Terminator Salvation
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The Story
After donating his body to science, convicted murderer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is executed in 2003 only to wake up in 2018 with no idea that most of humanity has been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust perpetrated against humanity by Skynet, a global network of supercomputers and robots.
Looking for answers, Marcus meets a teenage boy and a young mute girl. The boy is Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who will go back in time as a man to fall in love with and impregnate Sarah Connor. Their son John (Christian Bale) will grow up to become the leader of the human resistance in 2018.
But that reality is threatened when Kyle is captured by Skynet robots and taken to their headquarters in San Francisco, leading both Marcus and John Connor to plan desperate rescue attempts to get Kyle and the little girl out alive before its too late.
Content Issues
Explosive and hand-to-hand action violence takes a serious number of lives in the gritty future of 2018. All of it is intense and some of it is bloody and bone-cracking. In one scene, a woman is threatened by 3 potential rapists/attackers (though they don’t succeed). Harsh language is heard, along with uses of God’s name for swearing.
Worldview Talking Points
As you might suspect with a movie called “Salvation” set in a time after “Judgment Day,” the “Terminator” worldview is built on biblical themes in the largest sense of the word. The first 3 time travel action movies (and 1 brief TV series) ask the question, “Is there anything we can do to avoid the apocalypse?”
But “Salvation” director McG and his team mostly skip dealing with that bigger idea in this 4th film. For one thing, the story is set after the apocalypse has already happened. Instead, any worldview ideas tucked in between the nearly non-stop action have to do with what it means to be human.
The film’s answer is that is has a lot to do with self-sacrifice, courage, compassion, and patience—that we must work at “being human” in order to bring meaning to our lives with or without machines.
In our PlanetWisdom review for students, we pointed out that God’s Word describes being human both as being made in God’s image, but also as being fully corrupted by sin and unable to provide our own goodness, meaning for life, or—certainly—our own salvation.
If your son or daughter sees “Terminator Salvation,” we hope a few of the following questions might help provoke a productive conversation about some aspect of the film.
- How do you feel about “Terminator” as an action movie series or a TV show? Would you say you’re a fan?
- Do you think the movie was a letdown or worth the time to see it?
- After seeing the film, why do you think it was called “Terminator Salvation”?
- Why do you think the humans refer to the initial nuclear attack by the machines as “Judgment Day”? Who was being judged and for what?
- The movie doesn’t really say anything about God. Would a biblical worldview fit into this story? Why or why not?
- Do you think our growing dependence on technology is healthy thing? A dangerous thing? Either way, is there anything we can do about that?
- Do you think some people have more respect for or fear of technology than they do of God? Does God seem less impressive in our high-tech age?
- The Bible teaches there will be a “Day of the Lord” or a Judgment Day. Who will be judged on that day and for what?
- In as few words as possible, how would you explain where salvation from that Judgment Day really comes from?
- If you could go back or forward in time, where would you go and why?
