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Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2009)

I usually don't write "in reaction" to seeing a movie, however, on a number of levels, I've come to some clarity on how I feel about Terminator Salvation.
First (and this really helped me to be okay with my hesitation to embrace this film), I left the theater asking myself "what do I think of this movie, how do I feel?" and it dawned on me that having to ask is the problem - with previous Terminator movies (yes, even T3), it wasn't hard to decide, based on feeling alone, yeah or nay. The Terminator was just a whole lot of fun in a way previous sci-fi movies hadn't been able to achieve; T2 was a breathtaking statement with remarkably poignant scenes, while at the same time delivering special effects and action that changed things fundamentally; T3 was, for me, provocative, and the more I thought about it, the more I grasped some remarkable things. In all three, how I felt was clear, and I enjoyed them.
Which brings me to my next issue with Terminator Salvation: it fails the "KISS test" ("Keep It Simple, Stupid").
A good comparative to this is with the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The original trilogy was not only groundbreaking, not only an epic saga, but it was simple enough for a kid to get. The prequel trilogy was so complicated it takes real thought for me to figure out all the new characters and plots and conflicts; it became a mess, exactly the opposite of what it originally was.
By the time I arrived at the end of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I got the idea, and even chuckled to myself. I said "the franchise is complete, we've come full circle. You can't stop the war, we knew that, the terminators came back because they were losing the war."
But we knew enough - John Conner would lead a resistance, the machines would calculate that they were losing and hatch this crazy plot, going back in time, in a ditch effort to eliminate the source of their demise, the mother of John Conner. But, John Conner would not be killed in the past, our present, so that time would remain in an endless loop where machines neither won out or were prevented from existing at all. And such would be the conundrum of a movie based on the non-entity of time travel.
So, at the end of T3, I had no need for a sequel. While I wanted "more terminator", I had a sense of peaceful resolution that "the story", such as it was, had been told.
Then I heard a T4 was in the making, and I was really excited. "Ok," I thought, "so we're going to go into the future and see the world from which Arnold and Robert Patrick came, somewhat as it appeared from Reese's telling in T1." We had visions of humans scraping to get by, HKs in the black skies and dog-fearing terminators infiltrating human dwellings, eyes like laser sights piercing the squalor...
I thought that we had a simple story to stick to.
Terminator Salvation was anything but. A new main character we knew nothing about, and which was used questionably to advance on the simple story that had somehow manages to engage us for 3 previous films.
Characters who demonstrate no development at all. Very little in the way of endearing emotive connections, no intimacies or anything remotely smacking of the human compassion and conditions for which humans were supposed to be fighting anyway, save for one scene where a woman says she feels a man's warmth, only to find out...well, although I warned there'd be spoilers, when you see it you'll appreciate how odd it was that this be the place and the characters to provide emotion, where in previous it was between Sarah and Reese and Sarah and John and John and the Terminator and Sarah and the Terminator, you know, the main characters.
From what I gathered in that article, the original script wasn't much better.
It seems that, any way you slice it, the original simple story was of such perfection that there was no place to go; which is supported by the fact that both the original script and this dog's breakfast of a re-write both fail monumentally.
Terminator has had such an impact, and set the bar so high, it really was unreasonable to expect that level could be maintained.