don’t know that you can get a good creme rinse or a root treatment when you’re avoiding certain death at the hands of steel killibots.

Fourth: Everything else. I can only imagine that hygiene and overall cleanliness is secondary to surviving in a horrific, post-nuclear landscape. The men in the movie all have some sort of grime caked into their four-day old stubble, and really, for the sake of realism, let’s uggify some of these ladies. I know the inherent irony in asking for a movie about self-aware robots that travel back in time to kill the father of someone who might one day lead arevolution against said machines to have a bit of realism, but as a moviegoer, it’s awfully distracting when you’re wondering if the hot jet pilot has ever shown her cans in a movie before. (For the record, she hasn’t. Damnit!)

But really, asking for a bit of realism in movies isn’t completely ludicrous. I just ask for some consistency when it comes to creating the characters. Christian Bale and Common’s characters look like they haven’t had a good shower in a lunar cycle, yet Moony Boodglood’s character must have had a spa treatment every morning in preparation for her carpet bombings of SkyNet’s communcation relays.

That being said, she is still hot. So that’s okay with this guy.