The weakest film in the Terminator series, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Completely different from the previous films.

Rating: 7/10 (18 May 2009)

I saw "Salvation" at an advance screening a few hours ago. The word to describe it is "different." Everything about it. For one, it's definitely a PG-13 film, both in terms of tone and on screen violence. Second, the plot has nothing to do with someone going back in time to kill a member of the Conner family. Nor is there a single persistent antagonist motivating all of the action--the plot is more broad, and the characters and audience have plenty of time to catch their breath between action scenes. The setting is post-apocalyptic, and the aesthetic reminds me more of a video game than any film (think Gears of War, or Fallout 3). It's bleak, desaturated, and fascinating. In fact, I think that the visuals might have been my favorite thing about the film.
For me, these differences generally made for an inferior film. The biggest disappointment for me was the PG-13 tone of the film--not nearly as bleak as the aesthetic. Though I don't feel that graphic violence is necessary to make a film enjoyable, there needs to be some sort of sincere menace for an action film to maintain tension. In "Salvation," however, the machines have become surprisingly helpless. Machines armed with machine guns do a lot of shooting, but I can't remember any humans ever getting shot. The humans themselves maintain a rather cheery attitude, as well as often enviable hygiene. There is no indication that any of them are bothered by the end of world or fatigued by all the fighting.
That said, it really was a lot of fun. A lot of crowd-pleasing allusions are made to the previous films. The biggest machines are a lot of fun to look at, as are the blackened urban landscapes. The plot is rather clever, though at times its exposition is marred by out-of-place sentimentality. In short, it could have been a thousand times worse.
Still, I remember how horrifying I found the brief scenes of the future as portrayed in T1--how vulnerable the human resistance appeared in a world controlled by monstrous machines. The gentleness of "Salvation" is, for me, a disappointment.