Terminator: Salvation
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The Terminator franchise had apparently fallen so far that it needed to be filled with new life and energy through a slight re-imagining. This fourth movie changes the timeline from the original films, loses the time travel aspect and essentially becomes a prequel where the technology of the machines is concerned. Terminator: Salvation isn’t the out-and-out triumph that every fan of the series hoped for, but the (action-packed) ride is definitely fun and, with the exception one final scene, there weren’t any glaring problems with the story.
Overall, the film lacks characterization and the dialogue leaves something to be desired, but at least it never sinks down to Terminator 3 levels. (I can’t be the only one that remembers the ladies’ strip club and “Talk to the hand,” can I?) The writers on Terminator: Salvation are Michael Ferris and John Brancato – the same team that wrote Terminator 3 – so it’s not really that surprising that the dialogue and the story could use some help. (Brancato and Ferris are also responsible for Catwoman and Primeval, if that gives you any perspective …and they also wrote The Game, which must be the exception that proves the rule.) And why they decided to use the same writers that helped sink the franchise to try and reinvigorate interest in the series probably didn’t even make sense to the people making the decision, so try not to think about that.
- Score
- 5/10
The talk outside of the theater after the premiere of Terminator: Salvation was overwhelmingly negative, but I don’t think it was completely justified. The film is not without its flaws, but a director can only do so much with the material that he or she is given. McG successfully renders a desolate future world populated by killer machines and, while there aren’t as many as I’d hoped, some of them are really big and destructive. (That is a good thing, right? ...right??) And think about this: it only took about twenty years for us to finally see an entire film filled with this particular brand of post-apocalyptic wasteland. Hmm... maybe this film wasn't completely worth the wait, but we should feel lucky that we even got this much after such a long stretch of nothing.
