5. Machines do not operate or think like humans

At the end of the movie Marcus is deep in the Skynet HQ and he stumbles upon what can only be described as a futuristic keyboard which of course he can interact with easily by touching it. This is a huge pet peeve of mine when it comes to portraying machines in movies and a trap that almost every filmmaker seems to fall into. Let’s get one thing straight: if there are autonomous machines that are self-aware they are not going to be interfacing with each other via verbal communication or tangible objects such as keyboards. It’s just common sense that they would adopt some form of wireless communication. The same thing happened in the Star Wars prequels with robots verbalizing every single order they were given. Yes, it’s done so the audience can understand what the robots are thinking, but we don’t need to humanize them to do it. Why would a robot take the time to take the command they already comprehend via binary then encode it to some verbal format, speak it to another robot that in turn then has to listen to what the other robot says and decode the verbal message back into a format it can natively understand? Battlestar Galatica and the first two Terminator movies are the only movies/television shows that seemed to have avoided this.

4. We find out about Marcus’s fate too early

This is more of a screenwriting note than anything else. Wouldn’t Marcus’ character have been much more interesting had we not known that he was donating his body to science? Cut the whole scene at the beginning with the terrible dialogue between Sam Worthington and Helena Bonham Carter and start when he wakes up and runs out muddy and naked into the night screaming. Then, we would really only know something was different about him when the land mine sticks to his leg, unless you were paying attention to the fact that he never ate or drank anything.

3. Machines hit hard

At this point in my life I’m fortunate enough to say that I have yet to be hit in the face with a lead pipe or aluminum baseball bat, which is exactly how I’d approximate getting punched in the face by a Terminator would feel like. However, I’m fairly positive that if I or any other person were to get hit in the face by a metal object that not only would I be knocked out or dead, my face would be crushed. But not John Connor. No sir. He takes the punches, to the face mind you, and keeps on truckin’. You may say that it’s all in the fun of an action movie and that I should just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the movie. Which I genuinely tried to do, until John Connor got stabbed with a 4 inch thick steel pipe through the sternum. At this point I figured, well, he’s dead, that’s it.

Nope.

He limps out of the battlefield and remains conscious until the end of the movie. Perfect.

2. John Connor needs some humor in his life

Christian Bale really needs to learn how to smile. I feel as if he hasn’t genuinely smiled at anything in his films in years and frankly it’s beginning to get a bit annoying. We get it, you’re dark and brooding, but as the audience we need to see some humanity in you. Talking as if you just swallowed a class of sand is not going to fly anymore. Some say that in the post-apocalyptic world there’s nothing to smile or laugh about, but if anything, people would be finding more excuses to laugh and have humor. If you’re not laughing when your life is literally rock bottom and you are facing an unstoppable force that never sleeps or gets tired and has only one directive: to kill you, then when the hell are you going to laugh?

1. James Cameron didn’t write or direct it

When the man chiefly responsible for the originality and creativity in a franchise leaves it’s rather hard to follow in his footsteps. When you’re talking about someone who is essentially a titan of science-fiction movies like James Cameron, you really have some huge shoes to fill. In a way it’s not fair to any director who has to step up to the plate following Jimmy C., and hell Jonathan Mostow did a sub-par, if not decent, job with Terminator 3 (at least as far as the action sequences go). Although Cameron seems to be the only one capable of pulling out a proper Terminator performance out of Arnold as the T-800 in Terminator 3 acted completely different than the models featured in T1 & 2. Even McG had some nice moments in the film, such as the helicopter sequence at the beginning of the film. But it’s really the writing here that took the biggest hit from Cameron’s absence. James Cameron has a knack for creating compelling characters and relationships. Terminator was a love story between Kyle and Sarah, Terminator 2 showed a mother trying to protect her son at all costs, with the son trying to find a father figure in a machine who eventually discovers the value of human life. In Terminator Salvation I didn’t care about anybody because there were no relationships. Sure John Connor’s devotion to saving Kyle Reese was strong but we never see or know why. In fact, nobody in the movie seems to know why John cares so much for this kid because it’s never spoken about. Nobody seems to know that Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. Had I not been told that John and Kate were married I would have never had any other indication that these two were more than colleagues. If these characters would have been fleshed out a bit more, the film could have salvaged it’s humanity, which in the end is the biggest reason this movie flopped.

Bonus: Deceitful Trailer

I guess I can’t really blame the production house that put out the trailer for ‘Terminator Salvation’ as they did their job well. Unfortunately they did a better job than the editor who put together the final film, which poses a problem as it created much greater expectations than the film was able to fill. Watching the trailer for the first time got me so excited, those simple tones at the beginning from Nine Inch Nails, Marcus Looking down finding out what he truely is, the music rising up at the peak of the trailer showing shot after shot of glorious action. I guess there’s a reason they did not include much dialogue in the trailer: nobody would want to see it.

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Tags: Christian Bale, Danny Elfman, James Cameron, McG, Moon Bloodgood, Sam Worthington, Terminator