Terminator Salvation – Review

Me and Jon (who may or may not have been wearing an argyle hat at the time) saw Terminator Salvation last night. I really wanted to see it, but it didn’t get the best reviews, and word of mouth hasn’t been all that stellar either, so I wasn’t expecting it to be any good, but I ended up really liking it. I should have known though, because Massawyrm liked it, and I almost always agree with his reviews. It’s obviously completely different from the other Terminator movies, and I thought it had the most story, since the first three are essentially two hour chase scenes. Don’t get me wrong, the other Terminator movies are amazing (I even like the third, which Jon pretends doesn’t exist) but this one broke out of the mold and introduced a really dense story. The story hardly made sense most of the time, and had a tendency to jump around too much, and introduce too many unnecessary characters, but it was still a pretty interesting story.

The biggest surprise for me was how much I liked Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, who I ended up liking a million times better than Christian Bale’s John Connor who just spent the entire movie keeping himself alive and using his Batman voice, which is even more pronounced when he isn’t playing Batman. Even Marcus’ love interest played by Moon Bloodgood was heads above Bryce Dallas Howard who’s sole purpose was to stand around and look pregnant. I thought the action was all top notch, which also helps me go easy on the story’s shortcomings, although some of the special effects seemed a bit off. Sometimes the machines looked a bit too glossy and fake in the mostly desert backdrops, but the action was moving so fast (in a good way, not the shaky camera too hard to see way) that it didn’t really matter much. So if bad reviews kept you from seeing this movie, I definitely think you should give it a shot, especially on the big screen.