McG, director of particularly insufferable music videos and equally insufferable films like Charlie's Angels, recently proclaimed to Entertainment Weekly, "The old McG is dead!" You see, he wants to be taken seriously. He wants to do something mature. He admits that "I have a body of work that would not suggest that I am a credible storyteller" before imparting the timeless words of wisdom, "Before you can be Johnny Depp, you have to do your time on 21 Jump Street." This gives you an idea of the quality of the dialogue in his movies.

It is true that with Terminator Salvation, the fourth entry in the venerable Terminator franchise, McG tries to do something a little different. Where his old films were flashy and stupid, here he's learned to bleak up his color palette so that this one is instead gritty and stupid. I suspect that this is as much growth as McG is capable of experiencing as a filmmaker.

He's not the only one to blame for the overall terribleness of Terminator Salvation, though. The first warning sign is that the script was written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, the duo that wrote the unfortunate Terminator 3, a film that just about nobody seems to like, certainly not fans of the series. First of all, for a story that places as much importance on John Connor (Christian Bale) as this one does, it doesn't turn out to be much of a John Connor story.

You'll remember that John is the man who in the previous films had been foretold to turn the tide of the man vs. machine war. He's such a key player that Skynet, the sentient computer network, has been sending Terminators back in time to kill him or his pregnant mother since 1984. This time, however, we're thrown into the thick of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, where John battles hundreds of Terminators of varying shapes and sizes (and yet none of these computerized creations begin to approach the creep factor of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Robert Patrick). The story of how John rose up to take down Skynet is a story that deserves to be told, but not like this.

Article Author: Arlo J. Wiley

Arlo J. Wiley is an aspiring filmmaker who has a deep love of movies, music, television, and most other artforms. He is also totally obsessed with Joss Whedon and the Beatles. You kind of need to know that.

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