I promise I have no personal interest in either of the above bands.

And mostly I’m just interested in hijacking Pete’s Facebook status and Twitter account.

For music samples check out:

The Silence Kit – www.myspace.com/thesilencekit

Bleed Radio Bleed – www.myspace.com/bleedradiobleed

So Termination Salvation is fine I guess. It’s a hard film for me to be enthusiastic about for whatever reason. McG incorporated some ideas that I think are pretty inventive and other ones that don’t make much sense to me.

Bryce Howard and Moon Bloodgood as is typical of these types of movie have very little to do in the film. Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin and Sam Worthington are stuck carrying most of the acting load and I think they get by.  Though for some reason Worthington kept reminding me of John Cena in the Marine and you’d think that would be a bad omen. Christian Bale’s role is less than you’d expect from John Connor and I spent the whole film wondering what the intense emotional scene was that led to his famous diatribe.  I think I missed that scene. Must have blinked.

I think part of the problem with the film is its lack of a specific villain. Skynet is a vague entity that sends lots of robots out to kill or round up humans. Unlike the previous Terminator films, there’s no specific new terminator more dangerous than ever actively stalking the humans throughout the entire film aiming to kill them. When the baddest terminator in Salvation finally shows up, I had to wonder why he was attacking John Connor alone given the setting of the fight.

And while I think the idea of the character Marcus in the film is kind of interesting, in the end I just never felt that invested in him as a character. Plus they ruined the twist surrounding his character in the film’s trailers. Thanks Warner Brothers’ Marketing department. You guys rule.

The film’s nods to the previous Terminator movies came across to me as heavy handed especially a particular musical cue. Though I did enjoy John constantly consulting audio cassette tapes left behind by his mother for guidance.

A large part of the appeal to this particular Terminator sequel is that we finally get to see mankind’s future war versus the machines that has been discussed since the first film. A major problem with this angle is that the future war was just done better on the Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles. In the tv series, the humans were living underground like vermin fighting for their very lives. In Salvation, somehow the humans are maintaining air fields and utilizing futuristic planes. If the humans could create such planes, why aren’t the air fields prime targets for the even more futuristic flying robot Skynet terminator-plane-weapon-thingies? There’s a vague reference to the rebel base being surrounded by a minefield and some sort of magnet but it hardly seems like it could stop an aerial assault. Salvation’s humans are just too well armed for my tastes. Actually seeing the future war reminds me of finally seeing the Clone Wars in the Star Wars prequels. How much of a let down was it to realize the clones were all Boba Fett’s dad and basically prototype storm troopers? The future war was just better served by being shown in short glimpses in the previous films rather than under the steady spotlight of Salvation.

Some of the effects in Salvation are stunning but just as many were distractingly poor in my opinion. In the climax of Salvation, I think you get a little of both amazing effects like we’ve never seen before and cheesy CGI all in the rendering of the Terminator that Playmates at least is calling a T-RIP. One other highlight is that the giant f-ing robot terminator in Salvation is way cooler looking and easier to follow visually than any of Michael Bay’s stupid gymnastic Transformers. I’d like to think in 2009, however, we’ve moved past the point where we as an audience are impressed by the animation that studios can conjure up on a Mac.

And I’m no doctor, but the science behind the film’s concluding moments seems mighty convenient.

So in the end I think Salvation is hands down the worst film in the Terminator franchise, but it’s still better than a lot of science fiction films. It’s kind of a shame Salvation came out a week after Star Trek though, because it pales in comparison.

Also, I think trying to write basically spoiler free reviews of films is an effort in futility.