Once again, for the record, I *like* some awful movies, and there are some bits that are worth salvaging here, but in general.. awful. I’d say a good 70+% of this movie just should have been redone completely and we might have gotten a more polished turd than what was put out.

Some people blame the fact that this was released as PG-13. I heard a TON of bitching (at least on the former Big O and Dukes show) about this fact. But it goes deeper than that. A lot of things go into the actual production of a movie and you need the strong points to carry the weaker ones. If the writing/story, direction, effects, editing or any of the other factors are kind of weak, you really make up for it somewhere, but the only thing T:S had going for it was some pretty cool robot designs and some effects here and there, but they just weren’t enough to make up for all the other badness.

Maybe it’s that “McG“, the director and producer, has worked more on TV shows and music videos than he has on movies, or maybe it was other factors. I believe that you can take a lackluster performance from your actors and a good director can make them look great by picking just the right shots at the end. Just like I can take 1,000 photographs and if I only published the handful of ones that looked great, everyone would think I was a great photographer. But I think the process worked backwards here. McG somehow took a typically fantastic and dynamic actor, Christian Bale, and just made him look ridiculous. I mean, some of the scenes HAD to have been obviously bad and maybe Bale and company thought they’d be fixed in post production, but guess not.

The dialog was shitty. I wasn’t expecting Shakespeare but not expecting dialog on par with a Dolph Lungren movie.

The acting, also shitty. Or maybe it was just edited that way. The whole thing played out a lot like an 80′s movie. I kept thinking how this would have fit right in with the Robocop franchise. Not all the movie was like that, but a good bit of it, particularly the beginning.

In general, most of the movie doesn’t fit well with the Terminator franchise. It tries hard to fit in while trying something different than the usual terminator/good guy/person-in-distress all going on a long chase to visit someone, destroy something, prevent person-in-distress from being killed. I mean, it sort of does that because that’s just kind of how the franchise goes, but it does it in a more round-about way.

If you’re a fan of Terminator or sci-fi action flicks, then there’s something in there to enjoy. But this won’t go down as a memorable representation of the sci fi genre.

McG should be ashamed of making Christian Bale look bad, although that may be his biggest talent as a filmmaker.

BTW: Thanks to Warner Brothers for offering a free DivX copy of Terminator Salvation. I somehow feel better knowing I didn’t even pay part of my monthly cable bill to watch it.