Terminator Salvation 4k Review

[Jkobe Peoples]

Im finding that there are some movies that I like more upon a second viewing. It could be that once expectations are set aside (either upheld or smashed upon the first viewing) that it's easier to accept a movie a bit more... forgivingly. While I certainly still don't love Terminator Salvation (click link for my initial review), I'll have to admit I found myself enjoying it more the second time around.

The film wasn't the huge hit the studio was hoping for in the U.S., bringing in only $125MM. However it did much better overseas, bringing it's worldwide total to a respectable $371MM. As far as reviews go, it earned a 32% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with the average review being 5/10 stars (I gave it 3/5). In our informal poll over at our Terminator Salvation contest, most people are giving it 3 or 4 out of 5 stars.

The movie suffered from lack of any real depth to the characters, little focus on John Connor (miscast with Christian Bale IMHO), and a story line that concentrated on Marcus Wright, who while being about the best thing in the movie, felt really out of place in the fabric of the entire mythos.

The best thing about the movie are the action set pieces, and on Blu-ray with a home theater set up they deliver. The picture quality is (pretty much as usual) excellent, showing uber-detail. The disc makes ample use of surround sound and the subwoofer in particular (always a good thing as far as I'm concerned).

One thing to be aware of in the Director's Cut version of the film is that it does NOT have the 30-40 minutes of additional footage that McG said it would have when he talked about it earlier this year - the extended version is only about three minutes longer (and yes, it includes the topless scene with Moon Bloodgood). I don't know what happened to all that extra footage since this is supposed to be the Director's Cut of the movie. The topless scene is (as far as I could remember) the only brand new scene in the movie - the rest of the three minutes are just extensions of existing scenes in the movie with a bit more language and violence.

Oh, and if you want to watch the Director's Cut and you don't have a DVD player, you're out of luck: That version is only available on Blu-ray. The DVD version is quite sparse - I don't believe it even has any special features at all, but here are the specs on the Blu-ray [Update on the DVD version - apparently Target stores are offering a Director's Cut/SE version of the film on DVD. This is odd because it's not available at Amazon.com nor at Warner Bros' official store]:

One thing that bugged me a bit was the lack of any top level menu, and I think this isn't specific to this disc - I really wish that some standard for Blu-ray was established when it comes to the menu system. On DVDs there's ALWAYS a top level menu and usually you can just hit the MENU button to skip all the trailers they put up front. On this (and some other Blu-rays) you have to skip each opening trailer individually to get to the movie, and here it went straight INTO the movie instead of bringing up a menu with the usual settings, chapter selection, etc. You can access it but it's with the sub-menu pop-up option.

The "Re-forging the Future" and "Moto-Terminator" featurettes are interesting (the moto-terminator one more if you're into visual effects and concept design). My major takeaway from these featurettes was that they left me feeling kind of bad for the people behind the production. Even on films that aren't very good most of the time the folks working on them are so very passionate and excited about the movie they're working on, that I feel sorry for them when the film doesn't turn out to be as great as they had hoped after putting all that hard work into it. There is also BD-Live content available, but since my player is not connected to the internet I wasn't able to access that.

On the theatrical version there's what they call "Maximum Movie Mode" or MMM. Instead of just an audio commentary, you get picture in picture video segments where McG breaks into the film to give more insight into the film and his approach to the project. There are also galleries, a Terminator timeline and other video segments that you can access while viewing the film. MMM on this film is a VERY cool feature and is one of the benefits of Blu-ray over DVD. It's much more informative and interactive than a director's commentary, and it includes a description of the alternate ending that McG wanted to do in which John Connor becomes a Terminator at the end of the film.

And come to think of it, the trailers had more going on in them than the movie itself. The major theme of the first teaser and some of the others was that Connor starts realizing this future is not the one his mother warned him about, things are changing and he has to find out why. Not in the movie though.

Michael Ironside was in THE MACHINIST with Christian Bale, and he had a prosthetic arm. Also he had a prosthetic arm in STARSHIP TROOPERS. Therefore, Michael Ironside is a Terminator, and Christian Bale is a Starship Trooper.

Unrelated to TERMINATOR NO COLON SALVATION, but are you going to be reviewing the martial arts films DAY OF THE PANTHER and STRIKE OF THE PANTHER as part of your Brian Trenchard-Smith studies? They were filmed back-to-back in my home city (Perth, Western Australia). Be amazed as Jason Blade (Ed Stazak) fights kung fu fighters in pig masks and moonwalking ninjas, all while wearing high-waisted pants. Time to face the PANTHER, Vern!

Regarding Drews article, he needs to take personal responsiblity for helping to create the fanboy movement that hollywood is mining for easy money these days. The script reviews and so on at websites like AICN are a huge part of the problem. Just let the movie get made and stop behaving like you own it!!!

Regarding the script review on CHUD, I would have preferred that they make that movie and give me a chance to see if it would work. I like my movies to take a few chances and not just pander to the audience.

Think McG has shown he has the chops for the action (regardless of gore) and setting but the whole thing felt like a bunch of cool ideas with not very much linking them. Guess thats more down to the editing and on set script rewrites.

How the hell did the machines discover time traveling? And how did the resistance gain access to it? (And learn that a terminator was being sent back in time to kill connor and therefore send a) Kyle Reese or b) a reprogrammed Arnold?) I mean they know it now, because the first three movies happened, but I want to get to the moment where Kyle Reese actually gets sent back. And other cool time traveling shenanigans. Even if this one kind of sucked.

Honestly, I dug it. It was, as advertised here by Senor Verno, totally intense when the action kicked in, and I actually thought Sam Worthington did a fine job. I did not expect to ever be writing those words, believe me. Jump all over me as you will, but this flick was one hell of a couple hours of entertainment; that is NOT something I could ever say about Transformers 1 or 2. McG handled the action absolutely perfectly in that I understood just what the fuck was going on. Plus, it looked cool as shit and was badass, overall.

Best not to give them ideas. Given that the better terminator movies converge on having a single timeline, from the first to Salvation, it means that teaming up Connors and Terminators from different timelines would put them firmly in the territory of the crappier two movies*.

As I said in the review of one of the other Terminators, I like how part GYNYFLYNYSYSIFYXYMYXY accidentally helped to make sense with all the reboots and new timelines within the TERMINATOR series: Time is just one big, messy, constantly moving blob, so now I can totally accept that John Connor is Nick Stahl and survived Judgement Day with Claire Danes because a T-800 was sent back in time to put them in a bunker, while he becomes Christian Bale in a different timeline where Skynet is Helena Bonham Carter, gets turned into a Terminator in another one where Skynet is Matt Smith, the T-1000 does not look like Robert Patrick, knows martial arts and Sarah Connor is super cute, and gets killed as a teen in yet another timeline, which may or may not the original timeline, but probably is not.

A lot of good movies come in threes. For Example, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix films, and Pirates in the Caribbean. As we were walking into the theater, and I asked my wife how many good fourth movies she could think of. Her answers were Harry Potter and Episode IV. We disqualified episode IV since it was actually the first movie in the series. You can think of just as many series that really should have stopped after three movies. Star Wars, the old Superman films, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Alien, and others.

I am a huge Alien fan. The original is probably my favorite movie of all time. None of the sequels were very good, but the fourth one, directed by a french music video director, was a complete embarrassment. When they announced that McG, who is a music video director I have never heard of, was directing Terminator Salvation, that tempered my expectations a little bit. In addition to videos, McG also directed Charlie's Angels, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and We Are Marshall- three undeniable piles of crap.

So despite the incredibly good trailers out there, I tried to walk into Terminator Salvation expecting disappointment. I walked out happy and anxiously awaiting the 5th film in the series. T4: Salvation isn't perfect but it is a good summer action flick and captures some of the compelling themes of the series very well.

Judging T4 as a continuation of a great sci-fi storyline and as a character driven tale of humanity's struggle against impossible odds, it gets a 2.5/5. The film really fails to capture the emotional connection established in the first two terminator films, where you cared about the human characters from start to finish. T4 also fails to present a compelling post-apocalyptic survival story. Although this was probably intentional, the survivalist nature of a post apocalyptic future would have added a lot to the film, and aside from a few scenes, T4's representation of the post apocalyptic genre was half-assed at best.

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