Terminator Salvation: Critic Reviews

The whole movie is a bit of a machine.

Terminator Salvation feels both comfortable with its limitations and justly proud of its accomplishments.

With much buzzing, beeping and whirring, the Terminator franchise comes to an absolute creative standstill, or even goes clankingly into reverse, with this fantastically dull fourth episode.

Terminator has been smothered in quasi-religious symbolism and primary-school philosophising.

Few characters ever say more than a couple of sentences at a time, and when they do, it's often to assert the obvious.

The latest installment in the venerable sci-fi action franchise turns out to be a straight-up war film, grim and muscular and thundering and joyless. It's the color of cement, and it weighs as much, too.

The hardware is clanky, and runs on diesel.

Between this and Star Trek, popcorn-movie reboots have hit high gear.

The digital effects are mostly quite dazzling-not just the depictions of towering marauders...but a memorably scary sequence in which a little serpentine robot that's been taken captive thrashes furiously to save its nonlife.

One could argue Connor's grim demeanor is precisely what a global disaster demands. But Bale's turn has a bass-note feel that is anti-charismatic.

"Terminator Salvation" promised moviegoers a war between the human heart and the cold, cruel efficiency of machines. So why then is it so mechanical itself, so good at repetition, so preprogrammed and clunky?

This isn't storytelling, it's programming -- inorganic matter passing for life.

Terminator Salvation is a confused, humorless grind, with nobody, from the stars to the set designers, prepared to prick its self-importance.

After scrutinizing the film, I offer you my summary of the story: Guy dies, finds himself resurrected, meets others, fights. That lasts for almost two hours.

The movie's only unmitigated pleasure is a too-brief fight scene between Connor and a naked combatant made up to look precisely like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the relentless cyborg of the first three installments.

Message to Hollywood: Stop with the time-travel stuff.

The Terminator franchise was built on thrills, imagination, narrative, emotion, believability, character development and watchability. Terminator Salvation has plenty of thrills.

It is a fast, gritty-yet-slick, bombastic modern action film filled with tortured souls. It's not exactly a gas -- how much post-apocalypse fun can be had? -- but it is often electrifying and always entertaining.

Director McG proves perfectly adept at blowing things up in interesting ways, but there's not so much acting here as there is yelling at different volumes.

I cannot completely condemn a movie that has been very competently written, directed and acted, any more than I can blame Mr. Schwarzenegger for all the woes he has encountered while trying to govern California.

Darker, grimmer and more stylistically single-minded than its two relatively giddy predecessors, "Terminator Salvation" boasts the kind of singular vision that distinguished the James Cameron original.

It's got all the heart of a demolition derby.

It's far from awful, but Salvation is close to joyless, something easily predicted when this redundant film was first announced.

How could such a great idea go so horribly, horribly wrong?

It brings me very little joy to report that this version of the popular Terminator franchise is silly, obtuse, and pointless.