DVD-Terminator Salvation

When I first saw The Terminator all the way back in middle school, I immediately fell in love with the concept of a single minded killing machine that would not stop until it was destroyed or it accomplished its mission. The one "virtue" of the terminator was that it was relentless. It would not stop. Ever.

Terminator 2 disappointed me when I first heard that Schwarzenegger would play the good guy, but he redeemed the movie with humor. Robert Patrick played the relentless role every bit as good as the first movie. It worked.

The wheel fell off the franchise with Terminator 3. They fucked up the storyline with that one, and I didn't give a shit about a bitch terminatrix. But I knew that there would be a movie set in the future to tell the other side of the story. So, I had high expectations for Terminator Salvation when it was announced. But it is on the level of T3. We could have lived without this flick.

TS does not fail on special effects or acting. It fails on story. The story is dumb. Here's how the story should have gone. We begin with Judgment Day. The machines take over, and it is everything humans can do to survive the relentless killing machines. It should be an epic with battles and humans dying. You have to believe it is utterly hopeless. But John Connor exhibits the same relentlessness. The guy never gives up. He keeps coming and coming and coming. He never stops. This is how he becomes the leader and the winner against the machines. It all comes down to a final showdown with Skynet with the machines sending back terminators in time as a final straw move to save themselves.

We don't get this story in TS. We get a filler movie for some future flick. The result is a suck ass movie. You watch and simply don't give a shit about what happens to the characters. The movie also doesn't seem to fit at all with the movies that came before. Basically, they slapped together an excuse for eye candy with a plot that was made for straight-to-dvd. I was disappointed.

I am done with this franchise. Hollywood needs to understand it all comes down to story. People want great stories first and foremost. Hollywood doesn't get this.

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