Almost A Complete Joke

Rating: 2/10 (23 August 2015)

To begin with I really disliked the Technicolor's Oz process used to give the film its bleached out appearance, and this completely removed any of the vivid sense of reality found in the earlier Terminator films. Terminator Salvation looks and feels like a poorly conceived graphic novel, and due to the sharp stylistic break from the earlier films, it is very easy to forget that it is supposed to be a continuation of the Terminator franchise.
Bale's interpretation of the John Connor character comes across more like a stiff generic cutout hero figure, that could easily be pasted into any CGI summer action movie, and it is absolutely impossible to believe that this is supposed to be an extension of the same John Connor personality that we earlier saw in Terminators 2 & 3. The lack of a convincing John Connor character severely hurts the film, and the film would have been much more enjoyable, if it had a character with at least some of the same mannerism and speech patterns as the earlier renditions of John Connor. (When Spock came back from the dead, he may have acted strangely for one or two movies, but we still knew that he was Spock!)
The rest of the film is not very well cast also, and although I think that Korinna Moon Bloodgood is a complete knockout of a gorgeous woman, she simply isn't believable in the role of post apocalyptic jet fighter pilot. Her flight suit has obviously been tailored to hug her curves (think Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager) and there is one scene that is so cliché, in which Bloodgood removes her flight helmet and whips her beautiful long hair for the camera, that it is completely laughable! These people are supposed to be living during the aftermath of a nuclear war, how does this woman manage to keep her hair so long and luxurious, when supposedly there is barely enough food for everyone to eat? (Supposedly they crew was made to read Cormac Mccarthy's The Road, but apparently the book had little affect.)
The film reaches a low point in believability, when Bloodgood's character, Blair Williams, finds herself alone at an abandoned speedway near Los Angeles. The Williams character is confronted by a group of hostile male characters, who behave and sound like a bunch of stereotype Ozark hillbillies. Seriously, shouldn't these villains have been a little more ethnically diverse, given the fact that the scene was set in Souther California?
Unfortunately, however, the film's ultimate low-point occurs when it is revealed that John Connor needs an immediate heart transplant, and the half-human and half-machine Marcus Wright character volunteers his own heart so that John Connor may live. Oh come on now, talk about tacky shallow ploys used to prop up an extremely bad movie, well this is absolutely the cheapest emotional manipulation ever attempted by Hollywood, bar none!!!
However, the highlight of the film occurs when three of the main characters stop at an abandoned gas station in search of suppliers, only to find that the station is already occupied by unfriendly human survivors. Skynet detects a human presence at the gas station and sends in some previously unseen hunter killer robots to wipe them out. For better or worse, the new hunter killer robots look suspiciously like Transformers, but the action scene beginning at the gas station is absolutely the only time the film comes even remotely close to recapturing the magic of the earlier Terminator films.
If this film has any saving graces whatsoever, it is the respectable acting job put forth by Sam Worthington in portraying the half-human and half-machine Marcus Wright character, and also the passable acting job put forth by Anton Yelchin in portraying Kyle Reese. Other than that, the rest of the cast seemed to be phoning in their laughably flat performances.