Terminator Salvation Review

"With a plot twist you'll never see coming...
Unless you watched the trailers...
Or saw the first five minutes...
Or have any thinking capacity whatsoever..."

Before judging this movie, you have to establish what exactly you're viewing it as: a Terminator sequel or a sci-fi action film. If it's the former, you might just like this new direction. If it's the latter, then this movie will remain very, very confusing to the uninitiated.

The year is 2018 and humanity is all but scraps after Skynet launched its war against the human race. Since then, John Connor (Christian Bale) has become a soldier in the Resistance with a crew of freedom fighters dedicated to finding a way to destroy the machines once and for all. He's also trying to find his father Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) who is meant to travel back in time and father John in the year 1984.

It's a Terminator thing...

But John discovers that Skynet is preparing to hunt down Kyle with the intention of killing him, and in turn, rewriting history to Skynet's advantage for a John Connor-free future.

Another Terminator thing...

But hope may be in store with one of Kyle's traveling buddies, a former death row patient named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who has somehow survived execution and woken up in the middle of the War with the Machines. Not only is Marcus possibly able to save Kyle, but he might be the key to stopping Skynet once and for all.

I've completely lost you, haven't I?

For Terminator fans, this is an installment full of juicy fan service and worthy cast members to take up their roles. But when the movie has to step back away from the franchise, it just falls apart. Anybody trying to come into this for the first time are highly unlikely to pick up most of what's happening in this screenplay.

This movie also does little to tell its story in the method of any of the Terminator movies before it. John Connor is demoted to secondary protagonist, the T-100 character (archived footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger) is in the movie for all of ten minutes and with a plot that is heavily founded on traveling to the past to change the future, we don't see any time travelling.

What strengths this movie has, its all done with subtlety. Director McG helps to give a new desert war-zone atmosphere to a series that was originally all just darkness, so the action that's delivered (however light) is done in a realistic setting. But one must remember this is not a franchise about who's the grittiest soldier in the barracks.

If you can salvage Terminator Salvation for a decent sequel, you might just get your money's worth...even in a rental. With a sequel fully set in the future we've been looking forward to seeing, it doesn't wrap up much in terms of story or character development and the action everybody loved from the previous films is just not at the same epic level. A good attempt, but needed a sharper script and a lot less plotholes.