It's the aging Michael Corleone of Terminator films

Rating: 4/10 (3 June 2010)

This movie is the Godfather III of the Terminator franchise. Judged on its own merits, it's really not THAT bad for a summer action movie. Compared to the previous films, even the fairly weak Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, it bites the big one.
Set after the artificial intelligence Skynet has destroyed most of mankind in a nuclear attack, you can tell right away that Terminator Salvation is going to be one of those movies you can't think about too hard. For example, you can't think about why there was no radioactive fallout left behind from Skynet's nuclear attack. Apparently these filmmakers never cracked a book on the actual affects of an atomic explosion. And that sort of thing, the complete disregard of logic, physics and causality, just gets worse and worse as the story goes along.
Now, you'd guess that after three movies leading up to it, the story of John Connor (Christian Bale) leading the human resistance against genocidal robots would have been the plot of this film. For some inexplicable reason, it's not. John Connor is barely more than a supporting character in Terminator Salvation. The main character in the movie is really Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). Wright is a death row prisoner who, before Skynet's attack, donated his body to science. About a decade and a half after his execution, he crawls out of the remains of a destroyed Skynet base looking perfectly fine and with no memory of how he ended up in this dystopic future. The first half of the movie is mostly about Wright wandering around nuclear devastated Southern California, meeting Kyle Reece (Anton Yelchin), the guy who gets sent back in time in the first Terminator movie, and a human resistance fighter named Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood). While that's going on, we get a bunch of exposition scenes with John Connor butting heads with the leaders of the resistance movement and what Edmund Blackadder would call a "cunning plan" to defeat Skynet.
Eventually, Wright and Connor meet and we discover the secret of Wright's reappearance. Since this is a Terminator movie, you can probably guess what that secret is even if you haven't seen the film. Wright and Connor then team up to rescue Reece, who's been taken prisoner by Skynet. That rescue involves pretty much every action movie cliché you can think of, including the old "it was a trap all along" and "the villain now explains the entire plan to the hero". Then the movie ends by re-emphasizing that this story was really about Marcus Wright and that the whole purpose of Terminator Salvation was to perpetuate the franchise and take more of your money.
This is, by far, the worst Terminator movie yet and proves that the whole thing should have never gotten beyond the first two films. The Terminator presented a black view of humanity that would lead us to destruction. Terminator II: Judgment Day saved us from that future and argued that humanity was worth saving. The story should have ended there, something proved when the third film could only justify its existence by totally contradicting the point of Terminator II. Now we have a fourth film that only exists to set the stage for even more Terminator movies to come. Hopefully, it bombed hard enough at the box office to spare us all from that fate.
Christian Bale has little more to do in this film but stand around and yell. Bryce Dallas Howard, playing Connor's wife Kate, has nothing to do but stand around and be pregnant. Sam Worthington and Moon Bloodgood do a fine job, but nobody wants to go to a fourth Terminator film to watch characters they've never seen before. And Michael Biehn's Kyle Reece would have chewed up Anton Yelchin's version and crapped him out.
Except for the ending battle, which is almost laughably ill-conceived, Terminator Salvation has some decent action scenes, a few interesting special effects and effectively mirrors moments from the previous films. That's it, though. There's no genuine human drama and the moral or societal theme of the story is childish and poorly thought out compared to first three movies. And though these filmmakers spent well over $150 million creating a post-apocalyptic future, James Cameron created a better and more compelling vision of that future over 30 years ago with just a few lines of dialog and the equivalent of $150 worth of special effects.
I'm sure when Cameron and company came up with the first two Terminator films, they wanted to make money. But they were driven to tell interesting and meaningful stories. The last two Terminator films were created just to make money and whether they were any good was, at best, a secondary concern. I think we'd all be better off if this franchise was put out of its and our misery.