Terminator: Salvation

As I was watching this, I was like "Be careful what you wish for." Because Terminator fans always wanted to see the insides and outs of the war between humans and machines that we got frustratingly few glimpses at in the first two movies. And as the movie was going I was just not feeling it. I feel like seeing the actual war itself is making the franchise into something less appealing and special than it previously was. I loved watching the characters do their damndest to prevent this horrible future in the last couple of movies. A movie set in the horrible future itself loses a LOT of the franchise's main selling points, especially stuff like the culture clash comedy between the past and future.

And that's all true. But about 2/3rds of the way through it turned into an interesting meditation on the nature of free will, and humanity, and choice, and I freaking love that stuff, so what the hell, I'll give it a positive review. It's never going to set the franchise on-fire, or live up to the second film, but the truth is I liked the sci-fi moral dilemmas present in a film that probably didn't need them.

A lot of criticism about the movie from hardcore fans might have to do with the PG-13 rating. People might have thought it watered things down too much. I don't agree, and the reason I don't agree is because I don't think either the second OR third film actually deserved R-ratings. They were really no more gory than this and essentially were rated that because of F-bombs, which are things that only trigger R ratings because the MPAA is unfathomably corrupt. Out of the four Terminator movies I'm seen, I believe the only one that deserved an R rating was the first. This movie essentially Nerfed nothing.

Arnie couldn't star for obvious reasons at the time, but it's good the Governator and the filmmakers came to an agreement about an unbilled cameo. Really, the franchise wouldn't be the same without him.

I don't much care for the premise of the film. But it's a pretty good film that went some intriguing places with that premise, whether I liked it or not. ***1/2.