The end of an era

Rating: 4/10 (17 June 2009)

Before I went to see the movie, I was so excited that I read almost every review I could find online. So, even though most of the reviews where tearing everything about this film apart and I went to see it anyway, with almost no expectation. The actual reason was, since I love the Terminator franchise (including the series yeah, I know) I wanted to see for myself, how bad it could actually be.
Well, I have to say, there is a lot wrong with this picture, but first I want to mention
Positive things about TS:
Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright was (in my opinion) absolutely fantastic. He transported the right emotions, played believable (as far as this is possible due to the stupid story) and was the popular figure of the movie and the only character, that came with a little depth.
Anton Yelchin as the young Kyle Reese was good. Not awesome, but better than I expected him to be. After seeing him on Star Trek, I just couldn't imagine, how he could portray what would "later" be the character played by Michael Biehn. But he did a decent job.
The picture itself comes along without shaky cam (THANK GOD). You could always see what was happening and, in that context, the effects were done well But nothing you have never seen before. This is actually where you can see, where all the money went. But that has also been mentioned a million times before.
The setting was great, post-apocalyptic as you would want it to be, but here as well nothing we have never seen in a movie before.
So, that was actually it for the positive things of the movie (again: in my opinion). Unfortunately there is nothing there, that would be necessary to make a movie great or ground breaking, which brings us to the
Negative things about TS :
Even though the setting is great, there is absolutely no atmosphere. Never did I feel like the movie pulled me in, which is also reasoned by the next point –
Uninteresting Story combined with huge plot holes. The story of rescuing a lot of people from Skynet base before it is wiped out is not great, but even worse is the fact, that Skynet holds Kyle Reese imprisoned, KNOWING who he is and what he will do if he survives! This is also, what disturbed me most. And nobody can tell me, Skynet let him live to decoy John Connor to the base to finish him off, since he would have just disappeared from the face of the earth when Reese is killed, remember?? Well, Skynet obviously didn't. Now, THAT was just absolutely plain stupid, but sadly not the only illogic moment in the movie there were plenty of those. Why can a Mototerminator (the motorbikes from the trailer) calculate the route of flying objects coming at them and figure out a way to avoid getting hit but does not "see" a fixed rope crossing the street, which is making it crash??
Well, back to the movie itself.
The script is horrible. Written by the masterminds that brought us the groundbreaking "Catwoman" comes one more time a "script" that cannot possibly get any worse. The dialogs are a paramount in pointlessness. In hundreds of dumb one-liners, actually nothing is said instead you will feel ashamed for the actors on screen.
There is a lot more to come, so I will keep it short from regarding the following points:
Common played horrible as always – Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Connor was a waste of screen time – Jadagrace as "Star" was a waste of screen time – The end of the movie was a PG-13-nightmare.
McG tried himself on something, that was about a million numbers too big for his directing-skills. He stole most of the ideas from other movies, not to mention the exhausting try of reminding us, that we actually watch a Terminator movie by referring to previous features every five minutes Well, I have to admit, without all the homages, I could have really forgotten that this is the sequel to T3 due to the lack of feeling and heart. Just sad.
OK. Now I will pull myself together for the final and absolutely worst thing about Terminator Salvation. Are you ready? OK let's go Here comes
Christian Bale. Whenever he showed up on screen, the movie became twice as worse (which I didn't expect to be possible). His, and this has been said before, nevertheless I'll say it again, one-dimensional, unappealing, flat, cold, batman-voiced, uninteresting version of John Connor is absolutely the least thing you would expect by an actor, who is as great as he usually is. I was stunned how bad he was. He had one face expression during the whole movie. Why didn't they cast Nick Cage? At least he has two expressions sad AND suffering.
This role absolutely ruined it for me. Of course there are plenty of other things making this a really frustrating experience, but I don't have the energy to focus on explaining all of it.
This is the end of an era that started of with an incredible T1 and ended with a so-so Terminator 3, was restarted and ended at the same time by an awful Terminator Salvation. I wasn't this disappointed by a sequel since Star Wars Episode I.
Now, there are two more sequels to come hopefully they learned by their mistakes. I have my fingers crossed.
Good night and good luck.