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After three Terminator films and three Terminators sent to the past (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, Kristanna Loken) to kill John Connor’s mother/John Connor/John Connor’s lieutenants we finally see more than just glimpses of the future where the Terminators came from.
But it seems to be quite a different future from the one we and John Connor (Christian Bale) have expected, and not only because there is a new kind of Terminator around – a cyborg with a human heart and brain (Sam Worthington). John Connor seems not to be the leader of the human resistance, there are much less killer-machines around than we know from Kyle Reese’s (Anton Yelchin in Terminator Salvation) memories of the future, and even though we have seen the bombs fall in Terminator 3 – Rise of the Machines the future is not the burnt and radioactive hell it is supposed to be.

But while both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day were groundbreaking films and T-3 was at least trying to continue the saga, Terminator Salvation is a different beast. It’s obvious that the script has been doctored with more than once too often, the movie can’t decide if it’s a John-Connor-story or a Marcus-Wright-story, and it’s full of gaping plot-holes a submarine could maneuver through. It’s not even a Terminator-story like the first three films which centered on the fight merciless machine vs. man, while Terminator Salvation is more a war-movie than the SF-Horror of it’s predecessors, and the references to the previous films (“I’ll be back”, legless crawling Terminator, molten steel, etc) are not really helpful.
And it’s symptomatic that the best ten minutes of Salvation are starring a digitally created Arnold-Schwarzenegger-style T-800.
Of course, another “Terminator-travels-to-the-past-to-kill-John-Connor”-film would have been overly redundant, but maybe it would have been better to let the Terminator-series rest in peace instead of continuing it with this Episode-I-like disappointment.

Terminator Salvation Movie Trailer

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under 2-star-movies, 3-star-movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.