Terminator Salvation Multitasks With a Machinima Prequel

Let me start off by saying this: The idea behind Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series is conceptually crazy good. After all, if you want to produce a low-budget CGI animated prequel to your big-budget blockbuster, what better way to execute it than to use the high-def graphics engine already created for the tie-in video game — especially if said game features a supporting character from the film, whose backstory could use some extra development anyways?

The first long-form dramatic machinima series produced by a major studio, Salvation Machinima is a co-production of Warner Bros., Warner Premiere, Machinima Inc., and Salvation director McG’s Wonderland Sound and Vision, available via Amazon VOD, Xbox 360, iTunes and Playstation (which means, yup, it does require a money investment — $14.99 for an HD season pass).

The first episode, released yesterday, will be followed up by five more installments on a weekly basis, which means that new episodes will still be coming out after Salvation has become last month’s blockbuster. Taking place two and a half years before the beginning of Salvation, Salvation Machinima tracks Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood, reprising the voice of her character from both the film and video game), a tough-as-nails resistance fighter trying to take down the machines that have brought about Armageddon. Her specific mission is focused on finding the Ghost, a piece of tech jamming Resistance communications, which she accomplishes in the first episode. Of course, it’s not nearly as simple as that. (At 12 minutes an episode, it’d be disappointing otherwise.)

The action’s the reason to tune in: The various Terminator models are perfectly rendered, the gunfight battles are tightly choreographed, and it all builds up to a climactic chase and crash scene on par with what we’ll see in the upcoming film. But machinima is subject to the same advantages and flaws of its parent system, which boils down to awesome action scenes that take the 360-degree rendering system to its cinematic best, but character animation that simply doesn’t match up to traditional formats.

That would be fine if the series was pure action, but there is some clear attempt at character development here, as a battle-worn Blair deals with the isolation caused by her role in the Resistance, and by default the burden of that development is put on the elegantly written voice-over. When Blair wanders the wreckage of downtown Los Angeles, her face bears pretty much the same expression it does while fighting Terminators or arguing with scavengers. There’s only so much of that you can write off to her being world-weary.

I do have a lot of respect for machinima as a young and evolving medium. But it’s important to remember that while using it as a low-budget solution to world-building is a smart one, there’s still a long way to go before the medium can ever be considered a true replacement for traditional animation, CGI or otherwise. A great script and voice-acting do help, but much like real Terminators, Salvation Machinima still lacks a human touch.