So I just recently watched the latest addition to the Terminator saga, the 2009 classic Terminator: Salvation. Yes I know, I'm a little late when it comes to watching this movie but in my defense, I heard it was horrible. Apparently what you hear about movies IS usually true. This hopefully last addition to the saga was every word that is associated with disappointment. As it just so happens, I'm on thesaurus.com and will take it upon myself to give you a little idea about what I'm talking about.
Let down, bitter pill, blind alley, blow, blunder, bring down, bummer, bust, calamity, defeat, disaster, discouragement, downer, downfall, drag, dud, error, failure, false alarm. Until yesterday, I believed Christian Bale's best performance was that of Patrick Bateman in the all time classic "American Psycho" where he plays a crazed, white collared young professional with an overwhelmed blood lust. After seeing his performance in Salvation... I still believe this to be the case. In my personal opinion, the only movie he ever came close to having a good performance was in "3:10 to Yuma" where he played a father with strong morals. He proved to us that Bruce Wayne could be a narcissistic prick and that Batman could have a voice about as understandable as Sean Connery speaking Japanese. In Salvation, his acting was sub-par at best, but this could have been because the story line was such a piece of crap to begin with. How was the acting of everybody else? Just as bad.
Which brings us to the plot. It was crap. There is so much going wrong with this plot that I would just be rambling if I went over every little thing. Instead I'll give it to you short and sweet. John Conner is told by a cyborg that his father who is either a teenager or in his young twenties is at Skynet tower to be executed with a bunch of other prisoners. Conner must then use the help of this cyborg who doesn't even realize he is a cyborg until half way into the movie to rescue these prisoners and save his father who will ultimately be sent back in time to do his mom in the 1980s. So does this sound like a Terminator movie? No.
Amidst all the piles of steamy crap was ONE cool part of the movie. The main one being the 4 seconds that a CG replica of the 1980s Arnold kicked the ass of Christian Bale only to be blown up by a rocket launcher to reveal nothing but the T800 skeleton. In my opinion, they should have kept the Arny replica up longer, but I'm sure with every second of screen time, they were forced to pay the real Arnold money for his copyrighted facial attributes.
Was this movie planned to be this horrible to begin with? Well we should of had our first hint when we found out the director of Charlie's Angels was bringing it up. I read an article from back in the day showing some concept art of the movie and what viewers could anticipate to see. Among the drawings was a destroyed and rubbled L.A. and super detailed and extravagant laboratories and assembly lines. The actual movie consisted of desert and a single Skynet tower and squeaky clean, boring laboratories.
I've concluded that Terminator: Salvation had horrible acting, bland plot that didn't even relate to the rest of the series and a short cybernetic appearence by a virtual Mr. Universe. Thanks for listening!
