Not bad, but forgettable, on the order of a TV series episode

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2009)

I just got back from the Thursday 12:01AM showing of "Terminator: Salavation", the first showing in my area, which was basically Wednesday night. So, you know that I am a fan of the series, having seen the first movie in the theaters, and all of them since, even the last, which I thought was terrible. I also watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I had its moments and I thought generally positive of.
I have to say that I was disappointed in the sense that this was not really a movie in my opinion. It was an attempt to keep the Terminator franchise open for more mediocre movies, like a higher than TV quality series. There was a coldness and aloofness to this movie like the writer did not want to go anywhere near the Terminator mythology.
After all these renditions of Terminator, who is John Connor? Christian Bale is as serious and grimacing as Clint Eastwood, but I felt he did not bring much to the role. It was not his fault, I think there was nothing for him to sink his teeth into, because there was no movie here. It was a series of special effect ... the biggest enemy of these kinds of movies is that they are overwhelmed by their special effects.
In this case special effects abounded. Good ones, such as the air battles between the human jets and the terminator hunter-killers - and bad ones, surprisingly the clunk articulation of the Terminators themselves, which except for shininess were no more developed or realistic. Looking at the heads of these things, which we get many chance to do, we only see a fierce looking face, not a fully articulated mouth and jaw which would be needed for a robot to really fool humans in to believing they were real.
There was no mention of the liquid metal Terminator, or of time travel. At the end of the movie this "adventure" was spun as a battle in the ongoing war against Skynet. In other words this movie was basically a lot of bang and crash to get people to accept a movie with no heart, no point, and poor character development in the nostalgic hope that they will want to recapture the wonder of the Terminator movies and pay for more mediocrity.
I hate to say it, but I think this is the end for me. Hollywood is cynical and crass, and clueless when it comes to what people like and see in such franchises as Terminator, or Star Trek, or even in the blatantly stupid looking trailer I saw of Robert Downey playing Sherlock Holmes tonight in the theater before the show.
I honestly cannot help but think that this lack of demand for quality and obliviousness to satisfying the audience with a meaningful story that gives them something to think about longer than an explosion is due to a pathology in the American soul brought about by corporatization and commoditization of everything that has plunged us into an alienation from our own mythology and dreams into a continually distracted and manipulated consumer audience who is told what to do think and like.