Book Review: Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization by Alan Dean Foster

Writing novelizations of films must be a special challenge, especially when the film has the blockbuster potential of a franchise installment like Terminator Salvation. If the book is published in advance of the film, which only makes sense, it spoils the plot and gives away the ending. If the book deviates significantly from the script, it isn’t a very true novelization.

Terminator Salvation, the novel, is actually two stories: there’s the struggle of the human resistance against single-minded killing machines; and then there’s the story of leaked endings, revisions and reshoots, and clandestine access codes. For all the breakneck, widescreen-ready action of the latest man vs. machine story contained in the novel, the second tale may be even more interesting.

The new film represents a fresh start after the disappointing Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which had a similar stultifying effect on this franchise as Batman and Robin had on the Caped Crusader’s. (In a one-star review, The UK Critic called T3, “so bad, so unengaging [and] dog ugly unprofessional.”) Alan Dean Foster is an experienced hand at action/sci-fi movie novelizations and an apt choice for this revival attempt. He juggles the two primary plot lines competently, keeps the pace appropriately brisk, and provides enough characterization and detail to keep this from reading like a barely fleshed-out script.

Unlike the first three films, or the current Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, Terminator Salvation doesn’t involve time travel or warnings from the future, but is set in a near future after Judgment Day, the machine-orchestrated nuclear holocaust. An adult John Connor is now married to Kate and a leader in the resistance against the machines’ relentless campaign of human extinction. The other main plot follows Marcus Wright, a Death Row inmate as the book opens, who lacks memory of anything since his lethal injection, but has apparently gained some inexplicable new abilities (not the least of which being, you know, surviving lethal injection). Wright encounters teenaged Kyle Reese and a young mute girl, Star, and the three survive harrowing encounters with the machines by learning to trust and rely on each other.

Although there isn’t much to the story apart from a series of clashes with new varieties of malevolent machines (and a few familiar models), leading to the climactic meeting of Connor, Wright, and Reese in Skynet Central, the Terminator’s stronghold, it adequately conveys the humans’ struggle to survive and prevail. And while it’s not quite The Road (Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, post-apocalyptic masterpiece, which director McG had the cast read to prepare for this movie), Foster does evoke the ruins of our civilization sufficiently to retain the cautionary tone that’s been part of the better stories in the franchise.

Article Author: James A. Gardner

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