Review of Terminator Salvation (2009) by Steven C — 03 Sep 2012

Terminator movies (with the exception of the 3rd) are generally supposed to start out epic, the main plot of human's fighting robots in the future is set up quick and clearly, we get a title cool dramatic music and then BAM! The Shiz gets real and the plot and action movies along and stuff happens so if this is a Terminator movie why is it that we get rather lame title sequence with less cool music (Sorry Danny Elfman I love you but the original theme beats this ones), then weird awkward scenes of Sam Worthington kissing a Tim Burton's bald wife and then ooh what fun we get to watch him be put to death while the titles still roll and then suddenly we are told this is a movie about robots fighting humans in the future way to quick and not so clearly.

Add that with the amazingly stupid excuse for an unnecessary action scene that completely disregards any of the credibility of the movies supposed "Good Guys" and you get one large stinky pile of disappointment.

I thought it was pretty awesome when I first saw it but after thinking about it later I realized it wasn't that good, I mean this is the problem with a movie that doesn't know if it's a sequel, a remake, or a reboot and it ends up trying to do everything, there are so many forced references, lines of dialogue, and whole exact scenes to the original movies and trying to be so many different things (post apocalyptic, action movie, war movie, mystery movie, movie about what it means to be human sci-fi, horror) the first two movies blended these things naturally where as this film forces everything.

On it's own it's not really a terrible movie (especially for McG standards) but it just isn't the Terminator movie we wanted to see and ultimately because of that is a movie that has become completely irrelevant too watch on it's own, not the worst though, I mostly enjoyed the action scenes (despite most of them being pointless), some of the performances were good (and some of them weren't), the special affects were pretty good, and I appreciate that a lot of the special affects were real and practical and not just a bunch of CGI crap but the plot and script and the way it is made ultimately just makes for an okay but extremely disappointing movie.