A Machine Uprising? Terminator Salvation Review

The End Begins. That is the tag line of this film, directed by McG, starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington. While the film critics may be ripping this film apart, they are not looking at the bigger picture of what yet can come. While this film disappoints, in many ways it delivered a message of hope and revision for this classic franchise. Read the rest of the review after the jump.



Terminator Salvation in many ways has it moments of glory with amazing SFX and octane-filled action scenes. Especially with one of the opening scenes after the dialog given by the film about how Skynet infiltrated computer systems and military power by becoming self aware, destroying cities and wanting humans to not exist. I really thought the first 30 minutes of this film was done really well, but some of the interaction with the characters started to go downward when the film started to unravel its plot.


The ‘Terminators’ were done really well in my opinion, including the T-600, Hydrobot versions. The Hunter-Killers were somewhat cool but the effects were iffy on some scenes. The Harvester was awesome, especially the noise it made while it hunted for humans during the gas station/desert scene. The Moto-Terminators were disappointing, even though the concept was really cool, it didn’t live up to that on the big screen. The big reveal of one the ‘Terminator’ models is obviously the T-800, or famously, what Arnold Schwarzenegger played in the previous ‘Terminator’ films.

The characters in the film, were inconsistent throughout the film, especially Christian Bale playing John Connor. He was really mediocre in this film, over acting in some scenes, almost being a stiff, flat character in the film. John Connor is the leader of The Resistance but he didn’t show it for this film because of Bale’s failure of convincing the true meaning of the character. There were two bright spots that made up for Bale’s acting : Marcus Wright (played by Sam Worthington) and Kyle Reese. (played by Anton Yelchin)


Sam Worthington’s performance was one of the strongest this year, using his emotions as a meaning of what he’s not, a human. Anton Yelchin was also great as Kyle Reese, having that strong leadership with the spirit of a young man with a mission. The rest of the cast was average, including Moon Bloodgood’s performance as Blair but i really liked Micheal Ironside in this film as the Resistance’s commander.





The main problem i had with this film was that the climax was, well, anti-climatic. I was really surprised how this plot has so many flaws, even more shocking, the writers of this film are Jonathan Nolan and Paul Haggis (The Dark Knight, Crash). The original ending of this film would made the story more interesting and would of shocked many audiences but this ending didn’t really work out for me personally, i could’ve seen this by a mile away. Overall, this was a huge drawback for me of this film, it could have been much more but it wasn’t. Also it seemed a lot of scenes were cut in this film, it would be interesting if they release an ‘unrated’ version of Terminator Salvation and why McG had these decisions made.


Finally, this franchise has been revived but the film didn’t deliver as i hoped. Coming in with low expectations, it still had a feeling that Terminator Salvation could have been more excellent but it’s probably because the previous films (except for T-3) are classics and really good films, it’s hard to convince people that it can reach that level of highness. As i said earlier in this review, while the film was disappointing and messy, the future begins with this franchise, especially if it makes good money in the box office (budget was $200 million btw), hopefully Warner Bros picks it up (that’s an if) and learns from the mistakes. Let’s just wait and see if McG can learn to direct better and not have stupid contests with Micheal Bay because he sure knows how to direct like him.


Overall MovieViral Rating: 7.5/10