Gains: +5
Let's see. Giant, unkillable robots. Add a point. Killing those robots in lots of action scenes. Add a point. Hehe.
Sam Worthington was fantastic as Marcus Wright. His acting was so good that he made everyone else's efforts pale in comparison.
The musical score really worked for me. It ramped up the intensity quite well. The throwback songs to previous movies was also great. The throwback lines were well delivered, too--basically avoiding cheesiness while delivering expected lines is super difficult.
Losses: -3
For the first time since he became a Hollywood superstar, I really got annoyed with Christian Bale. He delivered a solid role, but the focus on him was a bit overmuch. Instead of showing us awesome scenery, much time was spent close up to his face. It was enough to iritate me within the first 10 minutes of the movie. Methinks he's riding on an ego trip a bit too much. That's just my impression.
In all three of the other movies, the good guys were just trying to survive against an overpowered opponent. Then even worse things happen. This movie had none of the character and desperation of the others. It didn't feel like a Terminator movie.
Very few things annoy me more than powerful bad guys who are toned down in order to force the plot to go the way the writers want it to go. In this case, every time a terminator gets it's claws on a person, it throws them against the wall. These machines could just punch their fingers straight through a human, but they never do, except when it's more dramatic. For instance, in this movie, a terminator is dying, but gets close enough to scrape a large gash into John Conner's forehead, parting his skin like butter before dying. Why didn't it do that to him before? Because it would just ruin the writers' day, that's why. Weakening the bad guys just makes it look like the writers had to save the good guys. It doesn't make the good guys look more awesome or dramatic.
Final Judgement: +2
This movie suffered greatly not from hype but from horrible previews. Every single truly dramatic moment was shown in the previews. Every moment where I should have been blinded by the sheer scope of the story or the situation or the cool terminator machines had already been shown to me several times on previews. Instead of cheering these cool moments, I found myself predicting what happened in each scene based on what I knew was coming. If you've seen the preview, you've seen the movie. Everything else felt like filler. Watch this movie because you are a fan of the trilogy, not for it's own sake.
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