Review of Terminator Salvation (2009) by Smith T — 08 Feb 2018

Terminator Salvation has some good concepts for Skynet robots such as motorcycles for Terminators, well-executed action sequences, good-looking special effects even if they fail to reach the heights of the ones from the second movie and Christian Bale's infamous rant that has become a meme.

Yet the fourth Terminator movie is a bad movie that attempts to be a sort-of spin-off movie that takes place in the post-apocalyptic world we only got a glimpse of in the last three movies but ends up being noisy, barely taking a break and having a dirty-looking visual style that attempts to show the post-Judgment Day world but looks more like the cameramen were too lazy to clean the lenses.

It certainly isn't helping matters that not only is Ahnuld not in this movie but also the fact that the PG-13 rating means that we can't see any truly unsettling imagery. The first two movies had things that justified their R ratings, the second more so than the first.

The third movie barely got an R rating. And here, now we have some teen-friendly Terminator movie that relied on name recognition to be a box office success. Along with the fact that Sam Worthington was also in Avatar which came out the same year and was directed by James Cameron who created the franchise to begin with meaning that audiences who weren't interested in seeing Batman kick robot ass instead went to see it to keep themselves patient while waiting for Avatar because it had the same guy.

At least the plot twist regarding Marcus was handled alright. Terminator Salvation could've been a chance to depart from the time-travel roots of the last three movies but it instead comes off as a loud, action movie that barely takes a break, so much so that it would make Michael Bay jealous.