Terminator - Salvation... anyone cares?

[ave]

I couldn't find a thread for this one so I thought even if it was just for random ranting about the film's quality, I'd open a discussion.

It started at the 4th of June in Germany and as I really like the Terminator-series, I had to watch it asap. Ok, last night I seem to have dropped into the cinema for it but what can I say. A short summary of the predecessors:

T1: Cyberpunk post-film-noir style, dark, dirty, violent, thrilling
T2: a lot softer yet very entertaining, very honest and brilliantly realized action sequences
T3: still honest in regards of action (honest equals for me the lack of fast cuts which are one main part of the action itself, like i.e. in certain Michael Bay-movies)
TSCC TV-Show: bullshit, won't bother talking about this any more.

So first of all I think they did a lot better than in the TV show. Which is not a hard job. But there were quite a few things I was missing: A thrilling storyline (most of the time I was asking myself "why the hell are they doing what they're doing")... I mean, all the Terminator-movies had a very easy to follow storyline: There's a bad robot and a sometimes good robot. The aim is: destroying cyber-dyne, saving person X.
Well in T4 we have it like that:
* Destroy Cyber-Dyne
* There's no specific bad nor good robot
* nobody saves anybody from anything
Further critic:
* Acting was below average (Christian Bale behaved like a fucking grunt from Gears of War, took his "idol-state" simply as provided in advance, leaving it to the viewer's imagination why anyone has a "god-like" impression of the mighty John Connor)
* dialogues were pending between boring and brain-damaging. I watched it in German so I can't quote correctly, but the worst dialogue happened probably in the deportation container when Reese said like "They can't do us any harm if we just survive: Here (points at his head) and... here (points at his heart)!" :lol::lol: I mean what the fuck is this? Terminator always had its weird pseudo-philosophic trips, but this hard? And anyone who watched the end of the movie knows that it wasn't supposed to become ANY better... not a tad. The opposite happened... oh my god.

So for an action-film, I'd say there were many scenes that were quite likeable. For a Terminator-movie, it was not acceptable. Loads of ideas/images felt like one has seen them before (giant robot -> Transformers; hillbillies offending woman -> Mad Max; Bike-racing between damaged cars -> Mad Max; giant skynet-base -> Matrix) and other than in T1, T2 or even T3, the movie simply lacked a good script that let the actors develop. Nothing happened with them, they left as they had come. Weird. To sum it up: Disappointment >_<
I thought a PC-FX-logo would be a good metaphor for what T4 is in comparison with T1-3 (embodying PC-Engine).^^

Sorry for the rant, but this had to be said!:(