McG gets 2 things right with the movie. Hiring Moon Bloodgood as a pilot (god she is hot) and the Post-Nuclear War scenery. Everything else about the movie, is, well, so so.

I have watched all the Terminator movies so far, and they were like awesome (even the 3rd one was good enough). All the previous movies had these snippets of future war scenes which always made me think, ‘wow man. It would be awesome if they ever make a movie just about this war’. Salvation is supposed to do that, but in spite of everything being in place, it simply loses the plot somewhere.

Where does it go wrong? To start, why are the Sky-net (the computer system which is bent on destroying humans) Robots, depicted as morons. There is this nice scene where a T-600 (a predecessor to T-800) is trapped and hangs upside down. To get down, what it does is shoot its own foot (literally!) and letting itself fall without its toe. Well, it could have let itself fall, if it had aimed its rail-gun just a bit higher, and shot the rope which was holding it up. Duh!! Also, most of the Robots resort to punching and taking ages to kill a human, while, we have seen in Terminator 3, that even the simplest robots can get rid of a human in seconds. What’s up with that? I do agree that if the robots were so lethal, then there would be no movie at all, but after showing them as lethal in the first triology, how can you depict them as losers now. Also, why is the time travel not discussed at all? Of all the things, Time Travel is an integral part of the terminator movies.

Also, the casting which looks good, does not really do its job. Bale as Connor, just shouts and shouts. I am guessing, he just did not have enough time to prepare for the role. This being a future war movie, there are a number of supporting characters, but thanks to lack of character development, you forget every character as soon as they are out of the screen. Except for Kyle Reese’s character. Now, that is one guy, who we have met in Terminator 1, and he is really, really cool. Come to think of it, he is actually cooler than Connor in this movie. Another character you might remember, after she is gone from the screen, is Blair Williams, only because she is played by Moon Bloodgood who is just hot ( even though the reported nude scene of her’s has been cut to get a PG-13 rating. Bummer . Hopefully, it will be restored when the DVD gets released ).

However, McG does manage to insert some shout-outs to the old movies. Kyle Reese says the line, ‘Come with me if you want to live’. There is Arnold (or his graphic image inserted on some one else’s body). A shot to shot copy of the T-800 walking on stairs from the first movie. He also keeps things in cannon. Judgement Day happened on 2003, Connor’s wife being pregnant (it was told in the third movie that Connor couple are gonna have kids) and so on.

Every thing is well and good, but one thing which seriously screwed up the whole movie experience was the Marcus Wright character. No, nothing is wrong with him. It is just that, till the intermission, it is not revealed that he is actually a robot. I (and million others), who have watched every pre-release trailer/clip/tv spot of the movie from day one, already know he is a robot. You know how? Well, those marketing geniuses working for WB made the big revelation in the trailer itself. Not only that, every big explosion, unique robot sequences and everything cool in the movie was simply showed on the trailer itself. I have seen several other movies (Spiderman 2 Trailer, for instance) who show the entire movie in the trailer, but with Marcus Wright being such a turning point character for the movie, they should have kept this secret, well, a secret. I am sure, if I did not know that he was a robot, and found out he was, while watching the actual movie, I would have liked the movie better.

Well, at the end of the movie, there is a sequel hook (Connor says, the fight will continue), but I doubt if it will ever get made. If not, I am sure McG will be blamed for that. Still, the visuals he has captured are awesome. If I ever had an idea, as to how the world will look if it went through a nuclear holocaust, I am sure the movie gives the right picture into my head. The deserted land, the destroyed buildings, the wreck of metal, the survivor camps. Also, the design of robots, awesome. Self propelling robot-bikes with built collision detection and avoiding protocols! Who comes up with stuff like that? McG has got the visuals and the robots 10 on 10. Unfortunately, he does not rate high on other things.

2 out of 4.