Terminator Salvation ... Meh

Plot
The year is 2018. Judgment day has come and gone leaving humanity in the hands of a few, scattered resistance fighters. Various terminator models roam the post-apocalyptic wasteland either killing or harvesting humans all under the direction of a faceless, computer enemy known as Skynet. And the salvation of the human race rests in the hands of one man ... John Connor.

This of course is the fourth film in the Terminator series and the first to not feature Arnold ... sort of. If the first movie was about saving Sarah Connor, and the second movie was about saving John Connor, this installment seems to be about saving Kyle Reese. This is where the holes in the story begin with me. How does Skynet know about the relationship between Kyle Reese and John Connor? I can understand that they know about John Connor from his FDR style fireside chats over the radio as the leader of the resistance. But how would they know about his relationship with Kyle Reese? Kyle Reese and the T-800 are sent back in time in the year 2029 and yet this is only 2018.

Central Conflict
Man versus Machine. The idea that somehow the best in us can become the worst. That by advancing our technology we're losing our humanity. Whoa, I just went way too deep. This movie stays in the shallow end philosophically so let's back up a bit. Man versus machine. In this corner … Machine want man dead ... and in this corner, Man want machine dead ... And Go. Unfortunately, this plays out more as a guilty pleasure movie than a canonical extension of the James Cameron Terminator series.

In the first Terminator movie Kyle Reese assesses the conflict between man and machine in the following quote, "That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." That context helps build the tension in the first 2 movies. Whereas the conflict in this installment is full of less tension because it seems Skynet is content to leave the resistance to its own devices while it’s busy in the lab working on schemes. There are no scenes like in the first movie where we see terminators infiltrating resistance camps. That would have been cool. Interesting side note, Arnold’s workout buddy Franco Columbo plays the terminator infiltrator that shoots up the resistance camp in Kyle Reese’s flash back sequence in the first terminator movie.

Influences and flaws
MCG cites such movies as Black Hawk Down, Children of Men, and Road Warrior as influences for this movie. In reality, this movie plays out more like a thinly veiled rip off of those movies while managing to never come close to catching the authenticity or originality of any of those movies.

That's probably my biggest complaint about this movie is that there’s nothing original about it at all. It's just a rehash of old clichés. Why there's even the cliché post-apocalyptic child, same archetype child as found in the Road Warrior, old Star Trek reruns (Bop!), or Aliens. I half expected her to say ... "The Terminators mostly come out at night, mostly." The 60 foot tall harvesters are right out of the movie War of the Worlds. Even the sounds they make are exactly the same as Spielberg’s alien harvesters in War of the Worlds. The air battles in the canyons are played out. The terminator motorcycles are straight out of Road Warrior and in fact the entire high way sequence is straight out of road warrior. The acceptance of Terminators as allies and even mentors for young would be resistance leaders (in this case, Kyle Reese) and not just enemies was already introduced in T2. The final sequences take place at an industrial plant and plays out exactly like the ending of T2. cough, cough, HACK! All the call backs to the original material in the form of "i'll be back" and "Come with me if you want to live" feel cheesy instead of inciting nerd nirvana like the call backs did in the recent Star Trek movie.

Maybe my problem is that I've seen too many movies and my expectations are set a little high. Or maybe MCG is a hack and this movie should have been held to a higher standard. Nevertheless it feels like they're just cashing in on the Terminator name.

Other franchises have been successfully rebooted such as Hulk, Batman and James Bond. I think in those cases, the source material needed a bit of freshness to appeal to modern audiences. This attempt at rebooting falls flat and lacks the fresh approach necessary to over shadow the source material. James Cameron casts a giant shadow. This movie plays out more like a made for TV sci-fi channel attempt at capitalizing on the franchise name instead of a true reboot of the franchise. Being a fan of the series, it was fun to see the T-600 walking around like zombies ineptly attempting to kill humans. But beyond serving up more endoskeleton murder machines walking around with "crush, kill, destroy" on their little tiny robot brains, this movie doesn't offer much.

Characters
A bright spot among the acting was new comer Sam Worthington who plays Marcus Wright. We find out that Marcus Wright is a prototype cyborg used by Cyberdyne systems to infiltrate the human resistance. That is something I would have preferred to find out in the middle of the movie when it's revealed rather than in the TRAILER!!!!!!! Because really that's the only twist in this movie. Other bright spots are Moon Bloodgood who plays a fighter in the resistance and Anton Yelchin who plays Kyle Reese. All the other performances, including Christian Bale who seems to be phoning this one in with his Batman voice, fall flat.

"Are you not entertained?"
A very qualified yes. If I had to quantify it, I'd say this movie gets 3 out of 5 stars. At least that's what I'll give it on Netflix. It's not so much that I dislike this movie as I think it's forgettable. Really, once you've seen this movie, there won't be any scenes that you'll be talking about with your friends afterwards.

Therefore this movie gets a ... Meh.

Rating System:
W00t ... Victory
Meh ... Indifference
Blah ... extremely boring

If you're interested in this movie, you should also check out ...
The Terminator
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Black Hawk Down
Children of Men
Mad Max 2
Transformers
War of the Worlds
Westworld
Futureworld