A Victim of the Previous Film

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2010)

I do not understand the bad reviews for this film. I too agree that it's not T1 or T2. Nor do I think it's fair to expect it to be. James Cameron, before he became stuck up and pretentious, was a great artist and made these films classics.
But it's hard to be 'original' in Part 4; so it's an un-fair cop out to judge this move poorly in regards to 'lack of originality.' At this stage in the franchise, I think what needs to be looked at most is staying true to the story and doing something within the ball-park of what the film should be.
This takes place before much of what we've been told about the Terminator movies does. But it still fits the bill for what T1 and T2 describe about the future. I hear people complaining about giant robots. I'm sorry, did they somehow miss the giant roving tanks and air-craft in the first two films? And what are these complaints about there not being full war scenes? I like the idea of there being specific scenes of action. At this point the humans don't really have an attack plan and are mostly hiding out and trying to re-group after judgment day. The scenes we see in T1 and T2 are long after the events here. Is this really so hard for fans to understand? I think these scenes are more suspenseful than just a giant full-war scenes movie.
And what is funny is to read all the complaints about chase scenes being gone in T3 and 'too many' in T4. Are you people never happy? T4 takes on the concept of humans and machines being blended to a point where it's hard to tell the two apart. Something that would have been more amazing in say 1995. This movie suffers more, than perhaps anything else, from the fact that there isn't too much left to say about sci-fi and robots that hasn't already been covered in the gap from 1991 to 2009. The Terminator movies themselves just took to long to come back and say anything meaningful after T2. And thus by the time they did, it is no longer 'original' because it's been said by ten thousand other sci-fi films. But there is nothing else original really left to be said.
The acting is stiff. Well, excuse me, but this is a war and isn't war stiff? I think the hero shows as much emotion as we are likely to see from a war movie in today's world. Mostly, people are sick of the war. The most a soldier can do is cry, say he wants to go home, and realize that he's already screwed himself. In T1 Kyle was also shown as suppressing his emotions after witnessing the horrors of the future war. The movie was largely about him learning to be human again instead of the 'machine' that he was in the future.
So, we see a humanity that is mostly devoid of emotions, huddling and hiding out, trying to find at a single weakness to attack. We see giant robots a little different than the ones we're used to (as those haven't been built yet) and we see an interesting story that re-connects Kyle into the story.
I see this film as being true both to war and to T1 and T2. While it may not be as overtly dark in tone, it is a solid entry into the franchise that did do its homework (even though it seems many of the fans did not) and tried to do something good.
The only fault I see in this film is not in this film but in the fact that the fans were so disappointed and ticked off by the previous film that they were angry and looking to pick apart any little thing they could in this film that wasn't 'perfect' by their own half-baked standards.