Terminator: Salvation. Who saw it? Who also thinks it sucked?*mild spoilers*

[shadowknows69]

I'm not against reminginaings of a classic movie and this wasn't billed as that, but it kind of cherry picked plot points of the mythos from the previous three movies and totally disregarded others. In fact it almost seemed like it didn't acknowledge T2 at all. Almost as if it took T1 as its main backstory and then the last half hour of T3, whch there was really no logical segue from. And then they added all this other canon destroying shit. I wanted to see John Connor building the resistance from his bunker the day after "Judgement Day", we get some of that but the story starts farther into the war than I would have liked. The effects were pretty but CGI still for me, with the possible exception of what WETA did with Lord of the Rings, wasn't as impactful as Stan WInston's wizardry with practical effects and no budget on the first one.

[Buzz Clik]

1. 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yikes.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/terminator_salvation/

[shadowknows69]

2. Honestly I don't go by RT much, but I had read some bad reviews

Wwhen it comes to my popcorn movies I'm easy, but I do like my sequels to have a certain continuity to them. There often seems to be major breaks with canon that almost seems to just be lazy, like all the writers had to do was actually watch a scene from the original more than once to get a repeated speech right.

[BlooInBloo]

3. It didn't suck, but it wasn't great either. Bale is an idiot for saying it was the best of all.

[shadowknows69]

4. Bale wasn't given enough to do.

He's an exeptional actor when given the right script and he was little more than macho eye candy for this. So much character development is lost in action films these days in lieu of another car chase. James Cameron proved you can have both. The reason old farts like me still go to these things and suffer the half hour of commercials and trailers before hand is because we loved these characters in our youth. I just expect a little more out of the writers. I blame mostly the studio process these days of getting one main script and then letting five or six different hacks script doctor it to death because of the daily brain farts of uninvolved producers.

[shadowknows69]

5. What actor doing a sequel isn't going to say that in the Press junkets?

They're probably contractually obligated to lol.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. No, he's not an idiot - he's just trying to sell his product.

One real quick way to stop being a hollywood actor is to start dissing the movies you star in.

[NashVegas]

17. See My Post Below.

Seriously. I think that the producers knew they had a stinker on their hands and released that tape to put pressure on Bale.

[Redneck Socialist]

6. It was spectacularly dumb

I mean I wasn't expecting much going in, but it failed to meet even my low expectations. I'd give it one and a half thumbs down.

Save your money, rent it if you're really, really bored some night.

[semillama]

8. There was only one scene that was completely awesome

I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but anyone who has knows which one I am talking about.

The character of John Conner was really poorly scripted, and to be blunt, not very well portrayed by Bale. Of course, a lot of that has to do with the script and directing by McG, who did a pretty poor job with the whole film.

Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese was the high point of the film for me. He's a good actor. If they weren't going to start with the rise of Connor and the resistance, then they should have focused on the development of Kyle Reese and his role in the resistance. A trilogy arc focused on Reese with a final movie that ends with him being sent back in time would have been great.

Frankly, I thought the TV series did a much better job of doing justice to Terminator than this movie.

[Longhorn Liberal]

11. I agree, the focus should have been on Reese...spoilers...

Part of the mystique, to me anyway, of John Connor (the resistance leader, not the kid) in the first two movies is that we only see him for 60 seconds. I am intentionally disregarding the third film. He's supposed to be a larger than life heroic figure, mankind's last hope, following him around for an hour and a half only serves to make him what he is, a regular human being.

Rant and SPOILERS of Salvation follow:




I don't like to be too critical, after all I'm sure very few of us have actually made a full length Hollywood feature and I'm sure they tried their best, but is it that hard to hire a person or two to read the script and catch the st00pid logic? I understand this is science fiction, but it doesn't have to be fantasy.

Only TWO functional Terminators guarding the effing Terminator factory? The human resistance helicoptering hundreds of miles into Skynet territory without any trouble from the HKs? Skynet, being able to think at 90 petaflops and in control of everything, not being able to figure out that Marcus has disabled one of his tanks (and maybe more)...maybe John Connor is infiltrating Skynet city along the path of disabled tanks. And above all, if you are trying to kill your mortal enemy SNAP HIS NECK...DO NOT keep throwing him around. Does Skynet really want to kill Connor or not?

[YOY]

20. Which Scene?

The big dude?

The Gubernator?

[4lbs]

9. They should have done whatever was required to get James Cameron to do this one.

McG just went for whiz-bang special effects, reminiscent of the Transformers movie(s), but without the heart and emotion (ahem) of the first two Terminator movies.

Even Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was better than this one.


One *** SPOILER ALERT ***




Major plot and logic hole:

So, SkyNet kidnaps Kyle Reese to lure John Connor. Doesn't SkyNet know that Kyle Reese is Connor's father? It has to, because why otherwise would it have kidnapped Kyle, unless it knew how important he was to Connor? Couldn't it have just killed Kyle Reese then, before Connor sent him back? Then Connor would never have been born right? SkyNet wins!

But no, nothing logical like that from a *smart* A.I. like SkyNet ....

[shadowknows69]

10. That was pretty bad

[mackerel]

12. A friend of mine saw and he said it was too loud.

[shadowknows69]

13. Completely, good to hear it wasn't just my theater, I couldn't hear the dialog half the time

Which considering the rest of the film I probably wasn't missing much,but yeah, I've been to less loud rock concerts before and that isn't an exageration.

[4lbs]

14. It seems the new crop of movies need to have the speech frequency range boosted by several dBs.

I have to do the same thing at home on my A/V receiver for whatever I regularly play or record on cable or DVD.

The speech audio range is the 1 KHz band from 200 Hz to 1200 Hz. Boosting it by +4 dB or even +6 dB often works well to make it audible over the background sounds or "action sounds" in the other channels in the movie.

So, in my A/V receiver, I have it boost all center channel audio (which is usually speech, for Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS) by +6 dB.

Theaters may need to start doing the same thing, as action movies contain sounds that can drown out speech most of the time.

[shadowknows69]

15. I've dabbled in sound recording and producing radio commercials

Used to be my profession and I thought it was just a lousy sound mix all the way around.

[NashVegas]

16. Now Maybe You'll Have An Idea Why That Christian Bale Tape Was Leaked

So McG and the producers would have someone to blame it on.

That's just a hunch on my part, but it's a pretty strong one. One of the screenwriters planted a negative Bale story a couple of months ago, too:

Christian Bale forced writers of Terminator Salvation to rework the script to give him a bigger part - as the British actor was determined to play the iconic role of John Connor in the sci-fi franchise.

Bale was originally offered the lead role of Marcus Wright in the upcoming sequel, but the Batman star turned the part down - insisting he would only play Connor in the film.

The character featured in previous Terminator movies but was only set for a brief appearance in the latest outing.

So writers were ordered to revamp the script to give Bale a bigger role.

Terminator Salvation scriptwriter John Brancato says, "A lot of the work was integrating (Connor) into scenes... and having that feel integral and sensible, as opposed to grafted on just because there was a star in the part."

The new movie hits cinemas on 21 May.

http://us.imdb.com/news/ni0779316/

[Iggo]

18. Sucked royal.

[Fearless]

19. I liked it. Nothing special, but not bad.

[YOY]

21. It didn't suck. Check out any Uwe Boll flick for suckage.

It wasn't the best thing I've ever seen but it wasn't worse than mediocre.

[mackerel]

22. It was almost as good as the first one. Hardly noticed

the 2 1/2 hours.

[Onceuponalife]

23. I loved it

Anton Yelchin (perfect choice to play Kyle Reese) and Sam Worthington were terrific. Parts of it are pretty terrifying if you can only suspend disbelief (which, let's face it, you have to on all movies of this type). And I love what they did with Helena Bonham Carter.:popcorn:

[and-justice-for-all]

24. Bale is a yum yum and I like the movie...

not great but not horrible..