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Okay, okay, fine. It's a summer movie. I get it. If you want character development, go see a Pixar movie. This is about action, action, ACTION!!!!! Ugh. One of the more depressing feelings in summer movie-going is when a shot in a trailer gets you all excited for a certain scene or sequence and when you see it in the movie you're like, "Oh, that was it?" That pretty much describes my feeling throughout watching T4. Instead of constructing actual fight sequences with arcs and tension they (I don't know who to blame at this point so I'm going to point my finger at the to the entire production) just thought up various kinds of machines and various ways to blow them up. Once again, we can look back to something similar in Star Trek and the fight scene on the platform. That was just some skydiving and sword fighting. But since there was an arc to the sequence, some suspense and not to mention the audience's relative investment in the characters, this scene cost a fraction of any of T4's and was vastly better than all of them.

Okay, so we've got no plot or character development and bland, pointless action. T4 sounds like a predictably disappointing summer movie to me. This was how I felt halfway through. But after the second half, I felt downright violated. The level of head-banging-against-the-wall-unbelievable-nonsense that goes on in this film finale will infuriate me until Ghostbusters 3 comes out. Why, for the love of Jim Caviezel, would Skynet send one, ONE, terminator after John Connor, when HE'S INSIDE THEIR HEADQUARTERS!!! We've just sat through an hour and a half of ginormous flying machines killing masses at will. Where were they? Machines don't sleep (but do they dream of electric sheep?) Then, on top of all this, you have the randomly cast Helena Bonham Carter waxing expository like the penguin chattering on about world domination as Adam West uses his utility belt to escape from being dropped into the tank filled with electric eels.

All they have to do is kill John Connor to win the war. I just....why didn't they.....it's..... just shoot them....why are the hallways lit......arrrrggghhh!!!! Simply put, the finale of this film was the equivalent McG sitting on a pile of money, flipping off the camera, consumed in diabolical laughter. KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

But miraculously, just when things were at their bleakest, good managed to prevail. This degrading experience has a silver lining. The collective movie-going public righted the wrong they committed when they gave Wolverine an $85 million opening and refused to accept T4 as entertainment worthy of their hard earned cash. Thanks to you, America, this film's failure will finally put the Terminator franchise to rest rendering it safe from evildoers like McG once and for all.

And now with my mind at ease, I can look back at Terminator Salvation not as the movie from which I garnered a welt by repeatedly slapping my forehead, but rather as a glorious $200 million trailer.

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