Hollywood: Make movies, please, not franchises.

Rating: 6/10 (5 June 2009)

There is no "may contain" - here be spoilers aplenty!
Looking beyond the abilities of McG, Christian Bale, and others who helped make this film possible, the major flaw is not the movie itself- it is our new passion for franchises, not films. For those who have seen this latest installment, ask yourself what kind of movie this could have been if they would have ended it without leaving room for sequels.
Time travel movies allow filmmakers to play around with the story so that you can see what happens at the end before the beginning if you like. In the Terminator world, we knew how it ends in the first movie - Reese says that the resistance wins, they'd crushed Skynet. Killing Connor in the future doesn't matter, so they send machines back to destroy him via his mother. So we know where we are heading. The last scene in the Terminator franchise should be sending Kyle through the time machine.
But if we do that at the end of this movie, it's all over, no more films. And we all know that to run a franchise into the ground, we need at least 2 or 3 really bad box office returns for sequels before we're giving up on it. No wonder Cameron said he was through - I'm surprised he did a second one, really.
We end this movie with Connor "still fighting the resistance"? Good thing he added that Skynet is global, so there's more work to do. But Ironside says we destroy Skynet, the war is over. I guess he needed to say "the war is over (in California)." Why not cut out the really bad ending (and the equally bad alternate ending- A Connor suit? No thanks) and write a movie that is a true homage to the first ones. Make it cyclic. And do it in one movie. It's possible, really. In fact, the end and the beginning of the franchise was already written in the first movie. All you have to do is fill in the middle.
That being said, if they make more, I'll see them. If not in the theaters, eventually. So instead of paying for one, I will have to pay for 2 or more. It's sad that we can't just make one movie anymore.