I want my 10$ back Warner Bros.

Rating: 2/10 (4 June 2009)

*SPOILERS* (not that it really matters)
Terminator salvation is a film that straight up blinds with CG. When you are in the theater you think the film is passable, maybe a 5 out of 10. However give it an hour or two and you will start to rethink the film and then you realize just how big of a **** pile this film really is. What this film really seems to be is a bunch of Terminator fan-boys just smashed together a bunch of "Wouldn't it be really cool if" scenes without really coming up with a plot.
Now for specifics, I will start with the art direction / set design. Most of the machines in this film are the least logical robots you can think of, a robot/super-bike that is only really going to work on paved roads, most of witch are covered in rubble or destroyed? Also Skynet doesn't resemble anything close to what it was described as in the original films, pyramid anyone? Also there are huge robots rounding up people for no reason (war of the worlds?), the entire plot of the Terminator films is based on a future where legions of robots are spreading across the world exterminating the population after nuking most major cities. I also would like to know why in every shot inside where Skynet keeps all the humans there are random balls of fire being released everywhere? If you are designing a machine world everything needs to be based on logic, if it serves no purpose there is no need to build it, if it does not maximizes its usability it won't be used. Random vents ejecting fire to a prison area seems perfectly logical to me. In Terminator 2 we saw a short scene where a large troop of humanoid robots just tearing through and killing everything in sight, which makes sense since the machines would be versatile, strong, and since they are humanoid they can go wherever we can. But the only machines we see aren't anywhere close to this, I know they are supposed to be older models but still they seem dumb and useless, which is not what Terminator was about. Moving on to the plot nothing improves, some of the holes and errors I have already mentioned (rounding up the humans?) but the whole story line of this film feels very empty. Originally I was under the impression this film was about some dude called John Conner who is destined to save the human race from termination by a self aware AI. However a large portion of this film seems to follow the half machine half human Marcus Wright, I don't really mind this character except for two things, the amount of screen time he takes and the use of his heart to save Conner. In the theater you could hear the groans and sighs through out of "Really? They defaulted to the heart?" I would have rather had Conner and Marcus survive and have Conner fully accept Marcus truly showing the difference between man and machine. Also on a side note I want to meet a doctor that can do a heart transplant on an airfield. For the shear amount of screen time that Marcus has they could have taken a little bit of that to better explain Kyle Reese's character since he is virtually unneeded for this films plot, I know they tried to tie back to the original 2 but the storyline of this film is already so far off that its just lost in the rest of the befuddlement of the plot. The direction for this film also leaves many things to be desired. Unlike in the first two you never feel like there is a chance they could fail, that the machines could win. All of the characters seem like they don't care if they really win or not. This is partly because the machines are no longer scary, but also because the dialogue and a lot of its delivery feels stiff, without emotion. I typically like Bale's work, The Machinist and Equilibrium, so I feel he was most likely he was let down in the direction, since he just felt really bland on screen. Some of the other annoying things that happened in this movie were; the number of times Conner is the only survivor by shear luck; if Conner was in my army and he lost that many soldiers and valuable resources with out accomplishing anything he would be out. This is a nit-picky but Christian Bale basically uses the Batman voice (I'm sorry Mr. Bale but that voice only works for Batman), and that last shot as the helicopter is flying away from Skynet is just too cheesy with the nuke in the background, especially compared to the nuke shot in T2.
Personally this film felt like the producers didn't trust their audience's intelligence to be able to process and sit through the slower more meticulous, plot intensive, Terminator movie that the first 2 were. Either that or they never had a movie and shot it anyways. Regardless of the exact cause for this films epic failure, if you thought that Terminator 3 was a punch to the face to Terminator then Terminator: Salvation is a curb stomp to the last remaining dignity that Terminator had left.