Norm's Movie Review: Terminator Salvation

Its not a bad movie. Not really. I mean, this is, after all, a Terminator movie. The acting bar was set by Arnold - we are not discussing Atonement, this is an action movie through and through.

And I was entertained with rarely being annoyed or bored, which is really pretty going. There were some cool wasteland scenes (I think the director might have played Fallout 3...) and a view of the post-Apocalyptic, war-torn United States, which was pretty damn cool. Though I have so say I am not so sure how the "resistance" keeps the machines at bay with a few magnetic mines, RPGs, Hueys and A-10 Warthogs... yeah...

But I am all for willing suspension of disbelief. I think to not suspend disbelief to a degree is simply asking the wrong thing of a movie. Yes, I know that parties are not made up of only attractive people, that most of the time there are not cars luckily sitting next to the hero that are amazingly easy to hotwire, I know guns run out of bullets, I know that silencers make a gun sound only marginally less frigging loud (about 120dB for a handgun. Yeah. It'll still wake the neighbors.) I know that falling in love takes longer than three chance encounters and forty lines of dialog. I know that the divisions between the good guys and the bad guys in the real world involve many more shades of grey, and matters of perspective. And above all, I know that the real world is not magical, there are not aliens living among us, we dont have the technology to build robots as intelligent as us, superheroes do not roam the streets, and

Why? Because I am friggin human, so even if I know I can't have those things, even if I know those things can't exist, even if I am happy with the life I have and the world in which I live, I always want to see what it would be like if there were more, if it were different, if it were magical, and incredible, and beyond what we have here and now in the real world.

So there you go, suspend your disbelief, and just enjoy the damn movie.

Until it goes and screws it all up.

In this case, the director admitted he did not really know what to do with the ending. Yeah. It shows buddy.

This is a major plot spoiler, in a way, so dont read on if you have no seen the movie or you otherwise care.

At the end of the movie they have one man, WHO IS STILL ALIVE, give a heart-transplant to another guy. Sure, the first guy, the one getting his heart cut out, was once a convicted felon who had a "second chance" for um.. Salvation... thanks to some robot friends. And the heart-receiver is the leader of the resistance upon which humanity's survival rests. But, you still cant kill a guy to get his heart, it is simply screwed up and unethical however you look at it. And somehow the director tries to sell this as one man's final redemption... is committing suicide to donate organs. Yeah... thats just screwed up, and totally killed the movie for me.