10 Reasons You’re Wrong About Terminator Salvation

3. It's Not Just Another Dumb Blockbuster

When do audiences fail to cut a movie some slack? When it€™s a Terminator movie.

Released in the same year as Big Dumb Movies GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Friday The 13th, Streetfighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li and Gamer, Terminator Salvation had at least one thing going for it - it hadn€™t exhausted its plot after the first 20 minutes. Indeed, anyone who has a problem with Salvation€™s storyline is invited to make sense of Revenge Of The Fallen, which somehow combines an alien machine hidden in Egypt with minstrel humour and a robot dog humping Megan Fox€™s leg.

The irony is that while audiences were turning their backs on Terminator 4, they were going to see Transformers 2 in droves, and apparently weren€™t offended when, while promoting Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Michael Bay admitted the picture was €œkind of a mess.€

Bay blamed the writer€™s strike for the film€™s weaknesses, and on a side note it€™s perhaps worth mentioning that Salvation was worked on by a number of uncredited writers, including Paul Haggis (Casino Royale), Shawn Ryan (The Shield) and Jonathan Nolan (The Prestige). Asked why he thought the movie failed commercially, McG said it didn€™t have enough fun and described how a sequel might work.

€œIt will be more of a chase movie with a new Terminator,€ he said, uncannily predicting Terminator Genisys.

Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'