Dir.: McG

Starring: Christian Bale, Sam Worthingon, Bryce Dallas Howard, Moon Bloodgood, Michael Ironside and Anton Yelchin

Looks spectacular, features more than commendable action set pieces, visual effects and world building with some beautiful animatronics and a generally good cast but by GOD, the story is a veritable porridge of incomprehensible macheta! Allow me to give you a step-by-step approach to SkyNets’ so-called Final Solution in this movie, the entire plotline that this film draws from.

Step 1: Resurrect Marcus as a human-machine hybrid who thinks he’s still human, still allies himself with humans and apparently has not been calibrated to enact SkyNets’ plans

Step 2: Release Marcus into the world and just let him mosey around without a clue, having no idea what the diddly-bot is going on and meanwhile have other Terminator units spot him and kill him without identifying him as an ally, therefore jeopardizing SkyNets’ own plan.

Step 3: Hope that Marcus will just so happen RUN into young Kyle who SkyNet somehow just knows will become Johns’ father and rather than have Marcus programmed to slay Kyle, therefore ensuring John is never born, instead Marcus trucks along with Kyle.

Step 4: Send Terminator units out to capture Kyle while Marcus is trying to protect the boy, and rather than have Marcus kill him THEN, the units bring Kyle and Marcus back to the concentration camp to be used as bait to entrap John Connor.

Step 5: Have Marcus once again wander around aimlessly, meeting up with John and his allies and not do a single thing to harm them. Additionally, Marcus tells John Kyle is at the SkyNet base along with a bunch of other survivors waiting to be either be killed or put to work. Then there is the fact that that SkyNet foolishly assumes John will go in, by himself, to retrieve his future father who is way too YOUNG to be his father, I mean what the HECK…

Step 6: Set a cunning trap in the base by sending one single, solitary, unarmed, starkers as a jay-bird Arnie-Bot.

Step 7: SkyNet tells Marcus its entire plan, therefore permitting Marcus to bloody SAVE John and help blow up the SkyNet core.

…. …. ….

No wonder SkyNet damn well loses the war!!!!!!!

Same to you, mate.

That being harped, I never thought Terminator Salvation was as insidious as its accolades will have you believe. The story is terrible, the character of John is misused and Marcus Wright, while not terrible is terminally boring for the most part, but visually it is a Terminator film I feel all of us were waiting for and it had a good sense of time and place and in all honesty it isn’t afraid to be different, success relative of course.

And for the love of Pete, John, kiss your wife properly, you’re not in church, you’re about to go off and potentially die.