Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

I really like the Terminator franchise. It's full of cool looking evil robots, time travel, car chases, gun play, and sweet, sweet action. That's why it pains me so much to give Terminator Salvation a poor review.

The fourth installment of the Terminator franchise takes a new approach to the classic Terminator storyline, this time taking us into the future to battle the machines post-judgment day. There is a lot of possibility to this approach, and indeed we do get to see all sorts of new cool types of terminators, from killer motorcycles to really pissed-off fish robots. Unfortunately, that and some cool explosions are about all we get from this movie. The plot was really jumbled, pointless and just... well.. bad. Even by the standards of terminator movies, which don't exactly pride themselves on epic plot structure.

There are all sorts of plot devices and mysteries thrown in throughout the movie, from John Connor noticing things are occurring differently from how his mother told him they would, to the romantic relationship between Marcus and Blair, to even the title of the movie itself. What do they all mean? Well, not much really. The movie plays out randomly, and culminates with an ending that really builds on little of what was presented in the two preceding hours. It really feels like one well scripted action scene after another, stitched together by meaningless, drawn-out hokey dialogue.

I was really left scratching my head about this one until I read THIS story about how the original script was very, VERY different. Apparently John Connor is barely seen at all in the original story, remaining a mystery voice of rebellion and support on the radio. The story was really focused on the Marcus character, who only plays a secondary role in the screen version. Unfortunatly, Christian Bale wanted to play John Connor, and they pretty much rewrote the entire film during the filming process to find reasons to have John Connor, a character who wasn't really even supposed to be in the movie, regularly appear and do things throughout the movie. This explains why many of the scenes in the final movie really have no purpose.

The original script also led up to a huge, crazy twist ending. I'm not sure if it would have worked brilliantly, or would have left fans fuming, but it certainly would have made for a more interesting movie, and it would have explained a lot of the useless elements that still remain in the current version.

Terminator Salvation had some good action scenes and cool killer robots. Unfortunately, that was about it. I would rate it as an "okay" movie, but nothing really more.

SCORING: I give Terminator Salvation 2.5 Agent Smiths out of a possible 5.