Terminator: Salvation

[Ashnod]

I'm gonna take a lot of flak for this, but here it goes anyway.

This movie wasn't good. What does "wasn't good" mean? It means that Ultraviolet is actually better Terminator Salvation.

ULTRAVIOLET.

Which is not to say that it is unwatchable. But there isn't anything here we haven't seen before, or seen better. It feels all retread without any real connection to anything.

Ultraviolet, for all of its considerable flaws, dared to at least take risks and show a bizarre setting with a bizarre plot that was at the very least unique. It was visually interesting, and I admit that I was intrigued enough by the setting to want to know more about it.

Terminator Salvation shows us a world we have seen a hundred times before and doesn't really show us anything new inside it. I don't want to say anything else without spoiling it, but by the time the milk-curdling resolution happened in the final few minutes, I was ready to throw my popcorn bag at the screen.

How has this franchise fallen so far away from its fantastic roots? Linda Hamilton, where are you when we need you???

[Adrian Moss]

I hear she got some voice credits for the show.

[Dawn OOC]

Originally Posted By: Ashnod

Ultraviolet, for all of its considerable flaws, dared to at least take risks and show a bizarre setting with a bizarre plot that was at the very least unique. It was visually interesting, and I admit that I was intrigued enough by the setting to want to know more about it.

If you want to look at just one aspect of the movie and judge all of it by that, then sure. I guess I can see that UV would be more interesting that T:S, in that way. UV still had a lot more flaws than T:S overall.

Originally Posted By: Ashnod

Terminator Salvation shows us a world we have seen a hundred times before and doesn't really show us anything new inside it. I don't want to say anything else without spoiling it, but by the time the milk-curdling resolution happened in the final few minutes, I was ready to throw my popcorn bag at the screen.

I'm not sure what you were expecting from the movie; I don't think T2 or T3 really showed anything new beyond new robots. I got a hell of a kick out of seeing the war against the machines first-hand rather than in 'flashforwards'. And to be honest, Marcus' reason for existing was something new.

Click to reveal.. (A spoiler)

Plus it was nice to see Kyle Reese being targeted and John Conner working to save him.

Could T:S have been more? Sure; there was room in the movie for explorations of the nature of humanity, what it means to be human and humane, the ability of humanity to embrace the apparent enemy within, free will vs. your own flawed nature, the beauty of the gift of a second chance, etc, etc. It could have a lot less, too. In short, it was a good action movie that delivered on the promise of 'man blowing up big machines' and brushed over some deeper questions. Not the movie I would have made, but then when are they the ones I would make?

[Ashnod]

Originally Posted By: Dawn, OOC

If you want to look at just one aspect of the movie and judge all of it by that, then sure. I guess I can see that UV would be more interesting that T:S, in that way. UV still had a lot more flaws than T:S overall.

Oh, absolutely. T4 has better dialogue, was better paced, certainly less extraneous shots.

But I still found UV to more interesting than T4.

Originally Posted By: Ashnod

I'm not sure what you were expecting from the movie; I don't think T2 or T3 really showed anything new beyond new robots. I got a hell of a kick out of seeing the war against the machines first-hand rather than in 'flashforwards'. And to be honest, Marcus' reason for existing was something new.

Click to reveal.. (Response with spoiler)

I'm gonna have to disagree with that - considering at this point in time SkyNet has absolutely no reason to go after Kyle Reese, and only slightly more reason to go after John Connor. The way SkyNet made it sound is that it had an awareness of the prior 3 films and the failures it had up to this point, when it should not have knowledge of something it has yet to do.

For the record, I didn't like T3 either.

[VileBill]

Did anyone like T3?

Christian Bale is an excellent actor, but even an excellent actor needs a real role to sink his teeth into. McG did a fine directing job, the action sequences rocked, even the concept was kind of interesting, but the screenplay just wasn't there. The STORY just wasn't there.

[Dawn OOC]

Click to reveal.. (more spoilers! )

There are a lot of reasons that going after Kyle was flawed in one way or another - for example, rather than using him as bait, they should have just immediately killed him. Honestly, the only point in not doing so was to draw John Conner in, and he'd have no way of knowing that Kyle was dead. That said, I still got an emotional kick out of seeing Kyle, and Anton Yelchin did a good job with the role. My first thought when I realized they were bringing Kyle in was, "Oh, god... how are they going to not ruin him?" Anton got the attitude and even the voice right.

Honestly, it wouldn't be too hard for the machines to realize they'd tried and failed before. In T1, Kyle Reese told the LAPD what he knew (IIRC), and in T2, Sarah Conner had been telling her shrink what she knew. It's not totally unbelievable that the robots could find some or all of those records. It would have been nice, as one of those things that could have been covered in more detail.

Originally Posted By: Ashnod

For the record, I didn't like T3 either.

Yeah, I didn't either. T1 is still my fav of the franchise.

[Charlotte]

I'm probably not gonna bother writing a full review. Put simply, this was a B-movie with an A-movie budget.

In the first Terminator film they made a big deal about how Reese wasn't sure that 20th century weapons could take out a Terminator. In Salvation everyone was fighting with close-to-modern weapons, so it turns out: yep. Now, this isn't really the first movie's fault since warfare in the past twenty years has gone in a different direction than just bigger guns, but it would have been nice to see what the T-800 in the first film referred to when it asked for a plasma rifle. The super-big rounds were nice, but you'd think that if your sidearm doesn't stop a Terminator you wouldn't bother carrying it.

There's all these weird cuts that make little sense. I kept noticing that we'd cut to a scene where the action sequence was already underway, such as the assault on SkyNet. At other times the emotionality of a scene bounced around like a ping-pong ball - like how Conner feels the need to shout "What are you!?" right after calmly letting Wright go. I get the feeling this film has what I call cut-to-shit-itis, where a movie's edited for time because the shorter a film is the more money it can rake in in the crucial opening weekend. The absence of scenes I saw in the trailer would bear this out.

As for the story, well: like I said, a B-movie. It doesn't really tell us anything we needed to know about SkyNet's future or John Connor's rise to power, other than he butted heads with Michael Ironsides a lot. I would have loved for them to at least try to explain how time travel works in this universe once and for all - closed loops? Alternate timelines? - but the only time traveler we got was, in a sense, Marcus Wright, and the big revelation with him is given away in the trailer.

What about the dialogue? Well, no one expects Shakespeare when they go to see a movie about robot skeletons fighting the cast of Road Warrior, but Jesus Christ, guys, at least try to keep the cliches to a manageable level. I can't even remember half of them, they were so vapid.

I should have expected the creative genius behind both of the Charlie's Angels movies to turn in a film like this. It had one interesting idea: the notion that John's greatest weapon against the machines is information, which he shares with anyone with a radio. But one idea does not a two hour film make.