jencat | Starring John Connor as... Batman!

So: Terminator Salvation. I've only been waiting... ooh, about a year. And honestly? I don't get that hyped about particular films so much these days. The Trek mania didn't really kick off until the reviews came in and the preview day hit. But T:S was always different...
Well hell. I adore T1 obsessively, like bits of T2 (when it's not laying on the bombastics), we don't talk about T3 and was really rather fond of T:SCC to the point where I spent a lot of Salvation trying to tie it all into the timelines they set up.

And then both Empire and Total Film kinda liked it, which was encouraging, but hey, tonight was preview night...
Most of it was kinda fun; some of it was incredibly dumb (whole exchanges of dialogue I was just gritting my teeth and praying for them to be over because the wording was awful) and the action sequences were pretty damn awesome.

However... this ain't a Jason Statham flick, and I'm not exactly watching for the big bangs, impressive as they were. I did love it when the big Transformers terminator showed up (and yes, McG, you so totally stole that right outta Transformers. Right before they ripped your trailer style off completely, i'm guessing.) and the noise actually makes your teeth hurt. Fabulous stuff.

And OMG Anton Yelchin. That boy did so good! And yep, you could tell he'd been doing his homework, to the point where you can absolutely see how he grows up to be Michael Biehn's version, and it's all the more heartrending for it. The Sarah Connor version of him (somebody Jackson?) never quite worked, and got overshadowed by Derek mostly, but this one was absolutely perfect.

No Derek though (damn you, timelines!), which felt odd because we've seen a lot more of the future world in Sarah Connor than in the films, so... The weird bit was, Moon Bloodgood ended up being a dead ringer for Summer Glau (right down to that good old thousand yard River Tam stare) and then Sam Worthington started looking likd Brian Austin Green, and it got pretty damn disconcerting.

Oh yep, Sam Worthington. Note to any American casting directors: learn what a frickin' Aussie accent sounds like, and then work out why your actors can't seem to drop it long enough to do an American accent (and Russell Crowe is also included in that!) because it's incredibly distracting..! He's pretty good, but the accent was way, way off quite a few times, and it drags you out of the story every damn time.

It's hard to criticise it properly, dammit, because they kept slipping up in different areas at different parts - but mostly it was not fleshing out the damn characters enough. Poor Bryce Dallas Howard got about a dozen lines (and apparently performed a heart transplant off camera, wtf?!) and gawd, what was it with the not mentioning the pregnancy thing?? It's just.. not normal behaviour, not in that situation. What with that and wearing full make-up in every scene (although she did look absolutely radiant) it kinda felt a tad off. Perhaps it got hacked to bits again, because they really didn't get much screen time as a couple (and the scene that caused the MegaBaleMeltdown ended up all of a minute long)... Gah, really did want more of that. It wasn't like they were really together in T3 at all (yep, apparently I'm only watching for the ships. Go figure.)

And Moon Bloodgood's character veered all over the place a bit, from funky fighter pilot to damsel in distress to jailbreaker, but it didn't feel consistent (and then she started annoying me).
Helena Bonham Carter's little cameo rocked though, she is so exceedingly cool...

Christian Bale played it a la Batman, obviously, which was actually totally fine. I'm absolutely happy with the fact that John Connor grows up to be Batman, and I'd be even more thrilled if they'd given him a couple more things to do than shout into radio mikes an awful lot (although loved the scene where he hijacks the bike!)

The homages and shout-outs were all pretty spot-on (and raised the only laughs for the whole film - not exactly lighthearted, is T:S).. and now I'm rambling. But it's niggling me a little that watching the fantastic Hotel Rwanda last night had me gnawing my fingernails down with tension that barely registered in T:S. Go figure.
Also, the ending sucked. It just did. Apparently I'd stopped caring about Marcus some time back so couldnt' give a stuff when he cheesily donated his heart (which, hello, had just been crushed but the other terminator to the point where Marcus died, no?). Was it supposed to be a 'OMG Connor has a terminator heart!' moment? because that just didn't work. Lord knows where they're gonna go with T5, if we get it...