It could have been good.

Rating: 4/10 (14 November 2009)

Remember when terminators used to be terrifying? The first two films had just one robotic villain apiece - the second one didn't even use firearms! - but both films were soaked in a feeling of panic and dread. The rules were established early on and were stuck to: if a terminator catches you, you're as good as dead. And the characters spent most of the time barely getting away.
But that was 20 years ago. Terminator: Salvation is full of lovely hardware - giant VTOL prisoner transports, 40-foot-tall mega-terminators, assorted hovercraft, and even snakelike marine robots. But here's the thing - if one lone terminator managed to ravage entire SWAT teams point blank in T2, then how do you pit all this deadly new force against a few hardscrabble resistance fighters and end up with a movie that isn't over in 5 minutes? The answer is sadly predictable.
The old terminators were frighteningly fast and intelligent. In T:S, they helpfully clang around and land slow, non-lethal blows until the heroes can get away. It's like watching the notorious slow-mo fistfight between Captain Kirk and the Gorn lizard man. The amateurs in charge of T:S were so in love with their toys that they failed to think about making the match-up between man and machine realistic and interesting.
Here's a quiz: if you're an evil, all-powerful AI, and you have the number one person on your global kill list locked up in a cell, do you a) fill the cell with poison gas and kill him in an instant, or b) send a slow, rumbling robot to open the cell door and spend several minutes throwing him around the facility until he lands near something he can use to defeat you? Yeah, you guessed it.
The whole second half of the movie is a run down the list of villain clichés. The slow and overly-elaborate killing methods. The Talking Killer. The plan that gets explained in detail to the character who's going to stop it in the nick of time. They even included the ultimate, sad cliché of action film - the lone hero who goes into the lion's den to rescue the love interest/dog/cute supporting character, and inevitably succeeds. Remember, this is the heart of Skynet, ostensibly filled with robots that could take on a battalion of soldiers. What suspense could we possibly be talking about at this point?
It gets even dumber in the parts involving Moon Bloodgood's character. There's the hair that doesn't get ruffled after gun battles and mud-slogging escapes; there's the rescue by a strong male companion. There's the blue-white American smile so shiny that instead of storming the Skynet citadel, the Resistance could have just lined their female pilots on the perimeter and burnt the whole place to the ground like Archimedes. Finally, there's the obligatory undressing scene with the obligatory flimsy excuse. Actually, let me correct that. There was no excuse. Bloodgood takes her jacket and bra off and stands there with her breasts solemnly covered, for absolutely no reason! I would be OK with that if they had given us a good close look, but this is a PG-13 movie, so they don't. So that's that.
There was just one good idea in this flat rehash: Sam Worthington's character, who starts out human and is transformed into an unwitting robot slave for the machines. This is shockingly revealed in the middle of the movie - or, if you watch TV, in the trailers for the movie. This is a marketing decision that defies explanation. Why did they think it was a good idea to spoil the only major plot twist in the ads?
A special mention goes to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose likeness makes a cameo in the form of a terminator specially personalized to kill John Connor. He attempts to do so, again, by grabbing him by the front of his jacket and flinging him in various directions, which, surprisingly, doesn't work. This makes Arnold's terminator officially less dangerous than the cassowary bird of New Guinea, which, despite not having a metallic skeleton, can kill people by disembowelling them with its sharp claws.
There's so much more, but you get the idea. This movie officially completes the parallel between the Terminator, Alien and Batman film series. All three started out as classics, before being euthanized by an atrociously bad fourth installment. So far, only Batman has managed to shake the curse. We wait, patiently.