Terminator- Salvation or: Why Christian Bale Got so Angry

Now that I've seen Terminator: Salvation, an unpleasant, messy and slapped together hodgepodge of half-built plot device and hacky dialogue, I begin to sympathize with Christian Bale's now infamous on set melt down.

When an actor like Bale, experienced, capable and successful enough to choose his projects, gets stuck into a total stinker, I imagine he knows it. And as the shoot drags on, through exhausting stunts, terrible heat and more scowls and shouting than an open casting call for Adolph Hitlers, the existential horror of it probably becomes oppressive.

The film begins in 2003 where a death row inmate is about to be executed and signs his body over to science. Fast forward fifteen years and the world we know has been sucked dry of color, facial nuance and credible plot device. From there we meet characters it's impossible to care about and have to sit through interminable battle scenes we've seen by accretion twenty times before.

This film is, stare-at-the-ceiling, boring. The most entertaining thing about it was the credits sequence which listed an actor named Moon Bloodgood, suggesting a non-native speaker trying make up a name for their vampire character in late night role play and the director McG, (the auteur behind the Charlie's Angels franchise) whose three letter pseudonym again suggests someone with more cultural currency than they have imagination to spend properly.

This film is well beneath Christian Bale and, given the overall incompetence of the film in total, I don't doubt that the proceedings were unprofessional right down to the lighting assistants walking into frame.  I've seen this kind of schlock before but it usually goes straight to DVD and stars Dolph Lundgren.