Who's Salvation-ing Whom?

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It's often said that it's more fun to write about a terrible movie than it is a great one. Or at least a lot easier. Problem is, you have to sit through the terrible movie first in order to write about it, and about a quarter of the way through Terminator Salvation I found my mind wandering off to all the funny things I could say about the horrible train-wreck of a film I was watching but then the movie kept going and going and eventually I just began to wish I were dead and my brain would leave me the fuck alone.

Horrible, horrible, horrible. What a horrible movie. Not an ounce of tension in the whole damn thing, and every line of dialogue was like a punch to the face of stupid. It was as if the writers got as far as describing the action and everybody decided that was good enough and that was what the characters should speak. "We need to blow this thing up!" "We are going to go to Point A and blow that thing up there!" "ARRRGGGGHHHHH!" "NOOOOO!!!" "It is beautiful."

It's tempting to lay blame on the actors - I was physically embarrassed by nearly every line-reading as if my guts were crawling up into my lungs to smother me dead - but they had no characters or dialogue to work with. Christian Bale was just unfathomably bad and y'all know how much I like him, but like my friend whom I saw the film with said afterward - it makes sense now, his angry explosion on set. He just wanted to get the fuck outta there, and I would've ripped anyone's face off that was getting in my way of escaping any quicker too.

Bad bad bad. I could go on and on but this movie stole enough of my life as is, so let me point to one specific bit of the story that poked me in the eye with its total brainlessness. Spoilers. So we're in the middle of a Terminator factory. Terminators everywhere! Behind enemy lines! And the Terminator Brain or whatever that thing was supposed to be (Matrix 4.0) knows it has all of the people it wants to kill right there in the center of it. It's wise to em! Millions of robots at its disposal! So it sends a single Terminator after each of the protagonists, of course. One after John Connor, the other after Kyle Reese. Two total! And then when those two are beaten, whee, they can escape! Apparently that powerful stool of doom that Sam Worthington threw through the Terminator Brain Thing's screen killed it or blinded it's hologram eyes so it couldn't do anything else. Apparently.

Ugh just dumb dumb dumb. And that's only one example and by that point I was so bored anyway I was wishing the theater would collapse around us all due to the constant thundering noise and crush us in the rubble, the end. If fucking only.
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