Film Review: Terminator: Salvation

Let me get this out of the way first: as far as I'm concerned, the Terminator series ended with Judgment Day. Anything that comes after that essentially negates what what the characters did in that film. This wouldn't be such a big deal if T2 wasn't widely considered to be among the pinnacles of action movies.

Enter Terminator: Salvation the fourth film in the series. The plot of the movie goes a little something like this: humans and robots are fighting, and the human leader must make sure the stuff that happened in the first two Terminators can still happen. Oh, and humans are being used to create realistic Terminators who don't know they're Terminators.

It's easy to feel cheated after watching Terminator: Salvation. Not because of the film's quality (or lack thereof), but because a dude named McG managed to convince me that he could make a good movie. I liked Charlie's Angels, but it's safe to say I was hoping for a different kind of "good" for a film that supposedly falls within the same series as Judgment Day.

Make no mistake though, Salvation does have its high points. If it did one admirable thing, it's this: it made me even more excited for James Cameron's Avatar, which stars Sam Worthington, who appeared in Salvation as its most interesting and deep character, Marcus Wright. Anton Yelchin plays a good Kyle Reese as well. McG has also crafted some pretty impressive action scenes that are, I will admit, a lot of fun to watch.

That's about all I can think of as far as high points. A little ways into Terminator: Salvation I realized that I didn't care about John Connor. I wanted to, but I just couldn't. There isn't a single facet of Bale's performance that makes Connor an interesting character. This is Salvation's cardinal sin. If you absolutely must continue the story, at least make the most important character watchable. They didn't.

There isn't a whole lot else to say about Terminator: Salvation. The best word to describe it would be "forgettable." The story isn't really advanced at all, and I quite honestly didn't really care about the events that did happen. The fact is, Judgment Day wasn't prevented, and McG could've done a lot of interesting things with the story here. He could've ran with it and created something new and fresh. Instead, he did nothing. He relied on Christian Bale to reboot his franchise, and failed epically.

Way to waste an opportunity.