My Review of Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation came out on DVD last week and I finally got a chance to see it.  I missed it when it was in the theater.

I am a big fan of the Terminator franchise, including The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, which was an excellent show that, unfortunately, got canceled.

The first movie was cheesy, for obvious reasons.  It was 1984.  What wasn’t cheesy?  But the premise was interesting and it is a classic.

Terminator 2 was a great movie.  The 80s cheese factor was gone.  There was a nice balance of moving the story forward and action with good special effects.  And, hello, a Guns N’ Roses theme song didn’t hurt either.

We’ll just forget the third movie ever happened.  I suppose it moved the plot a long, but in order to do so, we had to sit through a boring, awful movie.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which ran for two seasons on FOX, was awesome.  The show took the franchise in an interesting new direction.  There was a lot going on with the time line.  They really pushed the idea of time travel and explored the many worlds theory.  The show was great sci-fi for people who like to be left thinking and trying to wrap their brains around what just happened.  (That would be me.)

When I heard about Terminator Salvation, the fact that I was watching a really great Terminator TV show gave me hope that the movie would not leave me totally disappointed, as the third film had.  But the sorry state of action films these days left me skeptical.

It turns out, I was not the least bit disappointed.  I thought the movie was great.  It had a fair amount of action, but nothing that was forced or over-the-top and out-of-place.  There was a lot of emotion in the film without the gratuitous sexual content, as is often the case when a director want to cover up a lack of talent in acting and/or writing.  The story line was interesting and the fact that it takes place at the very beginning of John Connor’s leadership of the resistance, left room for yet another sequel.

For Terminator fans, as if there are any who have not yet seen it, Terminator Salvation is definitely worth watching.