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Terminator: Salvation
I will confess that I didn't see T3 because at the time, it seemed really stupid. However, the hype for Terminator: Salvation made it seem like they'd managed to get another decent Terminator movie together - good story, brilliant action and all that.
The hype was wrong.
Terminator: Salvation has a lot that's good with it, but counter that with huge gaps in story logic, making reference to events from the first two movies AND YET also blindly contradicting them (or at least not keeping things making sense[1]) and very little emotion on the character front makes this little more than a dumb action flick. I like dumb action flicks too, but this one doesn't even have the sense of fun or excitement that it should.
Christian Bale as John Connor seems to have lost his Batman edge for being anything other than a hardass military guy, and Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, the brand new SPOILER ALERT Terminator doesn't really get the sort of human/machine conflict we saw from Arnold frickin' Schwarzenegger in T2. And he's Arnie! (i.e. not the world's greatest actor).
Oh yeah... in case you didn't know, Sam Worthington is a Terminator in this movie. It was revealed in the trailers, like all of them, and yet in the movie this fact isn't revealed until at least 40 minutes in. It appears to have been written that this was supposed to be a big surprise moment when it happens - but because of those trailers, there's no surprise at all. If the marketing people had been a bit smarter, this could have been quite a good twist.
Lots of big explodey action, lots of nice terminators and some stupid ones as well, but when you reach the end, you can't help thinking "so what was the point of that?".
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is actually better than this film - because it makes you think a bit, rather than just being totally full of explosions. Pity it's cancelled.
A resounding "meh"[2]
6/10
[1] See DC White's blog entry here for one such example.
[2] (C) quuux, 2009.
Terminator: Salvation
I will confess that I didn't see T3 because at the time, it seemed really stupid. However, the hype for Terminator: Salvation made it seem like they'd managed to get another decent Terminator movie together - good story, brilliant action and all that.
The hype was wrong.
Terminator: Salvation has a lot that's good with it, but counter that with huge gaps in story logic, making reference to events from the first two movies AND YET also blindly contradicting them (or at least not keeping things making sense[1]) and very little emotion on the character front makes this little more than a dumb action flick. I like dumb action flicks too, but this one doesn't even have the sense of fun or excitement that it should.
Christian Bale as John Connor seems to have lost his Batman edge for being anything other than a hardass military guy, and Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, the brand new SPOILER ALERT Terminator doesn't really get the sort of human/machine conflict we saw from Arnold frickin' Schwarzenegger in T2. And he's Arnie! (i.e. not the world's greatest actor).
Oh yeah... in case you didn't know, Sam Worthington is a Terminator in this movie. It was revealed in the trailers, like all of them, and yet in the movie this fact isn't revealed until at least 40 minutes in. It appears to have been written that this was supposed to be a big surprise moment when it happens - but because of those trailers, there's no surprise at all. If the marketing people had been a bit smarter, this could have been quite a good twist.
Lots of big explodey action, lots of nice terminators and some stupid ones as well, but when you reach the end, you can't help thinking "so what was the point of that?".
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is actually better than this film - because it makes you think a bit, rather than just being totally full of explosions. Pity it's cancelled.
A resounding "meh"[2]
6/10
[1] See DC White's blog entry here for one such example.
[2] (C) quuux, 2009.