Review of Terminator Salvation (2009) by Mark N — 11 Feb 2015

It's kinda good, I reckon. It ticks most of the boxes for this franchise, although the dry humour from the others is missing.

I think that having a being that believes himself human whilst also being a terminator and having to choose is a cool new dimension that plays with sci-fi nightmares in interesting ways, whereas the concept of previous movies was getting gratingly unsophisticated.

It suffers from a slightly incoherent start. If you're going to drop an audience straight into the action with no immediate backstory, you need more emotional hooks; but this felt cold and unengaging at the start. That said, so did the very first Terminator movie, I reckon. It also suffers from a weak epilogue/ending. But I appreciated most of the movie - great images and cinematography; liked the strong, human relationships between characters; good machine/monster design; liked the exploration of new ideas and dilemmas. I don't think it's a work of genius, but I think it deserves more than the low average reviews here. So giving a slightly defensive 4 :).