Terminator Terrible

Rating: 4/10 (4 June 2009)

*Minor Spoilers* The trailers looked pretty good, and the advance artwork looked good - especially that overhead skull-cityscape, but the film itself Terminator Salvation was simply awful.
And what is it with red-eye robots (Matrix, Battlestar, and Terminator)? All these sequels are beginning to feel like the same story: Matrix morphs into Terminator into Battlestar into HAL 9000.
This guy McG is a terrible terrible director, absolutely artless and obviously without an ear for dialog. The script? Full of every action movie cliché and high-school level prose. What garbage.
And like the cigarettes and fuel for the jet-skis in Waterworld, where did the human Resistance in T4 get all of their military gear? Where did it come from? How is it possible for Hollywood to screw up these iconic franchises? A retarded squirrel could do better.
Sam Worthington ... boring. New Chekov as Kyle Reese ... oh please. The little black girl who knows her way around munitions? How multicultural. The Oracle at least offered Neo a cookie, Jane Alexander only gave the little girl a carrot. And did you see the guy in the distance with the blower making smoke in the LA scene were Kyle Reese and the little girl and the Sam Worthington terminator were the *only* survivors - then who was that guy? And as with Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, if the computers have been hacked and taken over by the supreme robot intelligence why then does so much of the human resistance rely on computers??? And speaking over open channels from submarines under water to land bases hundreds or thousands of miles away - does that not require satellites? Is that not monitored by Skynet? And if the Terminator airbots, motorcyclebots, ad infinitum use infrared to seek out the humans then why the heck are they using huge flood lights everywhere? Stupid stupid stupid.
The original Terminator's bleak future was lo-tech and survivalist and people were barely hanging on. In McG's Terminator future they had stylish leather outfits and Breck-girl hair (the pilot chick), they had an endless supply of ammo and weapons.
McG is like so many Gen-X, Gen-Y filmmakers who do re-makes of iconic earlier stories: A, they have no ideas and can't write so they mine old material. B, they don't have the slightest understanding of what made the original timeless in the first place and worthy of a remake. Charlie's Angels was essentially the Powerpuff Girls with humans, it wasn't Charlie's Angels, and now McG's Terminator Salvation has aborted and polluted the Terminator mythology and story.