Let me start off by saying that I did enjoy Terminator Salvation – it was a hell of a lot better than T3 (not that that’s saying much) but over all it was a fun movie and it leaves the franchise room to grow. But I can’t help but thinking that the movie could have been a LOT better.

First off, as some critics have mentioned, there’s really no “villain” in the movie – just Skynet. Which isn’t a terrible thing in and of itself, but it does make the whole movie feel like more of a military flick than an action movie. Actually, it had more of a video-game feel than I expected. Again, not a horrible thing to take the franchise in a different direction, I was just a little thrown off by it.

And when your enemies are soulless killing machines, you’d think they’d be a bit better at actually, you know… killing. There’s one fight scene where a Terminator punches John Connor. He punches him! Why not snap his head off? Isn’t that what it’s programmed to do? And why didn’t they build Marcus to kill Connor? Isn’t giving him emotion and free will and choice sort of counter-productive from their anti-humanity point of view? But if they did think it was such a good idea, why would they only build one of him?

But my main complaint was that the movie needed more John Connor. There was way too much screen time given to Marcus, and I just didn’t find myself caring about him. And the movie just has Connor in a leadership role – there are people who don’t believe in him, but for the most part he is worshiped. Which is great – that’s his destiny after all, but I would have loved to have seen HOW he came to be in that position. What, he just told everyone about his destiny, and everyone believed him? I find that pretty hard to believe. (And while I’m on things that are hard to believe, why is it that if Kyle Reese dies, everyone dies? I mean, if he dies then Connor won’t exist – I get that, but why does that mean all the humans will die? If they could stop the machines and sacrifice Reese, wouldn’t it be worth it?) But the main point is that Christian Bale is a hell of an actor, and he really wasn’t given much of a chance to act. He is John Connor, an amazing soldier and leader. Period. No emotion, no punch, no drama, just a guy who hates and shoots at machines.

So will I go to see the next movie? Probably. I still say they could have left well enough alone by letting things end with the amazing T2. But at least TS kept up with the first movies’ mythology, and I’ll always like hearing the duh-DUH-dum-duh-dum – except in T3, of course.