Review of Terminator Salvation (2009) by John K — 12 Jul 2015

Disappointing. A couple of interesting ideas, but they were outweighed by the plot holes. This is essentially a prequel (even though it's set in the future); that means that we already know pretty much what's going to happen, and the only real question is how much they'll include.

I didn't really care about any of the people, and I'm not sure whether one of the (very few) female characters even got named until the end of the film. Compared to the earlier films (particularly T2) or to other stories (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot), this falls short.

SPOILERS.

One of the main characters is Marcus, who turns out to be a Terminator (human brain/heart in robot body). At the start of the film, he's a prisoner on Death Row: he says that he deserves to die after killing other people. That continues throughout the film, where he says that he's not a good man. However, the film never says *why* he killed those people. If he had a good reason, why does he feel guilty about it? If he didn't have a good reason, why did he do it? This just feels like lazy writing: they want to set up a tortured hero with a quest for redemption, but couldn't be bothered to fill in the blanks.

Then there's Kyle Reece, who is destined to become John Connor's father. The machines kidnap him, and identify him immediately. However, how does Skynet know that he's important? Obviously Connor knows, but I also assume that he wouldn't advertise that information (unless he's a complete idiot).

Related to that, the whole point of the previous films was that Skynet wanted to kill John Connor because he would lead the resistance. In this film, it turns out that he's not in charge. There was a similar idea in "Terminator 3"; it would kind of suck to grow up being told about your great destiny, and then not actually achieve it. However, he also didn't do anything special in this film; if he wasn't around, I'm sure that someone else could have taken over easily enough.

Finally, there was no time travel in this film. I assume that it would take another couple of years to get to the flashback parts of the original film (e.g. Skynet trying to send other Terminators in to infiltrate the resistance), and it would be later when the resistance started reprogramming the robots. So, we don't actually get the other side of that story at all.