Terminator Salvation: The Essential Edition

Going into this edit i wasn't expecting much considering how badly i was dissapointed with the theatrical version.So i'm glad i gave Q2's version a chance and from the first scene to the last scene i noticed that the movie had a faster pace and the story no longer revolved around marcus and his self discovery.It was now focused on john connor and how he was becoming a bigger threat to skynet and the new ways skynet was coming up with to stop him.
The story is not perfect by any means but that is the screenwriters and directors fault not Q2.
Overall Q2 delivers a thrill ride of a movie which would now fit perfectly in any terminator fans collection.

December 10, 2011 @ 4:50 am

I originally rated this back in December 2011 and am writing a review in September 2012, so I don't remember everything. The tech quality (as is usual with Q2 edits) was spectacular. The entertainment and story on the other hand were still painful as hell for me to watch the entire movie. Not enough was cut for my tastes. So if you more or less liked T4 (as opposed to hating every second of it) you'll probably get a kick out of this edit.

Having really enjoyed Terminator Salvation I didn’t really have many problems – the only thing I mind is the heart transplantation which I now have seen two versions

T-Hope’s letting the T-800 freeze and cut to the helicopter
and Q2′s stabbing connor but letting him survive anyway

I must say I can’t decide which works better but I lean towards the second since the terminator slowly breaking free is a great suspense scene

All the edits are solid and especially the dream sequence with Serena is handled very well with echoes and ghosted-images.

Technically this edit is pretty flawless, video and audio are great, no hard cuts or jumps

Storywise there is still one problem: Kyle Reese is number 1 on skynet’s list, they don’t identify him, i assume he just gets taken by chance by one of those grappling arms, but when marcus goes into the data of Skynet they have clearly identified him as Kyle Reese – maybe cutting the line about Kyle Reese being on the list might have done the trick

On the other hand I always saw the Terminator universe as a “multiple worlds” universe, so every timetravel creates a new timeline. So to me T4 made sense in the way that John Connor believes there is only one timeline and he needs Kyle Reese whereas Syknet knows that killing Kyle Reese won’t erase John Connor in this timeline, so they bait him thinking he needs to save his future to ultimately kill him

Two things I missed:

1) The speech Connor gives about being human, I liked the angle. I liked that Connor in this movie starts off like a Terminator, having almost lost his humanity until he realizes that sometimes being human is doing things that cannot be rationally explained – i think it’s a great message and one of the bright spots of T4 which while not terrifically great like T1 and T2 was still a fun movie for me – that being said it still works so the faneditor did a good job regardless of my complaints

2) Marcus’s mission: again I think it was a nice twist that the perfect infiltration unit doesn’t even know for itself that it is an infiltration unit. The hints that Marcus was there to get John Connor are gone, but the story-thematic doesn’t change. From all that’s said and done it is still implied that Marcus was constructed to lure John Connor into a trap.
And even if the intention is to remove this completely then marcus turns out to be just an experiment that happened to stumble into the story so I think I go with the original explanation

So while this is a great polish that will probably be ok for many people who disliked T4 it still won’t replace my original dvd (although it came close) – maybe merging the fantastic opening of T-Hope’s Terminator Salvation with this and reinserting the speech of connor will be the thing I was looking for

Anyway a very good edit that I don’t regret watching

8/10

Quality - Good. A little soft for my liking, but perfectly fine.

Visual editing - pretty much flawless, except that the fades on the flashback to the prison cell felt unnatural to me (might be a true black thing?).

Audio editing - excellent for the most part. Although, once again, the flash back to the prison didn't really work for me. Narratively, it was fine. But it was the only part of the editing that just felt off - plus, the audio on Sarah's tape was a bit too quiet and difficult to hear. A direct comparison to the audio from the other tape scene shows a relatively big difference.

Narrative - good. An improvement? Not so sure. Q2 fixes some problems, but creates others. The removing of the rain scene robbed Marcus and the girl of development, and made both the attack seem abrupt and the "I'm cold" scene feel rushed. The removal of her willingness to offer antibiotics also just felt off to me and robbed the scene of a conclusion (she shoots him in the leg, but we don't see him exit?)

I was pleased to see that the twist that Marcus is a Terminator delayed, but it also felt that as a result the reveal of how he came to be what he is was less clear. Its a case of picking the lesser of 2 evils, unfortunately.

Enjoyment - Good. I enjoyed it. I recognise Terminator Salvation as a flawed film, but I've never thought it as bad as many people seem to. It's by no means a work of art, but it's competently made, has decent effects, good action sequences, a reasonable story (granted, with holes) and a good twist. I think both this cut and the original have thier strengths and weaknesses.

Terminator Genysis - now THAT'S a bad film.