I watched the latest Terminator film recently, “Terminator Salvation.” It was just okay: it began well, but the ending was extremely weak. I’m now going to explain how the film’s ending could have been much better simply by altering three or four lines of dialogue.
Here’s a summary of the plot of the film as it was actually released. The movie opens in 2003, with Sam Worthington’s character about to be executed for the murder of his brother and two cops. He is consumed with guilt, and accepts that he deserves to die. Just before the fatal injection, he signs his organs away to Helena Bonham Carter’s character, who turns out to be a scientist who works for the same corporation that will invent Skynet, the intelligent computer that will later destroy the world.
Then we flash forward to the future: Skynet has destroyed most of the world, John Connor is now grown up and fighting the machines, and, to our surprise, we see Worthington’s character appear. He looks exactly like he did in the first scene, and so we wonder: is he just well-preserved? Is he really a Terminator but he doesn’t know it? Of course, we’ve seen the trailers for the movie, so actually we know that he is a machine of some sort, but we’re not sure what that means yet. He continues to be riled up with self-loathing and wanders the post-apocalytic wasteland.
The human resistance figures out that Worthington is a machine (except for his human heart and brain), but during that time, John Connor’s father has been captured by Skynet and imprisoned. The only way for Connor to get into Skynet’s base is to trust Worthington. Worthington helps him sneak into Skynet, but then, in the computer control centre, Skynet reveals the real story to Worthington: that it was all a trap, that luring Connor to his death was the plan all along, and W should accept that he is a machine and join the robots. W refuses to join the robot cause, and a battle for Connor’s life begins. Connor escapes, desperately wounded through the chest, with his father and W, and manages to detonate a huge bomb that destroys Skynet’s base.
The heroes end up in a jerry-rigged medical facility out in the desert: Connor’s heart is about to fail. W says, “Give him my heart.” He dies so that Connor can go on living and continue the resistance.
Why does this ending suck? Well, one basic rule of screen writing must be: at the climax of your movie, do not offer your protagonist something that he obviously does not want. Because, when he says no, the audience will be unmoved. Given that W has shown no interest at all in seeing himself as a machine, why should he change his mind at the key moment?
It is not heroic to turn down something you don’t want.
Worse: the film has been structured so that, whatever the characters’ doubts about W’s humanity, we, the audience, never doubt it. Why? Because the first scene, back in 2003, shows him being human, shows him taking some responsibility for his crimes, and shows him weighing up his guilt. We would struggle now to see him as a machine—he is the film’s most compelling character.
So–how to fix things? Instead, the computer should offer W something he does want: salvation. The computer says, look, you are consumed with guilt for killing your brother. Whatever you do now, you will never get over it. You can fight for the resistance for years but you’ll never see yourself as the good person you want to be. But, if you join our hive-mind, we can wipe all that guilt free. You’ll be part of our collective consciousness/intellect thing, and you will have salvation.
Then, when W turns down this offer, it is actually a heroic act, because Skynet is offering him a version of the thing he’s been looking for the whole film. The audience thinks: shit, I didn’t really think he’d join those robots, but I’m still feeling tense for him: now he’s lost his only chance to fix his guilty conscience.
Then, when the doctor announces that Connor’s heart is about to fail, and W realises he can offer him his heart, then the audience realises that his heroic decision (to sacrifice his private desire for humanity’s greater good) has been rewarded—then giving his heart to Connor actually means something. Instead of merely seeming like a cheap coincidence, the heart-donation makes poetic sense: by turning down a false salvation, he has gained a real one. The audience realizes: he did the right thing, threw away his one (pretty dubious) chance to be at peace, and, by passing that test, now he’s been given the opportunity to really get peace, and not just a weird computer-based emotional peace but one that is both privately satisfying to him and which makes a difference to the whole world. Ah. I feel satisfied.
There are two other big problems with the film which I will get to later.
Daniel
