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List Price: $28.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 259
Released: December 1, 2009 |
| Our Price: $14.94 |
| Used Price: $14.29 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
AFTER SKYNET HAS DESTROYED MUCH OF HUMANITY IN A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST, A GROUP OF SURVIVORS LED BY JOHN CONNOR STRUGGLES TO KEEP THE MACHINES FROM FINISHING THE JOB.
Description of Terminator Salvation (Full-Screen Edition):
Terminator Salvation restores some of the balance of huge freakin' explosions and emotionally compelling plot to the Terminator series. Set entirely after the nuclear assault that left the computer system Skynet in control of the world, Terminator Salvation follows John Connor (Christian Bale) as he grapples with both murderous robots and his superiors in the resistance, who aren't sure they believe the prophecies that Connor is destined to save humanity. Into the midst of this struggle tumbles Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, who would later star in James Cameron's Avatar); the last thing he remembers was being executed in prison decades before. Baffled, he falls into company with Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, Star Trek) and a mute little girl, who soon get captured--but Wright then meets and bonds with Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood, Eight Below), a resistance fighter who remains loyal to the confused Wright even though Connor suspects he's not what he seems--or what he believes himself to be. Terminator Salvation isn't the astonishing synthesis of action and feeling that either The Terminator or T2 were; the plot threads are poorly woven and fray completely in the last third of the movie. Despite this, Terminator Salvation has at least two skillfully orchestrated action sequences that will get your heart racing, and Worthington’s beguiling mixture of toughness and vulnerability gives his relationship with Bloodgood a genuine pulse. It's imperfect, but compared with the hollow carcasses that most action movies (including Terminator 3) turn out to be, it's worth seeing. --Bret Fetzer
Terminator Salvation (Full-Screen Edition) Reviews:
Slam bam thank you ma'am 
2009-12-16 - Lots of action and thrills here, if not enough decent acting. But that's hardly the point of this franchise, and on that level T4 delivers. The script is ok, and the basic concept is a good one. If all you want is some high-tech whiz-bangery, this should do it.
Disconcertingly, at various moments in the film it's not easy to know if Christian Bale is man or machine; his somewhat wooden style is almost uber-ironic here. But McG continues to deliver the goods, visually, though this one feels somehow hollow, despite excellent effects. T4, while better than T3, never approaches T2. But then again, James Cameron has rather more of a sense of humor than McG.
Worth watching after you've seen T2 three or four times, perhaps.
Nothing great, nothing horrible
2009-12-14 - While lacking the blend of action and humanity that made the first two movies so good, this is a decent film as long as you don't go in with ginormous expectations.
The plot is a little jumbled, the movie takes some time to hit its stride and the acting (especially by the leads) is plastic at times, but there are some good action sequences and enough going on that I was able to power through some wicked tiredness to watch this at 1 a.m. the other day.
I particularly liked Marcus Wright's plotline, which is unfortunately undermined by some subpar acting on Worthington's part. I kind of enjoyed the fact that John Connnor isn't head of the human resistance; after the last two films one expects him to be the honcho. It was cool how John used his computer know-how in a few situation, harking back to T2 when he hacks into the ATM. The Kyle Reece storyline and the actor who plays him are really cool. That could almost have been its own movie.
There was a lot I didn't like, or at least a lot of things I wish the filmmakers had re-considered:
-- The numerous obvious nods to other moves are rife: Marcus emerges screaming and muddy from a subterranean labyrinth (Shawshank Redemption). John Connor's radio broadcast's to the at-large resistance fighters (Apocalypse Now). The final scene when John is rigging the nuclear power cells is both a cop of the end of Aliens and the first Terminator movie. A machine collects humans and holds them for transport (a theme from War of the Worlds that also looks very much like Spielberg's from a few years ago).
-- Marcus emerges into a world he doesn't know, and yet he seems completely at ease. No freak-out over the destruction of humanity? No concern over robots hunting humans with giant machine guns?
-- There are A-10 Warthog planes pulling maneuvers no A-10 Warthog could ever accomplish.
-- The machines and the humans are in an all-out war. The machines are actively hunting the humans and yet on several occasions the resistance is seen staging raids out of giant army bases and airplane hangers full of equipment. Wouldn't that be a bit of a tell for the machines?
-- It seems awfully easy for John to infiltrate the Skynet headquarters and do as he pleases. What, no perimeter guards as there would be at any central command base?
There are a few other qualms I can't think of right now, including more nods to more movies and things the characters do that I personally would not be doing if I was being hunted by bloodthirsty robots. But overall, it's a pretty enjoyable movie that I would probably watch again.
Save Your Money! 
2009-12-14 - If you want to watch a cartoon, buy "Snowhite and the Seven Dwarfs" or some other Disney animated feature. Or if you want to wander through a game landscape and shoot at robot spiders and flying machines, buy the "Terminator:Salvation" game. This DVD should be required to have a warning label (like those found on cigarettes.) To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement. The animation was of poor quality and the lip-synching for the two characters was non-existent. Even the old Japanese Gozilla and Mothra flicks were done better.
Instead of displaying the film in one episode, it was broken up into 6 episodes -- each with beginning and end titles and credits. Hey..I really enjoyed watching them over and over ad nauseum. If the episodes were different, it might have made this thing more interesting but it was one chase scene after another with the spiders and flying machines shooting endlessly at the two human characters...and never hitting them. It reminded me of those blackplotation flicks where the bad guys shoot at the black hero and never hit him while he shoots back and never misses the endless supply of bad guys.
Was I disappointed? Absolutely! Why did I give it only a "One-Star" rating? Because nothing lower was available.
See the YouTube family guy sketch first.
2009-12-14 - Here's the really short review: It's 2 hours of your life you'll never get back. Pretty much what they did was just repackage "Transformers" and release it again. So if you liked that mindless film . . . then you're a 3 year old on a sugar high and will watch anything with lots of flashing colors and loud noises.
In a nut shell, this is 2 hours of mindless CGI action sequences. Then the plot is clumsily bolted onto the computer generated sequences and basically zip-ties the movie together. (Which it fails to do.) And the acting? Yeah, that was just dreadful. It was like scenes randomly cut out of a pathetic melodrama.
Were I watching this by myself, I would have turned it off half way through and found something else to do.
So here's how I made it to the end of this train-wreck: Before watching it, my friends and I got on you tube and found the video of Christian Bale freak out on Peter Griffin from family guy. The whole way through the movie we were blurting out lines from that sketch. "Do you want me to rip your [...] lights down?!?" response: "Those are Christmas lights; I put them up so everyone would be happy."
So we'd all start laughing and try to forget how terrible this flick was.
Unusually good! 
2009-12-13 - After seeing so many really-bad and so-so "blockbuster" movies recently, I was extremely pleased with this one. Highly recommended. Oh, the blu-ray treatment is top-notch too.
