Terminator: Salvation (2009) 3/4

For all its bad press, in some ways this is the best Terminator film.  Terminator 2, for all its glorious special effects does still look a little dated today and liquid machines are nonsensical no matter how much I leave my senses at bay.  And I'd rather sit through the last 45 minutes of Return of the King than sit through Arnold being lowered into the lava any day.  If I want that much melodrama, I won't put on an action movie, I'll watch Coronation Street.

The first Terminator film had a lot of imagination and introduced us to the Arnold we know and love.  But it had some very slow scenes and the special effects were atrocious.  The stop motion and model ship stuff in the flash-forward scenes are the best examples of this.  You can't even blame the time period or the budget for that because, come on! It was the 1980s, not the Ray Harryhausen 1950s.

The third film wasn't too bad.  It had Arnold at top form and the car chase with the picker truck was awesome.  But the scene where Arnold is trying to stop himself from attacking Nick Stahl should make even the most forgiving action fan roll their eyes.  The film did however patch up some of the continuity problems from the second film.

And now there's Terminator: Salvation, the fourth in the series.  It has great special effects and acting and a pretty decent script too.  This time at least it didn't feel like it was written by a twelve year old.  The first three films left a lot of hard-to-connect plot lines and Salvation meshes them as well as anyone could have hoped.  When it came to discussions of time travel I was able to suspend my disbelief with a lot more ease than with the first films.  And I wasn't left feeling ripped off from lack of action sequences.  So well done, McG, you've pulled off a hard feat.