Terminator Salvation

TERMINATOR SALVATION (2009) - May 23, 2009
Another step down for the once-great, now crappy Terminator series. This one finds John Connor essentially reduced to a side character, with the emphasis shifted to Sam Worthington's Marcus Wright, a convict who is executed in 2003 only to wake up in the post-apocalyptic 2018 (the reason for this is completely spoiled in all the ads even though it isn't revealed until at least an hour into the film, though I suppose it would have been pretty obvious). One of the main problems with this film is that none of the characters are particularly interesting -- not even John Connor, played with monotonous intensity by Christian Bale. McG's slick, faux-gritty visual style also doesn't help matters. His action direction is decent (it's coherent, at least), but it's kind of mediocre and, for the most part, not particularly exciting. There are a few decent action set-pieces, such as the one in which a band of survivors is terrorized by a gigantic robot with motorcycles coming out of its feet -- but even that feels completely out of place in a Terminator film, and seems like it would be more at home in the latest Michael Bay Transformers movie. I guess I was essentially entertained throughout, though it is kind of sad that the best I can say about a new Terminator film is "eh, I wasn't bored." The conclusion, which apes the endings of the first two Terminator films by ending in a steel mill of some sort (I guess they make terminators there, though I didn't see any evidence of that other than a few terminator heads), only serves to demonstrate how much worse this film is than the first two. My attention did start to seriously wane at this point, though the appearance of a slightly off-looking CGI Arnie did basically make it worthwhile. **1/2