Terminator Salvation
Terminator Salvation further solidifies the decline of James Cameron's original series. The combination of poor writing and mediocre direction are never a recipe for success and that is easily demonstrated by this film. The cast are completely wasted in their roles; Christian Bale has nothing to do, Bryce Dallas Howard is barely in the film, I could go on. There are also a lot of poorly implemented references to the previous films that fall incredibly flat. The filmmakers don't seem to understand that the repetition used in the first two films served to play on the time travel theme inherent to the franchise, which isn't present and barely mentioned in Terminator Salvation. Also the appearance of Arnold as an incredibly fake looking CGI terminator was especially awful.
All of this could have been forgiven if Terminator Salvation brought anything compelling to the franchise, but it fails at every turn. I think the biggest problem here is that it's much more interesting to talk about the coming future war and trying to avoid it, as they did in the previous films, than it is to actually fight said future war. To cap it off, the action really isn't that great. There is one set piece battle with an enormous machine that was cool, but other than that the action sequences are very pedestrian. Don't bother. 2/5
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