Decent action film

Rating: 6/10 (12 March 2010)

Salvation is a good action movie, but not excellent. It had to carry a lot of weight from its predecessors which it doesn't rise up to, but on its own it certainly makes for an entertaining watch.
Perhaps the overall plot remains the weakest link in the movie... Why would Skynet choose such a complicated approach to winning the war? After all, a slow and repetitive war of attrition is what you'd think it'd be good at. Not some unnecessarily dangerous twisted "let our enemies reach our heart to become most vulnerable"-plan.
As a side note the sub plot of the human terminator ex-convict could have been developed further since it is pretty interesting.
Acting is good, and whenever there's an irritation it can be blamed on the weak script. An example would be the kid which by not saying a single line in the entire movie (conveniently assigned as a mute), as well as using 1 single "sad poor child" facial expression, becomes more boring and machine-like than the robots she's supposedly fighting. I guessed they were aiming for a Newt but got a mute...
I thought post-nuclear future would be even more grim and dark than it appeared in Salvation. It's not a biggie, but seeing the same clear blue sky in many scenes as of what I see every other day in Summer does not embroil me with an apocalyptic feeling. There's not enough dirt. There's not enough blood. It feels quite clean in fact, which perhaps is because it's intended to fit a younger audience. (But somehow most of my friends had managed to watch The Terminator by age 9-10 regardless, more than a decade ago.)
Some of the action sequences were a bit silly or over the top. Ordinary human characters getting beaten several times and still standing up? Check. Bullets being fired from a mini gun mounted on a terminator but not hitting anything? Check. Robot motor bikers springing out from a giant walking robot's legs? Check. But note that I said "some", and I'll have to give an overall positive score for the action sequences.
Salvation is not a nail biter like Terminator or Aliens. One will have little doubt in how it will end from the very beginning. It may partially be the fault that instead of the gloomy predictions of nuclear war in the earlier movies, we instead have the predictions that machines must eventually lose (or at least be delayed long enough for Kyle Reese to be sent back in time) in Salvation. Foreshadowing can be important for conveying an ominous mood throughout a film, which this one lacks compared to its predecessors.
So, my final grade is: Watch this if you enjoy action movies. Chances are you will not find many redeeming qualities if action is not your genre, but strong acting and action together brings a lot of value alone for the right kind of viewer. It also helps if you don't come with the expectation that this should be as good as Terminator 1 or 2.