OneMetal.com book REVIEW:
Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

Terminators: They’re the machines that keep on going, despite apocalypses, despite a hailstorm of bullets, despite Skynet and box office Armageddon. They can lose mechanical limbs, survival time warps, and outmaneuver even the smartest Resistance soldiers. Much like these metal exterminators, Terminator Salvation refuses to let humanity win … and by that I mean give humanity a break already.

Last year, director McG restarted the film series with Terminator Salvation, a movie starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington. In yet another act of overkill, author Timothy Zahn expands on the movie’s events with his spin-off novel, Trial by Fire.

The roughly 300-page book will appease fans interested in Salvation’s secondary characters: namely Blair Williams, Barnes, and Kyle Reese. Ultimately connecting four main perspectives—Kyle, Star, and their fellow Resistance members’; Blair and Barnes’; the survivor Jik’s; a remote town’s. To start, the characters are mostly sorting through the rubble of Skynet’s San Francisco hub, obliterated at the movie’s end. John Connor, who makes a disappointingly scant appearance here, pegs Blair and Barnes on the same assignment, forcing them to settle their differences over Marcus Wright as they scour the Skynet scrap heap. The pair flag and investigate suspicious enemy activity while Kyle and his buddies tumble headfirst into an underground Terminator reserve.

Zahn’s plain, often repetitive, and sometimes laughable language reads average at best, and the writing actually worsens as the book reaches its final pages. Conflicts resolve themselves with luck that comes a little too easily, and Zahn tries to build suspenseful action that stems from melodrama and cliches.

At the least, Trial by Fire might bridge the newer Terminator films by leaking a plot thread of a forthcoming installment, sure to enter production sooner or later—more likely, though, the book passes as printable fan-fiction and little more.

Bottom Line

Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire meets the same gloomy fate as its movie counterpart. Buy this novelization only to satisfy a desperate Terminator fix.