Reel Heroes: Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, Terminator: Salvation

I love stories of redemption, both real and fictional.  In fact, if it weren’t for such stories, people would stay hopelessly lost.  But change is inevitable, and with maturity often comes the ability to see the error of our ways, and to become better men and women than we were before, to “rise above the fall” as one Christian song states.  Stories like this abound in our culture, from real people like atheist C.S. Lewis, who became one of the most vocal Christians of the century when he put his quite intelligent mind towards the task of disproving Christian doctrine, and Robert Downey Jr., who rose above his drug-induced, Hollywood, bad boy days to become (shudder) a conservative republican, to fictional characters like Daniel Craig’s once thieving cowboy amnesiac in Cowboys & Aliens or the ultimately evil Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies, who is eventually saved by his son Luke in The Return of the Jedi.  Like these people and characters, Marcus Wright starts out the beginning of the movie Terminator: Salvation as a bad guy – in fact, a real bad guy; a murderer on death row.  The first scene shows him receiving a lethal injection for his crime.  Then, if you can believe it, things get even worse.  The computers launch an assault against mankind, cutting all manner of robotic terminators loose to wipe out the few human survivors.  And Marcus finds himself reborn upon this landscape, eventually discovering that he’s not even human any more, but “one of them,” a machine, but one the computers cleverly allowed to retain his humanity:  All the better to infiltrate the humans and wipe them out for good!  When he returns to them, with John Conner hot on his trail, he is repaired, and taken in like one of their own, and he is in misery with the knowledge of what he once was, a filthy murderer put to death, and the knowledge of what he is now, a half-man, half-machine pawn of the murderous computer system known as Skynet, used to infiltrate the few remaining humans so the machines could destroy them once and for all.

     But he can’t abide this existence, and therein lies his redemption, and the reason he’s a role model.  He rises above what he once was, and even rises above the pawn he has become.  He rips the computer control from his own head, and goes up against the terminators trying to destroy John Conner and Kyle Reese, the only hope for mankind’s future.  He fights these monstrous androids because he’s the only one who can.  Skynet saw to that when they used his body to recreate him in their image.  Yet he proves he is not one of them, and that he is a human, and manages to redeem himself by his human choices.  In the end, when John Conner’s heart has been pierced and he lies dying in a medical tent, Marcus makes the ultimate sacrifice, believing, perhaps correctly, that it is through this final action that he may just ultimately redeem himself.  He gives his heart to John, so that he might live, and that mankind might continue in the face of insurmountable odds.  He didn’t let the fact that the computers had turned him into a machine stop him from being a man, and to become a better man than he was before, than he ever thought he could be.

     We can all take a lesson from that.  Find your heart, and use it for others.  It is, after all, the Golden Rule.