Some great effects, but this isn't Terminator

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2009)

As someone who is a big fan of the first two films and certainly not disparaging of the third, naturally I was looking forward to the fourth instalment in the Terminator series. Of course, I had my reservations when I saw it was to be directed by someone with a made-up name whose greatest achievement to date was the Charlie's Angels films, and that the key catalyst of the previous three (Arnold Schwarzenegger) would not feature. And, it seems, those reservations were well founded.
Firstly, let's get some things clear: I like Christian Bale a lot and think he is a superb actor. I also think some of the special effects/CGI in this film are as good as I've seen. And I think the film-makers have been very creative with some of the variances of Terminators and Hunter Killers on show. However, for some reason, Terminator Salvation is scripted as some kind of brain-dead action flick rather than the intriguing science fiction which is prevalent in the first three. Character development is pretty much ditched in favour of cheap story links and lame references to the existing franchise, while the action sequences, whilst entertaining, are rarely fully explained and often interrupt any semblance of plot which might be developing.
Bale himself is intense and tough as the iconic John Connor, but we are told very little about how he went from hiding in a Presidential bunker with Kate Brewster in Terminator 3 to being the god-like leader of the resistance. Speaking of which, the character of Brewster is developed even less, and is purely used as a very superficial love interest for Bale. Similarly confusing is the portrayal of Kyle Reese, here depicted as a scrawny street dweller with a small, mute black child as a sidekick (presumably for tokenism, he has no relevancy to the film whatsoever). Again, we have no real idea how this character became the Kyle Reese we see in the first film, which is surely one of the main objectives of Terminator Salvation - or it should be.
And then there is the character of Marcus Wright, who is essentially the lead role. We see at the beginning of the film that he donated his body to Cyberdyne Systems for research and was eventually re-invented as a prototype for a new type of Terminator. Wright believes himself to be human however - a twist that is never fully explained - and this creates much conflict between himself, the resistance and the enemy Skynet. Whilst it's a reasonable idea, it simply isn't interesting enough to carry the film, and the ludicrous relationship that develops between Wright and a female member of the resistance is alarmingly cheesy.
With regards to the effects, some of these are truly awe-inspiring - particularly a helicopter crash that Bale suffers near the start of the film, and some of the battle scenes involving enormous Hunter Killers. There is a flaw though in the way that the Terminators themselves are depicted. The androids that roam the streets picking off members of the resistance are certainly frightening enough, but do not resemble the T-600 models described by Kyle Reese in the first film, an error which I expect is deliberate to make the newly developed T-800 models (Schwarzenegger's character from the previous films) appear far more advanced and threatening.
But the main problem with this film is that it is not, in any real sense, a Terminator film. All the previous three were synonymous with a chase element, and the near misses that went with it. There is none of that in this film, and it appears as almost a snapshot of the war with Skynet, rather than the beginning or end. Pretty much all the previous threads and possibilities that were created in the franchise have been done away with and a banal plot, a poor script and a frankly nauseating finish have been thrown together together to make an action film for the masses, rather than a satisfactory new chapter for the fans.