One of our most popular new features here at Screen Rant has been the movie spoiler discussion post, where people can feel free to talk about all aspects of a film without having to worry about spoiling it for others. You can check out our Terminator Salvation review but if you want to talk about the movie after having seen it I suggest you do so right here.
So discuss Terminator Salvation below to your heart’s content!
Tags: terminator salvation
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105 Comments
By the way since the movie story is about a post-apocalyptic world why there was no radiation mentioned ??
Steve,
Thats a GREAT question.
Didnt Connor say the plant was full of NUCLEAR POWERED fuel cells for The Terminators ?
I was wondering ,
Why was was nobody affected by radiation from the fuel cells
When Connor set off the explosives?
all they had for protection was an OPEN helicopter.
@Gary and Steve
That’s two great questions!
What about at the beginning when they infiltrated the skynet facility. They first dropped a small nuclear device with troops on or close to the ground. Then the facility self destructed with what appeared as another nuclear detonation. Connor had to be within a couple of miles in an open helicopter. Apparently McG and the writers never heard of radiation poisoning.
@Sharp
I’ve had that nickname since I was 13 and I am 34 now. Most people in my community don’t even know my first name. LOL!
@Gary, Steve and Cookie, lol, that was just overlooked like the most of the script.
Let’s not forget the EMP burst from the explosion at Skynet, would have disabled the chopper and it would have crashed.
The way the resistance was living above ground was also unrealistic…
I guess we should be thankful that Mcg didn’t give Reese a third eye or a baby arm growing out of his back. They all had such white teeth too,,,
Let’s just forget the radioactivity.
“The Road” should give us a more realistic vision of a post nuclear war world…
It won’t be pretty.
I dont hae a link,
But Chud has a good story about the original script for this film.
Check it out.
WOW….It’s getting REALLY ANNOYING seeing people post excuses like “it’s just a summer movie….” “it’s a FUN movie…” “it’s a blockbuster…” “it’s science fiction” to justify huge plot holes, pathetic writing and sub-par acting.
Who, EXACTLY, has ordained that a movie, meeting one or more of the criteria above, CAN’T have good writing, decent acting and a logical plot? I’ve read the same excuses for Transformers over and over again, and although I read the words, I have yet to see a single poster justify their trite logic on the sub-standard films. Seems to me that they use these excuses, because they themselves KNOW the problems with the films, are are such franchise fans, that they will not achnowlege the problems, even to themselves. Another great excuse is “lighten up, it’s just a movie….” Well DUH. Then I guess we should all stop critiquing movies as of RIGHT NOW, and just toss money at expensive schlock, expecting nothing, right?
For all the “I personally hated the way Connor reacted to Arnold coming at him. He should have had the facial expression of someone that just crapped his pants.” comments. The arnold Terminator in T2 & T3 was John Connor’s “friend”, not his near indestructle enemy! Not to mention how many Terminator machines John faced already before bumping into the “new” Arnold Terminator.
@ Charles Darwin
Sometimes theres not enough screentime to explain all the plotholes in a movie. Nit-picking details will usually take away from any movie experience.
Please rank all the terminator movies. For me as follows
1.T2
2.Terminator
3.Terminator Salvation
4.T3 Rise of the Machines
Does anyone know if james cameron got asked to input or was even offered to direct Salvation? I think he could make another great movie. His futuristic scenes were amazing. Cameron to direct the next one!!!!
There are mind-boggling things to think about with reese being john’s father in T1. If reese hadnt travelled thru time, then john probably would have been fathered by someone else. So John wouldnt have looked like edward furlong, and could well end up looking like bale. Also he could be more or less of a physical specimen so maybe he never becomes leader of the resistance. With future timelines being constantly changed by interfering timetravellers, the writers have license to do almost anything and get away with it.
It seems all movies get ruined by trying to appeal to their target audience. Which is teenagers. Star trek is going for a whole new audience. So i think salvation does the same. In both cases i think they’ve ruined it for the hardcore fans. Trek was overly soppy and like a cowboy film in space. I was surprised at how depressing salvation was allowed to be but all these “blockbusters” these days are nothing new. Just safe and as little risk as possible
1Terminator
2T2
3Tereminator:salvation
@charles Darwin
well because some people actually know how to just turn off the logical part of they’re brain and enjoy some action… some fake stuff. Not every movie is for everybody and not every movie will be liked by everyone its as simple as that. Dragonball evolution… i know lots of people hate it on here… guess what i know alot of people who liked it and what to see sequels becuase of it. Some people don’t question it because as soon as the movie is done they just don’t care till they’re watching the next movie and/or they have way more important things to do. Now this is just my opinion but that whole we should stop critiquing part… well you can if you want to… but ill still type my opinion on here because at the end of the day i believe in my opinion more then what somebody else thought of it…
P.S. Just because opinions can be proven wrong doesn’t mean that i’m just going to abandon my opinion.
I personally feel cheated out of the original ending. It pisses me off that everything was changed because of a leak (though I heard this ending apparently tested better with audiences) because really right up until Marcus said “Give him my heart” it was still open to the original ending, and really in the midst of watching the movie I began to feel like it would have been the better ending.
First of all, addressing the heart transplant issues, it’s true: performing open heart surgery in the middle of the desert is not going to go well at all, assuming of course that John’s immune system doesn’t destroy the random heart for which the odds of a good match are low. Then of course is the fact that John would have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of his life so that his body doesn’t reject the heart; I can only imagine that THAT resource is going to be hard to come by.
Then above I read a post about how the Marcus character was good because it showed him training Kyle and preparing him for the resistance in a way that Kyle mentioned John training him in T1. It would make sense that Marcus would continue that bond after becoming John, and would be interesting if Kyle didn’t know that John was in fact Marcus. This “not being the future his mom told him about” might then make sense because he’s not experiencing the future his mom forewarned him of; rather, Marcus as John will experience the future that John was waiting for.
With everyone complaining about Bale’s performance, and him not being someone to connect to: it’s because the character you’re anticipating all along is in fact Marcus, whose personality is the John Connor we are waiting for. Bale was playing the “real” John Connor, whereas Worthington was playing the John Connor we keep anticipating.
But then there was a leak, and so I must accept the heart transplant ending…
Ok, I finally saw it. I would say, probably what Vic gave it, maybe half a point less, maybe, 3/5 seems kind of fair though, I’ll give it that half a point for effort.
First of all, a lot of the “twist” was predictable. They never had an explanation for why Marcus was “rogue,” seemingly not under Skynet’s control, that was the first give-away. Second one was when they said Terminators can receive signals from Skynet, then why wasn’t Marcus being “updated” with mission orders on the go? Last, was skynet allowing Marcus access to Skynet and even allowing him access to the computer, even enough access to disable the perimeter defense (which seemed pretty weak in my opinion, but I’ll get to that in a minute). It just seemed way too convenient, I knew something was up.
But then there is all of the missed opportunities that these “cold and calculating” machines allowed to happen. Like when they identified Kyle, why didn’t they just kill him? Since it was all a trick all along for Marcus to think he’s leading Connor to Kyle, they didn’t REALLY need Kyle to be there, especially the coordinates they made Marcus feed to Connor was just to that T800 anyhow…
Then even after they thought they’ve got Connor, the Terminator goes into Kyle’s holding cell and then puts him on some weird machine… Why didn’t the Terminator simply punch a hole through Kyle or crush his head or something? Same can be said about Connor, how many times was he punched or hit by the T800 and he didn’t die?
The chase scene with the mototerminators was half ok, half stupid. The making them slip on the oil and the gas not exploding when shot stuff was pretty cool, but I don’t know, the whole idea of mototerminators just seem so gimmicky to me.
The Harvester, eh, I don’t know, it seemed like it was so good at destroying moving cars in one part of the scene, then all of a sudden when it came to the main characters, they took their sweet time lighting that tanker on fire and the Harvester basically just stood there letting them get away…
The few things that I thought were ok and made me think that at least they tried, are the few throwbacks to the originals. Like the opening credits was fashioned after the opening credits of the first Terminator movie. The little dialogue in the beginning of the film was like a hybrid of what Linda Hamilton described in T2 and what Arnold described in the car ride about the history of Skynet. So at least they were paying attention.
Anyway, back to what I mentioned earlier, Skynet seemed awfully poorly defended. No barbed wire, no electric fence, just a burm and one sentry gun?? Seriously? And even if Marcus disabled that sentry, shouldn’t the factory where Terminators are built be crawling with Terminators? Yet Connor got all the way inside without resistance? Another thing, if the objective was to kill Connor, then couldn’t they have simply had the sentry gun not be deactivated and killed Connor while he’s going up the burm thinking it’s deactivated? They didn’t HAVE to wait until he was inside freeing the other captives…
And why Connor completely ignored the Terminator to try to revive Marcus…
Oh, and when they first broke through to the Terminator plant part, they landed with a bunch of Terminator skulls, already assembled. Yet when you see them putting the skull on the skeleton, they are assembling it piece by piece while on the torso… Which one is it?
And those “power cores” are right out of T3, so that’s automatically gay.
And why is it that Skynet doesn’t seem to care about the resistance’s base? I mean, they got Skynet’s attention by blowing up one car in one scene, then in another scene they blow up an entire forest and Skynet doesn’t seem to notice…
And how did that guy “knock out” Marcus with the butt of his gun? Isn’t he a Terminator??
I don’t know, as an action movie, it’s ok, entertaining, but it’s nowhere close to the first two. Oh, and the music sucked. It was too “cinematic” and doesn’t give the sense of impending doom like the original score did… But then again, neither did the movie. In the first two Terminators, the Terminator seemed relentless, the movies were tense because you felt that the main characters were constantly in danger. Yet in this movie, there was so many times where it seemed like Skynet didn’t even care about the resistance at all. They had big open airfields, people walking around and standing around outdoors without a care in the world, sitting around rooms talking and testing, it seemed more like a Humans taking the offensive against the Terminators movie than a humans trying to stay alive against Terminators relentlessly trying to hunt them and kill them.
The action scenes themselves were pretty good though, wasn’t too disorienting like some others are where everything is really zoomed in and the camera is moving around more than the characters are…
As far as the actors go, Common’s character was completely useless and didn’t even need to be in the movie. Anton Yelchin was alright, although I kept imagining him with a strong Russian accent, got Star Trek to blame for that, Christian Bale was pretty ok, better than he was in Batman, and Sam Worthington was pretty good, better than Christian Bale, at the very least gave a much more memorable performance than Bale did. Bale was ok, but was a bit flat compared to Worthington.
The ending… the whole heart transplant thing was pretty bad, I mean, how did they even know if Marcus was compatible?? Also, they did a heart transplant out in the open just like that? I mean, seriously. And that very last scene with the helicopters flying off into the sunset, does anyone else think that looked like a video game? It was REALLY bad CGI, seriously BAD…
I think they got Arnold’s face in there pretty good though… When Connor tried to smack him with the butt of the rifle they got Arnie’s facial expression pretty well I think. Looked like they were trying to simulate that scene in T2 in the mental hospital after the chick with the arm cast tried to hit him.
And it just didn’t really make much sense how they can develop a Terminator as advanced as Marcus and yet they are just now developing the T800. And I don’t get how they kept Marcus’ memory in tact, I mean, donating his body to science, I doubt that mean they will keep his brain alive without any brain damage for so long before Skynet starts to fight a war with the humans.
The movie had A LOT of plot holes and a lot of problems, but there were those things that makes me believe that McGriddle tried his best and that he is actually a fan of the originals, so I’m willing to accept it as a popcorn action flick. I would have had more of a problem with the movie if it seemed like the makers of the movie didn’t even watch the originals and were just trying to cash in on the name and didn’t give a crap or even ATTEMPT to keep to the original.
Attempting and failing isn’t nearly as bad as NOT attempting and failing…
I would say 2.5/5 honestly, but 3/5 for the effort. And duh, 1 and 2 would have gotten 5/5 out of me both, T3 1.5/5 .5 of that just because Arnold got in shape for the movie, so really 1/5…
d/rew wrote:
“Please rank all the terminator movies. For me as follows
1.T2
2.Terminator
3.Terminator Salvation
4.T3 Rise of the Machines”
ditto for me.
Well, I saw it Saturday and I can’t disagree with any of the complaints, but I don’t find myself thinking any of that matters.
As far as movies go, it wasn’t great. Lots of holes and pathetic writing. As far as action goes though, it was, in my opinion, brilliant. From beginning to end, I couldn’t turn my brain off, unlike Wolverine, where I fell asleep (yeah, I fell asleep in the movie theater).
Then there was the audio to go with it. My roommate and I both came to the conclusion that we’d be inclined to just say, “eff this,” if we heard that monster of a machine after us. The only thing more chilling then the sound of it was the siren in the unload zone. I’m obviously destined to die.
Overall, the movie failed, but the effects and the sound effects were more than enough for me. While I wasn’t exactly pulled in from the actors (thanks to the writing, not their performances), I was pulled into the story though a sense of dread and desperation.
Oh, forgot one thing, what is with all of the speeches? It seemed that every 15 minutes they had to have some kind of speech or something, mostly from John Connor. And in the little mini speech Connor had with Marcus, why was Marcus so ready to accept that Kyle Reese is Connor’s father? If he told me “You killed my father, Kyle Reese” I would have been like “oh, I met some kid with that name, maybe he’s Kyle Reese Jr.?” But instead, he simply tells him that Reese is in Skynet, without even a second thought about the fact that Reese is younger than Connor and Connor is calling him his father. And him mentioning his name seemed awfully convenient too, he didn’t mention his mother’s name in that speech…
What should have been done is:
1) Reese should not have been a target by Skynet, only a resistence fighter
What the heck was Helen Boheim there for? She wanted Marcus to donate his body; why? What possible use would she get from that?
2) Marcus Wright should have been a Terminator who regains his humanity after meeting Bloodgood. Then Skynet would realize they would have to come up with a Terminator without these failings
3) Connor should not have had the fight with the T-800 unit. That unit was able to crush a human skull and would have made mince meat out of any human in a second
4) The T-600 units with rubber skin should have looked a little more human to show that they were the first infiltration units
5) Where were the dogs?
6) Like many have said, Skynet seemed to have lost its ability to defend itself. Why weren’t they using those little flying trackers as defenders?
7) Nuclear blasts don’t seem to have the same affects on humans as they do know
Even with the flaws, I enjoyed the film.
LOL, I turned to my friend when Connor first went back to camp and was like “hey, where are the dogs??” So we had the same reaction there, lol.
Ken the batteries on that radio gave out just at that very moment,,,,
Also on the dogs, They prob didn’t need dogs yet because the T-600’s were obviously not fooling anyone.
They wouldn’t need the dogs until the full skinned T-800’s made it past the intensive bobwire and land mines…
The cg work was great, the robots moved like robots almost like T1 did. BUT, the trailers showed the best parts except for Arnold. The plot felt like it was ripped out of The Matrix 2. I honestly liked t3 better than this. Everything was rushed or really didn’t make any sense.
I just saw this movie and read all of the posts here, I agree with them all… But I have a question… Would there be any circumstance where you can make a 4+ Film franchise centered around time travel that doesn’t have gigantic plot holes? Seriously, I think this movie is more a victim of logistics than anything else. This “Franchise” should have stopped at T2 and you would have simply had an epic 2 films… than maybe follow up the franchise with a movie taking place years after Connor lead the resistance to victory and a new threat is presented. that way you bypass all the plot holes.. Maybe have some future time travel as opposed to past time travel or something along those lines.
Not really, T2 was technically impossible given the facts of T1, but they were able to work around that and make a believable movie. The whole time travel paradox will NEVER be defeated in any movie dealing with time travel, but they definitely can make more movies without it being full of holes. Plot holes to do with the paradoxes of time travel can be forgiven, but this movie had a lot of holes within its own timeline and story arc. They could have very easily made a movie of the beginning of the war with the machines and John Connor’s rise in the ranks of the resistance, and made it more of a human story and it would be good. What I never understood is why Kyle Reese was in Skynet’s wanted list in the first place. Do they somehow know that Kyle Reese would eventually be sent back in time to become the father of John Connor? And even if they knew, how do they know John Connor will lead to the defeat of Skynet? They only knew that at the very end when they were about to be defeated and when they sent the Terminators back in time. Did they somehow communicate something back in time to current time Skynet to let them know to kill those two off??
@JohnnySep, this franchise was doomed when they decided to make it into a trilogy,,,
Add a inexperienced director and 20 WB executives and whalla,,, this is the result…
When Cameron made T1 and T2, he had control of the Terminators. The direction of the story was his, he made the call,,,
Unfortunately the franchise was sold and now there’s too many chefs in the Terminator kitchen and the food sucks!
Its a stretch but,,,,,,,
Ken the only explanation (I can think of) for Skynet having the info on Reese and Connor is before its defeat in 2029 it sent a Terminator (prob a (T-1000) back to infiltrate Cyberdyne in 2003 with the knowledge of Reese and Connor. I’m sure it also had the technical specifications of what became the revolutionary cyborg components of Marcus…
I think that it was obvious where they found Marcus was more than likely a post apocalypse Cyberdyne research complex.
But who knows this plot hole has not been explained yet?
That’s what I came up with…
Yah, I thought of that too, but we might be giving it more credit than it deserves, lol.
Haha you could be right,,,,,
Oh, can’t believe I forgot to comment on this. The one thing that Terminator Salvation scored BIG on is all of the A-10 Thunderbolt II (Warthog) pr0n. Seriously, I think this was the best showing of the A-10 in any movie to date. Everytime they were on screen I was giddy like a teenaged girl watching Twilight. They had the correct sound effect for the GAU-8 30mm cannon, they had them kicking major robot arse, man they were cool. I think Terminator Salvation will be the reigning A-10 movie champion for some time to come. It was kind of weird that it seemed like the A-10 was the only aircraft the resistance had, but hey, I’m not complaining. I don’t think there is any aircraft better equiped to take on Skynet than the A-10. I mean, all of the Terminator vehicles like the HK’s are basically just roving or flying tanks right? Then what better than the world reknown tank killer to turn them into scrap metal??
I finally saw it, and it was decent. It wasn’t great, but decent. I just read an article where McG talks about the ending that had to be changed because it was “leaked” on-line. What we knew already was that it was rumored that John Connor dies and then Marcus offers his body, which is then overlaid with John Connor’s features. Many people then speculated that the leader of the Resistance would then be a Terminator. The way it was scripted and shot was Marcus (as John) shoots and kills Kate Connor and Kyle Reese, thereby resetting everything. THE END! Talk about a major Up-Yours to fans and also to Executives (who no doubt would like to do sequels). It would definitely be a ballsy move, but honestly, I don’t see how it could have worked.
I read that too, and that ending would have made even less sense. First of all, John Connor had a lot of rank in the resistance, Marcus is a new-comer. If John dies, why the heck would they simply hand over all of Connor’s influence to Marcus? Shouldn’t the next highest ranking person take over as the leader when Connor dies?? Makes no sense…
The new ending is kind of cheesy, but I like it better.
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