Summer '09 - Blockbuster #5 - "Terminator Salvation"

Wow, did the critics hate this one.  I'm not going to be putting it on any Top Ten lists, but I'm also not putting it on any Bottom Ten lists.  So, pretty good, not nearly great is my short review.  For details (and spoilers) read on...

I am a big fan of Terminators 1, 2 and 3.  (Yes, I liked T3.  A lot.)  So I was pretty pumped about the fourth one.  It would be our first real look at the war with the machines that we've been teased with since 1984.  Some of it I really liked... some not so much.

I liked the idea of John Connor as a valued lieutenant who some believed is really the future leader of the resistance, and others think is just a hot-head.  I liked the way cyber-espionage is part of the war.  And I liked the newest incarnation of terminator (a "real" human with terminator-style parts implanted).  I liked Christian Bale's take on Connor.  I liked Sam Worthington as Marcus.  I liked Anton Yelchin as the young Kyle Reese.  And I liked the look of it: sort of Mad Max meets I Robot.

I didn't like Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Brewster, who has exactly nothing to do.  I didn't like Moon Bloodgood as a resistance fighter who "believes" in Marcus.  I didn't like the whole Helena-Bonham-Carter-as-Skynet-avatar thing.  Dumb.  And I could have really done without the cute little kid.

(Tangent: Why did I like the male performances and not the female?  That's weird, since the director, McG, made his name directing "Charlie's Angels", which I love...)

I thought the story pretty much made sense.  The machines know that Connor is obsessed with finding Kyle Reese, so they kidnap the kid and use him as bait.  Some critics have argued that Skynet should have simply killed Kyle, and then John would have disappeared from existence.  But this time-travel universe is different from the one in "Back to the Future".  The future can change (and did, between films 2 and 3) but you can't have the present magically change around you.  Killing Reese would have been irrelevant.  I think.  And, in any case, there's no evidence that Skynet knew why Connor wanted to find Reese.  There's no evidence that Skynet knows that time travel is even possible in this movie.  (One might argue that Skynet's interest in Connor implies they know about the future, but that's not necessarily true.  They might just know he's one of their best and most driven lieutenants, which he is.)

Of course, the best thing in the movie is Arnie.  They spliced in clips from previous Terminator films flawlessly to allow an 80's era Schwarzenegger to fight Christian Bale.  I loved it.

The ending was okay, if a little maudlin.  I can't complain too loudly about McG ruining a beloved franchise, but he didn't add too much to it, either.