Terminator Salvation Review

 

Hello all, this is TrueStoryGuy here with his review on the lackluster smash “Terminator Salvation” aka “Terminator 4″. Now, before I go much further, I would rank the four movies as ordered:

Terminator 2

Terminator 1

Terminator 3

Terminator 4

That’s correct, I’ll rank Terminator 4 below Terminator 3.  Terminator 2 ranks above Terminator 1 just because of the pure awesomeness that was T2. It’s probably hailed as one of the best sequels ever, which is rare for a movie. However, we all came here to review Terminator 4, not of the quadrilogy, so let’s get started.

Terminator 4 starts off pretty decent with some dialogue and backstory for the main character “Marcus Wright”. It’s explained (or forshadows) what is about to happen with him later on in the film. Soon after, an excellent action scene plays with John Connor and the “Resistance”. The Resistance is a group of survivors from Judgement Day who’s mission is to survive & kill robots. If you need me to explain any further, then you need to seriously watch the first two Terminator movies. In any case, these surivors are in the middle of a war — Not the same war that’s been present in the other movies, but smaller skirmishes are SkyNet is preparing for a large onslaught in the near future.

For the scene, we follow John Connor, who, in a single shot, arrives and notices that most of the Resistance members are dead, he climbs into a helicopter, flies into the air and is quickly “shot” down, crashes and crawls back out to see that a nuclear bomb has been set off. That’s a pretty awesome freakin’ shot, and the whole time I’m going “Wow, this movie is actually pretty decent so far.” Sadly, it appears that I spoke too soon, as Connor’s over-acting makes you wince, and the action starts getting dull. Seriously, the helicopter crash is the best part of the movie.

Let’s delve deeper, though. John Connor eventually meets up with Marcus Wright, who is argued to be the very first T-700, a person who still has human organs and the skeleton of a Terminator. John Connor needs to decide if Marcus Wright is really human, or is tricking everyone just so he can kill John Connor. This decision isn’t even made by Connor himself, and Marcus Wright pretty much gets freed with the help of somone. This someone knows that he’s human, and not some unemotional machine that Connor thinks he is. So forth, probably one of the worst action scenes is soon followed.

These two people go through a mine field with landmines that detect machines through magnetism, get shot at even though one of the other members shot a Rocket Launcher that supposibily killed them both and escape without detonating one of the landmines. I mean, sure, they explode the first 15 feet of landmines (Which had about 5 explosions, which means 5 landmines) but then they run about a football field’s worth without detonating atleast one. It started out clever, and then went deeply downhill.

I wish I could say that the action scenes and Connor’s over-acting were the only downfalls of the movie, though, but they’re not. It’s also the story. The story revolves around action, much like I said about the much-pointless landmine scene. The characters only real objective is to get to SkyNet. This movie was not character driven at all; even Terminator 3 atleast had some character driven plot to it. Saying that, I think this movie had pointless action because it tried to give Marcus’ character a lot of screentime.  That’s right, the movie’s fault is having too many important characters.

Terminator 4 would have been better if it just focused on one character’s story arc. I personally believe that John Connor didn’t even need to be in it. It could have just been Marcus Wright the entire time, and listen to John Connor’s radio calls. Yeah, it could have started with Marcus Wright the way that it did, and then him going through the procedure. Him “waking up”, getting all his stuff, meeting Kyle Reese and actually going to multiple cities looking for other pockets of the “Resistance”. Then ultimately meeting, and saving John Connor in SkyNet at the end of the movie would be a lot more rewarding then following John Connor & Marcus Wright right to the end in condensed-time-saving form.

The movie does have some good qualites: It opens room for a sequel with a bigger, badder war, and it has some nice touches for Terminator fans. The Guns ‘N Roses song “You Coud Be Mine” is played on the radio by John Connor in the movie, we see John Connor gets his scars

and we learn how the T-800 started to get made. It also explained what a T-700 was. Now, the T-700 thing is more like a fan theory. The T-600 is just a Terminator skeleton. The T-800 is a Terminator skeleton disguised to look like a human, but thinks like a robot. The T-700 was a “prototype” planned ahead of time and was a Terminator skeleton disguised as a human, but thought like a human. Other fan favorites like “I’ll be back.” are said, along with “Come with me if you want to live.”

Overall, Terminator 4 gets a 6/10 from me. It’s important enough to the story that I can’t ignore it, but some of the action was dull and it could have used more substance with a stable story. Don’t let this teeter you from seeing the movie, though; it’s a fun popcorn flick if you’re not looking for something serious.