Interesting and quite unique prequel/sequel hybrid that catches a lot from the epic terminator magic

Rating: Null/10 (16 June 2009)

Oh man, how long have we been waiting for this: Finally a movie set entirely in the "Terminator future" only hinted at in the previous installments by extremely dark, depressing and apocalyptic flashbacks. And let's face it, there is huge potential in exploiting these rather cool sequences. And I think McG did a rather good job on this. So many tie-ins, cool moments and nods to the original saga indicate that the director treated the franchise with all due respect and created a worthy homage while giving it some interesting new drifts as well. Anyhow, with so much back story to build upon, he quite naturally and obviously had a hard time to tie everything together logically, inevitably leading to some flaws. One of the main weak points in the plot is the "awareness" of the machines of Kyle Reese, not exactly logical, even worse is the fact that they do not kill him while having more than one opportunity to do so. To make matters worse, John Connors speech near the end of the movie indicating that Kyle Reese is the sole purpose for him to enter the Skynet facility is just too over the top and not quite appropriate, why the hell would any resistance member know that the future depends on John's/Kyle's survival and act accordingly?? Just mentioning the dozens to hundreds human prisoners wouldn't only have more than sufficed but also be much more believable than just screaming "we'll all be dead" without indicating any apparent reason. Something else the movie lacked a little were "real" mass future fight scenes (like in the opening of T2), mostly, just some single Terminator machines are shown wrecking havoc, which together with the rather clear skies and still surprisingly green vegetation in some places account for the apocalyptic future to appear a little "brighter" than indicated in the flashbacks from the first movies. I also think the first script variant of the movie would have been very interesting, to have John killed and Marcus take his skin, the scene where the T800 impales John still hints to that, since it clearly looks like an epic and dramatic death scene. Moreover, the almost "cheesy" heart exchange in the end felt suspiciously like a quick filler for a sudden script change. But for such a different and very depressing ending, the whole movie should have been scripted differently, namely placing Marcus and John on their own for the majority of the plot, struggling through the war, growing accustomed to each other with John discovering Marcus to be a machine much later (how the hell did they shoot the machine parts into him anyway, stolen from the Weapon X program? :-) and Marcus embracing his humanity due to looking up to John. I think this would have really improved and added to the movie and putting it en par with the (easily strongest) second installment of the franchise, but the movie as it is still delivers an epic action story with a decent amount of depth and proves worthy of the great terminator saga, unlike the rather disappointing third part, which was essentially a weaker remake of T2 (with a quite good and bold ending for the time and occasionally solid and amusing action scenes, that is).