Terminator: Salvation is the "4th" film in the Terminator franchise that, believe it or not, began all the way back in 198-fucking-4. That's way before I was born. Like the humanoid machines featured in every movie, it seems to be a franchise that just won't fucking die, so as the years progress the studios will keep finding ways to suck its tits and in the interest of capital gain. In this film, because they really have nothing left to fall back on the from the "present day" Terminator movies, we get to see the legendary battle with Skynet as mentioned in all 3 previous films. John Connor is now in his 30s with a badass goatee and, strangley, feels the need to use the Bat-Rasp throughout the film's entirety.
McG, the director with the name of a rapper who really likes big macs, does a pretty good job with what he has to work with script-wise. From a narrative standpoint, T:S really doesn't do much, but I think that's the fault of the screenwriters. The story is there, somewhere, but it's not fleshed out whatsoever, and everything seems more like a vehicle for the explosively exhilarating action sequences. Those scenes are the meat and bones of T:S; McG handles these very well and every one (which take up about and hour and a half of the movie's two-hour running time) is well-constructed and keeps your eyes glued to the screen.
The story, the soul of any movie, is too cliched and riddled with contradictions and excess, unecessary sequences to really have any meaning. For example, in scene near the movie's beginning, Connor jumps into a helicopter to escape, only to have the helicopter lose control and twirl about for about 2 fucking minutes of your life before crashing right back down to the ground, in the same spot it took off from, thus negating any reason to have gotten in it in the first place. I can buy big, blood-thirsty robots in any movie, but for some reason I can't buy another sequence shortly after this one where Connor jumps into the ocean to enter the Resistance's HQ, and the next shot shows him soaking wet, glistening in a submarine. My BS-a-Meter went off so loud most people in the theater probably thought it was a cell-phone. All in all, T:S plays like a video game, with non-stop action that takes only brief pauses to progress the subpar story.
Christian Bale's John Connor sort of epitomizes T:S, whereas its head is so far up its ass with ego that you kind of want to see it die. Marcus Wright, the new character introduced in the film's opening, is a convicted murderer but he's still way cooler than John Connor, just because he's not a complete douche the whole movie. There's a "revelaton" about 2/3 of the way through the film about Marcus Wright, but considering the fact that they give it away in the damn trailer it carries no emotional gravity whatsoever. Also, Arnold's in it for a few seconds, and while neat, it really just hammers in the point that T:S is trying to so hard to be like its big brothers despite its conviction not to be that you realize halfway through it that your watching a (very expensive) fan film.
Terminator: Salvation uses its narrative as a crutch for action sequences, which, thankfully, it does quite well. McG can direct action, there's not doubt about it, it's just that the movie thinks it' soooo cool that it forgets to be cool. It runs for a clean 2 hours, but not a whole lot happens story-wise. Alas, it's fun; watching Marcus Wright, who seems like he gets more screentime than Connor despite Christian Bale's top billing, is a good character who the screenwriters really don't do justice with. There's a missed oppurtunity with him, to explore what makes people people and machines machines. But despite its predictability and hollow characterization, T:S succeeds at being that big summer action flick that we need this time of year.
Also:
-according to IMDB, this movie cost $200 million to make. Where?! Michael Bay's movie about big fucking robots cost $150 million and looks worlds better
-I feel like Gears of War was an influence, on, well, the whole movie
-I don't think Christian Bale actually ranted on the set, I think he was just rehearsing lines from the movie
Score: 7.5/10
