My name is Ross and im 26, I like travelling, reading, music (mainly metal),going to gigs, photograp...
My name is Ross and im 26, I like travelling, reading, music (mainly metal),going to gigs, photography, painting, hiking, and cinema.
Cheers to everyone who has read my reviews! Comments are always welcome.
Member since:12.06.2009
Reviews:179
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First of all let me start off by saying that Terminator 1 and 2 are amongst my favourite films, and I even found T3, whilst not of nearly the same calibre, to be an enjoyable enough film. I've always found the Terminator universe's combination of nuclear armaggeddon, giant machinegun-wielding metal skeletons, tense, fast-paced plots, timetravel, fantastic gun battles and car chases and apocalyptic landscapes strewn with the skulls of untold millions to be utterly intoxicating, so it would take a seriously bad film to curtail my interest in the franchise. Enter pretentiously named hack-director "McG" and his team of Hollywood cretins.......
Terminator 4: Salvation is set in 2018, after Skynet has triggered the nuclear near-annihilation of mankind, and picks up the story of John Connor, leader of the human resistance, played here by the ever dull Christian Bale, who mumbles and grunts his way through the whole film as if on heavy medication. In a plan to reset history, the machines capture a young Kyle Reese, (Anton Yelchin)
who was sent back in time in the first film to save Connor from a terminator hell-bent on removing Connor from history by killing his mother before he is born, but rather than simply killing Reese, the machines keep him alive, in order to try and lure Connor out of hiding. This doesn't make any sense, as simply killing Reese would theoretically cause Connor to cease to exist, but I suppose time paradoxes aren't supposed to make sense. That said, T4 has plenty of other plotholes that you could fly a Hunter Killer through all the same, such as Skynet's main base being equipped with keypad-controlled doors and PC style computers that its machine-driven intelligence would have no need for whatsoever, and the convenient presence of a giant pile of nuclear-powered terminator batteries left on a table just waiting to be blown up.
T4 introduces another main character in the form of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) who, prior to the apocalypse, gave his body over to Cyberdyne Industries upon his death by execution for murder, and awakens in the future as an unknowing Skynet cyborg. Marcus's alleigences still lie with the humans however, and he spends the film helping Connor to rescue Kyle, in spite of the Resistance's attempts to kill him.
Like all the other characters in the film however his character is bland and uninteresting: ironically for a film about saving Humanity, T4 is utterly devoid of soul, spark, -anything even slightly resembling emotional investment. It is a vacuous, unengaging series of cobbled together big-budget, CGI-saturated action sequences that feels as if it was itself put together by automatons. I suppose the action sequences are visually appealing, if you can stomach CGI, but they are frequently so over the top as to become boring and unengaging, as the film tries and fails to make up for its woeful plot and dialogue and piss-poor acting with endless computer-driven pyrotechnics.
The plot drags along painfully from the start, punctuated by appallingly bad dialogue and action scenes stolen from other, better films. In fact, if you were to remove all the scenes that have been lifted from elsewhere, you would be left with practically nothing: The Resistance leaders hiding from the machines in a submarine and the snake-like CGI 'hydrobots' are lifted straight from The Matrix, the giant CGI robot with its motorbike companions is straight out of the Transformers film, and the whole human/machine ethical question was handled far better in films like I Robot and A.I. The film even shamelessly steals from the plot of Spielberg's War of The Worlds remake, in which giant robots capture live humans and ship them off in huge metal containers to be "processed". We get to see T800s overseeing lines of ragged human refugees: all the robots are missing are German shepherds and swastika armbands. This blatant Nazi allegory was tiresome enough when Spielberg did it, here it is just pathetic.
T4 even steals from its own franchise, the ending taking place in a factory full of molten metal and showers of sparks, just like in T2. Hell, it even shamelessly copies the scene from said film in which the protagonist tries to hold off a steadily advancing terminator with blasts from a shotgun before finally dispatching it by engulfing it in molten steel.
In short then, this is a film made by a talentless Hollywood hack with zero ideas of his own. And I'm franky astonished that anyone over the age of 12 could feel anything other than disappointment and and anger towards this derivative piece of Hollywood garbage.
T4 is a good example of all that is wrong with Hollywood today: it has largely lost the ability to make good films and has fallen back onto mindlessly recycling old classics without any understanding of what made them great in the first place. To quote a newspaper review I read recently, "The war between men and machines is over- and the robots of Hollywood have won".
Summary: Yet another derivative worthless, cash-in on a once-great franchise.
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Production Year: 2007 - Science Fiction - Director: Francis Lawrence - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Dash Mihok, Will Smith, Salli Richardson, Willow Smith
Jul 28th, 2009
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