The fourth film in the Terminator franchise had a lot to live up to. I am an avid Terminator fan, I saw the first one when I was about 9 and have been hooked ever since. Without a doubt I’d give the first two films 10 stars in any review, Terminator 3 would probably get 9 or even 10 if I was in a good mood. However, Terminator Salvation just wasn’t “perfect”, and that’s why I don’t like it as much as the first three. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of good points to this movie without a doubt, but for a franchise that’s been big on little details, they seem to have slipped a little on their latest masterpiece.

Within the first three films if there was ever a mention of any details regarding the future, no matter how small they were, these details were backed up in either that film, or cleverly in one of the other films as and when we (the viewer) were shown future events. However, in Terminator Salvation small inconsistencies have started to slip in, which never happened in the previous three. For example from ‘The Terminator’ we know that Kyle Reese spent a lot of time in the machines “concentration camps”. In a conversation with Sarah Connor, he implied he was one of the people kept alive by the machines to move bodies etc, used for manual labour rather than executed like the rest of the humans. In Terminator Salvation we see Kyle as a young man where he was taken straight from the queue into a holding cell after they recognised him, and then almost immediately rescued by the resistance.

The resistance uniforms weren’t quite right either; they’re a navy blue colour in the first 2 films, not black. There was also a new character, who is a human/machine hybrid. This technology was never mentioned before, but I suppose it was needed for the main plot line and also, I have to admit, that not everything that had happened in the ensuing 30 odd years could have been explained in the first movies! There was however a CGI Arnie in Skynet which was a very good touch as we all know that all machines within each version of the T800 series looked identical, so it makes sense that there is more than one ‘Arnie’! However, here I have to jump on another omission that I think would have been excellent should it have been included: the writing/directing team skipped over the first generation of T800’s which had rubber skin, and went straight onto showing us the realistic cybernetic organism ones.

As mentioned above, I have to comment on the CGI which is truly fantastic, I know there was a lot of CGI in the film, but I honestly only noticed it about once, everything else looked 100% real which, if you think of the subject matter for a terminator film, is very impressive!

Another thing that was very clever was the way that the story progressed in getting rid of the central command ready for John Connor to assume his position as leader of the resistance. Another small detail that I think was a great addition to the film was that, if you cast your mind back to the original films you’ll remember that John Connor has a huge scar across his face, and near the end of Terminator Salvation we get to see just how he got this scar. We also find out why Kyle Reese attaches a sawn off shot gun to a piece of string and hangs it below his armpit in the first scene of ‘The Terminator’. It’s the little details that I think make great Terminator movies, and this film was actually full of them. They did miss a lot out and also as I mentioned there were a few inaccuracies which was a shame. But on the whole this was not a bad movie at all, I’m just judging it by my high ‘Terminator’ standards!

So overall I’d definitely recommend watching this film, it’s not as good as its predecessors; however it’s well worth a watch. I give a good 7 out of 10 for Terminator Salvation. Missing out on the last 3 stars because of the small inaccuracies that were really important to a Terminator geek like me!