Terminated...

Rating: 2/10 (2 October 2009)

Fot the fourth installment of the Terminator franchise, McG took the director's reins and steered the series towards something new. Terminator Salvation (2009) brings the story into the future war between the machines and the remaining human ”resistance” (or terrorists...) - an event which the previous films have all flirted with but something we haven't yet fully seen on screen. It could've been great: a post-apocalyptic world, people trying to survive in any means they can, machines hunting them day and night without a break, intense atmosphere etc...
But sadly it isn't great, it isn't even good or passable but very poor. There's plenty of action in the film; big explosions, big machines, big everything... but that's all there really is. The film, without a stop, jumps from another scene packed with action to another – and that would be just fine (like in the previous Terminator films) if the scenes or the action were imaginative and interesting or that there was an intriguing storyline being told in the process but Terminator 4 hasn't got any of those aspects in it.
The lack of a real or interesting story is what brings the film down. I could take the poor action and even the lousy performances from the cast if the story was right but now everything just has gone south. And it's a bit odd because I thought the principle idea of the story was great and something not seen in the Terminator -universe before but from the very first minutes of the film you'll find out that something has gone terribly wrong in the writing process (or with the executives..?) and the story filmed here is lousy, full of plot holes and shallow characters, cheesy dialog and so forth.
The cast (as I hinted above) isn't doing the best they can either; especially Christian Bale (John Connor) was a disappointment, Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright) not being that much better – and they're the two leading stars you could expect a good performance, no matter what the script was like.
Terminator Salvation is (sadly) a generic action rampage without any thought. The great post-apocalyptic setting is waisted alongside with the legacy of the three (or two...) previous films (a great source material by the way, though used ridiculously poorly) so badly that it's criminal. I know they're making a fifth one but I've lost interest. 1/4