For all those who read my reviews I want to say thanks, even if you dislike the review, agree with it, or have a difference of opinion.  After receiving a lot of feedback and suggestions from the readers on how to make my reviews better I thought that in the interest of  ongoing improvement,  changes must be applied and so with the release of Terminator: Salvation , I thought it would be a good time to try something a little different.

Looks like to me that McG has certainly redeemed himself, well at least in my eyes. After watching his Charlie’s Angels series I feared for the worse. All I could think going in to the theater was that John Connor would spend the movie with his hands tied to his back, doing some god awful backwards jumping while knocking out a room full of terminators .  Luckily there was nothing so obscure in it, instead he gave us what Terminator 3 couldn’t,  a great movie.

Story:

In a world in ruins  a band of humans have gathered together to help take back the world which has been taken over by robots in command of the supreme A.I. known as Skynet. John Connor, the leader of the resistance must bring about the end of the robot army before every human is wiped out by the terminator menace.

Characters:

The Terminator movies always had memorable characters through each movie, this one is no different but they seemed to have taken some of the characters in a bit different direction. John Connor, the main character, the reason for all the movies in the first place. I do like the idea of Christian Bale playing John but I don’t like what they had done with the character of John. Through out the previous movies he was predicted to be the leader of the resistance. What happened from then till now? he seems no different than a normal “grunt” sure he has more experience than any body, but I would have thought he would have been the head leader right off the top. Kate Brewster, his wife from T3, she was such an important person, now she’s reduced to a stay at home wife who doesn’t look like she’d be able to lead ducks to water, let alone lead the resistance after John dies. We now are introduced to a new hybrid human/terminator by the name of Marcus Wright. A prototype terminator that is used to infiltrate the resistance and bring John Connor to the Skynet HQ where a machine from his past sits and waits, ready to strike when called. I felt they should have done this character much differently, in the world of always trying to improve to have an upper hand in the war, why introduce the most human acting Terminator, one that could slip almost every security point to only have it replaced by (which I feel as a more inferior model) the T800 who only looks human. In the end we have Kyle Reese, well a much younger version than we’re use to, but they kept as close as they could to the original character.

The Movie:

– Bad: Again I must touch on the idea of having a resistance group where John Connor is not the leader. Having him more like a squad leader of a group of fighters really makes the idea of trying to save him through out all the movies almost like a slap in the face to everyone who worked on trying to make the previous movies a success, most importantly James Cameron. With all the visions of the back stories from the previous movies, when ever humans are fighting the terminators there always seems to be a big battle between man and the human sized terminator machines. In this you see all of three endo-skelleton terminators and a whole whack of H.K. (Hunter Killers, the flying machines). How can a robot threat be a threat if there’s no robot army, hopefully they fix this or else it’ll make us humans look very incapable of dealing with a small entourage of robots. What I found really interesting is that you don’t see a single animal. In T1, Kyle Reese explains the importance of a dog because they can sniff out terminators. What happened to all the dogs? did they just die? I know that the “human” looking terminators have just started to rise but still I’m sure someone at the army base would have at least one dog.

– Good: Throw backs, when done properly they work. The movies so far have spanned three, so there is a lot to work with, such as names, places, saying and characters. This movie used all the most memorable ones such as the lines “Come with me if you want to live”, to the recored tape of Sarah Connor to John for his preparation to lead the humans to freedom, and my personal fav. the playing of the song “You Could Be Mine” by Guns and Roses, while John tries to hunt down and hack into a motorcycle terminator. But in the end it’s Arnold himself that is the real nod to the character that started it all. Sure it’s not really him just a CG version over someone else s body but they got it all down to a T, very well done. Very old school terminator.

Rating:

The movie, not as dark or as depressing as I feel it should have been still struck a chord with me. I want to see what the other two movies do bring to the table in ways of how they relate to the story we already know and love and in the end we’ll get to see how John is betrayed by the terminator that we get introduced to.

Viva la resistance.

Please let me know if there’s anything you liked or disliked in the new format, thank you.

Dan X.