Actually, I think it's an overrated piece of trifling *beep*
A so-called Terminator movie where the future looks peachy and the Terminators are no more threatening than your average house fly. Little children can bait and out-smart them with the ease of the Road Runner tricking Wile E Coyote. A human resistance having no qualms or bothers whatsoever about prancing around freely in the broad *beep* daylight. Everyone looking healthy and clean and fit as hell. Transformers everywhere..............Bad acting from all involved,....No horror, no suspense, no grit, no edge, no wit, no charm,..... I could go on and on with the myriad of problems with this insipid, vapid, PG-rated, castrated piece of Terminator-mythology-insulting crap all day, but there have been more than enough legit material posted on the internet over the years for me to not have to bother repeating.
Suffice it to say there would be those that would like McG's Throwanator $$$alvation, but to go so far to crown it "underrated", as if a 6.7 isn't already too goddamn high for this soulless sell-out piece of frivolous crap, is simply taking a joke too far. There are many films, some EXCELLENT films in fact, that are WAY underrated and under-appreciated on imdb by today's shallow audiences that seem to require everything to be some shiny, CGI-loaded, superhero-ish, piece of frivolity, ..........but McG's MTV-inspired pos Throwmanator Crapvation certainly isn't one of them.
It should be no higher than a 5/10. Indicative of the pure dull/mind-numbing mediocrity that it truly is.
SPIRAL OUT!........KEEP GOING!
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tb-sch
9 years ago
Mwhahaha... so true.
And the saddest thing is: they started out the right way by setting the film in the future to avoid further time travel kerfuffle. They could have found a new angle to look on what we already know. Just imagine the fear shown in the small future sequences of T1 and T2, the idea of being steadily on the run and somehow avoiding the invincible machines, just to be infiltrated by a humanoid robot at some point, the tactical background which results from that asymmetrical situation - there is so much one could do with that. Instead they invalidate everything we have seen before by having some kind of military base and some honest eye-to-eye fight. The individual robots are just little obstacles. They virtually use NOTHING of the claustrophobic vision Cameron had.
This movie might have an average blockbuster production value, but writingwise it works on the level of a bad b-movie. The result is so subpar that 5/10 would simply be not fair to movies which fail on great ideas, lack of budget or whatever other reasons one can find for great intentions gone wrong. This movie had no intentions at all, except cashing in on a frenchise and using it as a cash cow, while slowly sucking the life out of one of the most interesting science fiction ideas every created for a movie.
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sextamental
9 years ago
You're right of course, but I thought I'd go a little easy on it and say no higher than a 5. It really is a 4/10 effort tbh.
Personally I rated it a 3/10. I give two points to the hard work of the technical crew for pulling off some good visuals, and one point for Moon Bloodgood's perky tits.
SPIRAL OUT!........KEEP GOING!
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buccbacker77
9 years ago
I really could not agree more with the both of you. What happened to the horrible nuclear winter that turned each day into perpetual night?! The metallic endoskeletons firing lasers that blasted massive holes in soldiers that they couldn't survive? I still think of the atmosphere from the T1 and T2 flash forwards as one of the scariest ones ever created in a futuristic sci-fi movie. This movie just makes me sad at how badly its potential was wasted.
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greg-233
9 years ago
A common objection with Terminator Salvation is that "this future isn't like the future scenes we saw T1 and T2." It has to be remembered that this film wasn't actually trying to recreate those bleak visions. This story is showing us what happened in 2018, not 2029.
Assuming there was a nuclear winter after Judgement Day (taking into account what scientists who studied this theory knew at the time), it would have been over by 2018. The future war scenes in T1 and T2 don't have a nuclear winter, it's simply night time. (The novelisation of T2 by Randall Frakes mentioned that the nuclear winter after Judgement Day lasted two years.)
The metallic endoskeletons that fire lasers haven't been built yet, because this film is set earlier in the war, with earlier models of Terminator, earlier models of Hunter Killers, a struggling Resistance run by incompetent leaders etc. Naturally, the future in this film is not like the flashbacks we saw in T1 and T2, which are set 11 years further on. Terminator Salvation is not a perfect film by any means, but I can forgive its shortcomings. It's in my DVD collection with the first three Terminator films.
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buccbacker77
9 years ago
You clearly know a lot more about the subject than I do. Thank you for the reply!
Even after knowing that information and understanding what they were attempting to do with the story, I couldn't help but feel like I wasn't afraid for humanity's existence like in the first 2 films. The terminators weren't as threatening and the resistance had much more sufficient military capabilities to make them a formidable opponent. I really didn't care if the terminators wiped everyone out. I don't know, maybe I'm just being too picky with this movie and should try to look past its flaws. I'll give the whole series a rewatch.
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flickfix
9 years ago
This story is showing us what happened in 2018, not 2029
That just changed everything. So, T-800 is still in earlier less lethal version and Conner is still learning to be the leader he hasn't yet become? That sort of iron out a lot of wrinkles.
I wasn't taking more of these dates.
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greg-233
9 years ago
"That just changed everything. So, T-800 is still in earlier less lethal version and Conner is still learning to be the leader he hasn't yet become?"
In 2018, the most advanced Terminators are supposed to be the hulking T-600s with rubber skin. They're probably as intelligent as the aerial HKs Reese told Sarah about in T1. ("Not too bright.")
But John Connor's confidence took a bit of a knock when he saw Marcus Wright. It's as if Skynet had skipped past the T-800 earlier than it should have done. Hence John's crisis of faith, and the idea that he doesn't know his enemy like he thought he did. Or could it be that Marcus Wright and the T-800 that was throwing John around really come from 2029 themselves?
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