Let everybody eat cake

So, I finally got to see Terminator Salvation. Here are my thoughts, spoilers ahoy: 

TRAPPINGS

• The opening credit sequence was crap. And I didn’t like the Marcus/Helena Bonham Carter bit either – give me a kiss? What was that?
• I wish they had incorporated the original score more. It would have made it feel more like a terminator film since it didn’t really look like one.
• Sound was great though, I could feel the helicopter blades reverberating through my chest. I don’t know if that’s the movie or just the cinema though.
• The picture was too clean somehow. It did remind me of the look of other McG films, so I think McG was a bad choice.
• The script was lacking too. Lots of plotholes. Not enough character focus. Poor dialogue, and the editing in dialogue driven scenes was poor too.

CAST

• Sam Worthington was very good, although I noticed his real accent appeared quite a few times. I wasn’t quite so disappointed with the Marcus character as I thought I would be. He was still extremely cylon-like though.
• Moon Bloodgood’s character was worthless though. I liked her, but her actions seemed too reckless. She knew Marcus for two days, she knows what the machines are like and she still risks everything to save him?
• Anton Yelchin was perfect. He was better than I thought he would be, and I thought he was going to be pretty good. I didn’t expect him to follow Biehns’s portrayal so strongly. His diction was great. He reminded me not only of T1 Reese, but also T2 Connor, which was great.
• Christian Bale was okay, but not as effective as I’d hoped. It took me a long time to accept he was John Connor. It wasn’t just Bale though, the character of Connor was just off in this. Also, there just wasn’t enough Connor as I’d hoped. He really should have been the main protagonist of the movie, not shared with Marcus and not subordinate to Marcus.
• Kate Connor was a non-character. And I don’t know why she showed up at Skynet at the end considering how very pregnant she was.  Why was she pregnant anyway? If it’s simply so they can have little Connors in the sequel, they didn’t need to show her pregnant for that to happen, besides, I really don’t want there to be little Connors in the sequel.
• I didn’t mind the little girl as much I thought I would when she first appeared. It was a good move making her mute.
• I liked the Sarah Connor and Arnie bits. Although I wish they used the original recording, and that the CGI Arnie was a little better.

STORY

• I wish there were more character moments. Particularly with John Connor, instead of just action action action. I mean they stopped the action for that long exposition scene, they could have done it to show stuff the audience actually wants to see.
• Also, how’d they know Marcus would randomly bump into Kyle Reese, or was that a lucky fluke? Also, wouldn’t it have been easier to have Marcus kill Connor instead of luring him so different Terminators could kill him? Marcus actually actively saves Connor’s life in the river. Skynet sucks.
• It was interesting that John Connor wasn’t the leader yet, but everybody except the people actually in charge acted like he was.
• I did like that most of the movie was about Connor trying to find Kyle Reese, although it did push back  the most highly anticipated moment in the film for me: Connor meets Reese. I did hope that it would be a surprise meeting, like Connor rescued a bunch of people and Kyle just happened to be one of them, but I did like the meeting as done in this film. It was my favourite scene with Bale in the film. I love how he sees Kyle, knows him, and is all ‘what is your name?’
• I wish the story existed in a stable time loop. Little things like the machines knowing who Kyle Reese is, and Kyle seeing the T-800 annoyed me a little. However, I am a little hopeful that this means we’ll see a ‘kyle finds out John’s his son’ scene in the sequel.
• Some of the Terminators were a bit Transformer-like, and a bit too people friendly.
• Why is Connor going around telling Terminators his parents’ names? Also, why wasn’t Marcus like ‘hey your dad has the same name as this kid I just met’, rather than seemingly understanding that that kid he met was Connor’s dad.
• The heart transplant ending was stupid, but since I read what the original planned ending was, I am now extremely glad they decided to go with a simple heart transplant. Connor dying and being switched with a Terminator is about the worst possible ending they could have come up with. It would have destroyed the series for me.
• I wish they’d shown Reese going through the pockets of John’s jacket and finding Sarah’s picture. That would have been awesome.

OVERALL

• So, I loved it, but it wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been. Actually, the more I think about the film, the less I love it. It still had enough of Terminator about it to make it not completely crap though.
• Though I liked Marcus, I still wish the character had been omitted and the film focused on John Connor and the resistance. Seeing more of the power struggle between Connor and the legal leaders, and seeing how the Connor prophecy was spread, and seeing the day to day lives of the resistance fighters would have been good.
• The film seems clearly set up for more movies, so hopefully all the stuff that’s missing from this one will be in the next couple and make this film work in retrospect.