This post is full of major spoilers, read at your own risk.

Things that were the shit:

• Special Effects - possibly some of the best I've seen in film to date
• Sound - perfect in every way, guns and explosions sound real and are ear-piercingly loud
• Costumes - someone spent a lot of time creating costumes for the characters in this film, and it shows. Excellent.
• Casting - as I said above, utterly brilliant.
• Story - Fantastic. Lots of tie-ins to the previous two Terminator movies, including gems like showing how John Connor got his scar and the origins of the first cybernetic Terminator.
• The appearance of quasi-Arnold in his nude T800 glory.
• I think the Guns n Roses song from T2: Judgment Day made a reappearance in Salvation, although I haven't seen T2 in awhile so I can't be sure.
  

Things that were bullshit:

• "Xtreme" stunts that seemed more suited to the next The Fast and The Furious sequel than a Terminator flick.
• Forced lines from past movies "Come with me if you want to live" and such that just made me roll my eyes and really ruined the immersion factor.
  
• Some parts of the story seemed awfully obvious...like the fact that Marcus Wright turns out to be a Terminator. They really buried the lead with this one.
• The PG-13 rating. This movie should have been R through and through...I wanted to see Terminators ripping bodies apart and smashing heads, not just tossing dudes around into random walls and what not.
  

This post is full of major spoilers, read at your own risk.

Things that were the shit:

• Special Effects - possibly some of the best I've seen in film to date
• Sound - perfect in every way, guns and explosions sound real and are ear-piercingly loud
• Costumes - someone spent a lot of time creating costumes for the characters in this film, and it shows. Excellent.
• Casting - as I said above, utterly brilliant.
• Story - Fantastic. Lots of tie-ins to the previous two Terminator movies, including gems like showing how John Connor got his scar and the origins of the first cybernetic Terminator.
• The appearance of quasi-Arnold in his nude T800 glory.
• I think the Guns n Roses song from T2: Judgment Day made a reappearance in Salvation, although I haven't seen T2 in awhile so I can't be sure.
  

Things that were bullshit:

• "Xtreme" stunts that seemed more suited to the next The Fast and The Furious sequel than a Terminator flick.
• Forced lines from past movies "Come with me if you want to live" and such that just made me roll my eyes and really ruined the immersion factor.
  
• Some parts of the story seemed awfully obvious...like the fact that Marcus Wright turns out to be a Terminator. They really buried the lead with this one.
• The PG-13 rating. This movie should have been R through and through...I wanted to see Terminators ripping bodies apart and smashing heads, not just tossing dudes around into random walls and what not.
  

Yay

Big Terminator fan myself, really looking forward to seeing this one.

I agree, good movie overall.

Yeah, I also thought it turned out better than i expected.

got bored half-way through. kept asking myself when will this movie ever gonna end and thought the ending was too cheesy for a Terminator movie. I also thought the Special Effect wasn't that amazing. overall, if i had to grade this movie, i'd give it a C-

Personally, I didn't like it. Clearly it was an expensive, big-budget movie, with quite a big cast too, however I still think overall that neither were of these things were put to very good use. Let me come right out and get this out of the way: I thought this new Terminator with a human heart was a really stupid idea. The entire movie basically ends up focusing around this guy and I think it does far more damage than good. People have been praising his performance, but I don't think it's anything I'd make a fuss about. Yeah, maybe it's a difficult role to play a man that's torn between being a man and a machine, but what can ya do? It's a stupid idea for a Terminator to begin with. It's a cheesy concept, and it makes for one heck of a cheesy ending. I think the worst part of it is that you can totally see it coming. As soon as you see Bale go down after fighting Arnold, it's totally apparent what's going to happen shortly later and for me that was almost unbearable to watch. Oh, what have you done to the Terminator series?!

I also like how you said Christian Bale "makes an appearance" because well... he really didn't get nearly as much screen-time in the movie as you'd expect. I'm not so sure that his lack of presence mattered all that much, though it did cause the movie to put much more focus on this new dumb Terminator. While I have nothing against Bale, I really felt he overacted quite a bit throughout the movie. Perhaps his performance would have been more appreciated if the rest of the film backed up this extreme level of motion he was trying to portray.

Additionally, I felt the director's work was pretty amateurish at times. I found it really lame how each time a Terminator dies in the movie, we get a close-up of its face and get to watch it's red eyes turn to black. That just comes off as a rookie move to me. Once or twice? Fine. Dude does it like 5 times. Also... with the one that attacks Bale after the first helicopter crash (which I thought was a pretty cool shot, I'll admit), you see Bale kill it with that gun turret. It's gotta be dead. He walks up to it, it's still alive and he puts a couple bullets in its head to end it, then we see the eyes turn off. It was unnecessary that first time, even more unnecessary the next several times. The director could throw together some pretty decent action scenes with a lot of heavy special effects, but I didn't find most of the scenes to be that impressive or memorable. I also agree that the movie probably could have done without most of the motorcycle scenes. Oh, and I think Star was the little girl's name, right? I thought it was amusingly bad when Reese explained that "she doesn't talk". Ultimately, I felt that was a really lazy move by the writers. Let's include a minor character and since she doesn't really have any importance to the story, let's just make her not talk so we don't even have to worry about it.

Okay, so I've ripped the movie quite a bit and now will mention a few things that I really liked about it. First of all, Arnold's appearance was probably the highlight of the film for me. Yeah, it wasn't really him, but they did a totally amazing job recreating him with special effects. Down to the proper facial expressions and reactions and everything. That was cool. I also thought the kid they chose to play Reese looked an awful lot like him. Maybe I could be wrong about that, afterall it's been a while since I've seen the original, but as far as my memory could tell, the resemblance was solid. I liked some of the actors they chose for the movie, such as Helena Bonham Carter and Splinter Cell's own Michael Ironside, but I don't feel that they had big enough roles to really bring much to the movie. The special effects, however, were good throughout.

Here's my biggest issue with the movie. Not only is it completely unnecessary, it does damage to the backstory that James Cameron laid out for us in the first 2 films. Prior to Salvation, we knew that John Connor would become the leader of the resistance against Skynet and the Terminators. We knew he would come in contact with the use of time travel and that he'd use it to send Terminators back in time. We knew he would learn how to reprogram Terminators to use them for good, like in Terminator 2. However, in Terminator Salvation, it's this other Terminator that ends up being the main hero. It diminishes what we knew of John Connor. I feel the details are something that perhaps would have been better left to our own imagination. Now that we know exactly how things went down, we find out that it's less interesting and John Connor doesn't quite end up being as important to the resistance as we would have thought. Afterall, if it wasn't for this lame new Terminator, John would not have succeeded. Maybe I'm being too critical of this aspect. Perhaps it's worth noting how John is able to have this kind of relationship with a Terminator and is able to use them to his aid, afterall, he is only human. Still, I'm not entirely impressed with how the world turned out to be post-Judgment Day. In all honesty, I've really struggled writing this last paragraph. Maybe I've been too critical of the movie and need to give it a second chance. Perhaps I was too quick to condemn this new Terminator. I was also kind of bothered by the fact that there's no reference to time travel at all in the movie, but considering that it probably doesn't happen until 10 years later, why would they include that? Besides, it's Skynet that discovers time travel first, not the humans. Clearly that'll be the focus of the next installment, if they are to continue the series. Well, even if I can learn to forgive the story of Salvation, the execution of it didn't particularly impress me and I don't know if I'll ever be too fond of this human-heart Terminator.

I didn't like Terminator Salvation because they tried to add too much story and personal relationships between characters when its not needed, there are a few other things like CGI arnold that looked like total crap but other then that they tried to add too much to what never really had large doses or story to begin with.

I hated the fact that instead of actually KILLING they just threw everybody into walls.

MB...the Terminators never really ripped people apart and such in the past movies.

****spoilers!*****



I loved the movie, but saw the plot twist a mile away.

The shut down signal was a trap? No shit.

Infiltration Terminator designed to lead John Connor to Skynet to kill him? No shit.

Also, I felt like there  were some  plot holes, but if anyone can explain this to me, maybe I missed it, I would be grateful.

Skynet's Kill list.

Number one on their list was Kyle Reese. Now, did Skynet put him at the top because it already knew he will become John's father, and if so, how? It seems like Skynet knows a fuck load about John Connor, almost as if it knew that he would eventually become the leader of the resistance... but no terminator had  yet even been sent back in time, how the fuck did they know?

Or is it the kind of thing where they put him at the top of the list so that the resistance would try to find him to find out who he was and why a civilian was the first on the list... I didnt get that part.


Also, Skynet central was defended as fuck. I know that Marcus shut down the defenses, but after Connor got into Skynet central why the hell didnt Skynet just turn them all back on to prevent the cavalry coming in for the rescue....

If someone could explain these things to me, I would be grateful.

EDIT: Oh yea and btw, wasn't Arnold's Model a T101?

When fake Arnold appeared I was like DUDE WHAT!?!

Yeah, the Marcus Wright = Terminator twist was badly telegraphed by the trailers. They should have left the plot somewhat ambiguous in the trailers and kept that as a concealed subplot for the film.

Also, I definitely think it's worth seeing. I don't know if it's good enough to completely redeem the franchise after T3 (which I hated), but it certainly takes the series into a better direction.

I agree with the Spoony One, and I haven't even seen the movie.