Nothing Special, Not Even Good

Rating: 5/10 (24 May 2009)

Terminator Salvation is a mediocre and unoriginal film. I sat through the film and wasn't ever bored, but I was also never really enjoying myself. There are simply too many problems with the movie. The story is a poorly thought out mess that develops in an inconsistent way partially because no one ever bothered to really develop the characters.
Marcus Wright is probably the worst character overall. He committed an act of murder that is never described in the movie and is looking for some kind of salvation (yeah, real clever). The problem is that this mysterious past feels like such a terrible clichÃ©. Even worse are all of the incredibly dumb lines talking about second chances. The actor who played Marcus is also terrible considering that his Australian accent appeared during any scene that required the least bit of emotion or volume. Any time the actor couldn't use a flat, steady delivery, he turned into Robo-Aussie.
Christian Bale, who I like, doesn't even deliver a good performance. I blame this more on directing and an overall terrible script than on him, but I can say this is one of his worst performances that I can remember. There is more to say about this, but ultimately the problem is that the characters were never well developed and it shows. The only possible exception is the Kyle Reese character and even that is a stretch.
Another big problem with the movie is that it appears to be a simple mash up of "cool" ideas from other movies. The giant robot seems to put out diesel exhaust like in Transformers. The set pieces for the prison camp look like they were stolen from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The Skynet facility with its random flames and central spire seem like they were inspired by The Lord of the Rings' Mordor. Borrowing from other movies is not in itself bad, but the way it was executed was distracting and bothersome.
The same is actually true of the scenes that are inspired by the other Terminator movies. Does another Terminator really have to be burned and frozen? Really? Do you really need to create an almost exact copy of the scene from the first movie showing the Terminator walk up stairs? Does one robot really have crush the chest of another one with a large beam or concrete slab on chains, again? In fairness, these scenes bothered me whereas others might really appreciate them. I simply felt they were done in such hokey ways as to be distracting. All of these scenes just felt they were the product of uninspired, lazy writing and a fan boy mentality. I mean, seriously, another battle in an industrial complex?
I guess to make a long review short, I thought the movie was terribly written. I will never understand why all of Skynet's robots in this movie were bipeds since it is a pretty terrible design and the big robots from the first movie were actually on tank treads. I'll never understand how Marcus and Blair Williams (who is also a terrible character) fall in love so quickly. I will never understand why the writers even bothered trying to kill John Conner and setting up the terrible heart transplant scene. I really don't even know why Arnold's face is in the movie but I will let that one slide.
The movie is decently entertaining if you can shut off your brain and deal with plot holes, poor character development, and terrible writing and directing. I am relatively certain there is probably some fan fiction that is better written than this mess. But, ultimately, the movie is still decently entertaining, so I have to give it a few stars.