Family relations? Favours among friends? Blackmail? Insanity? Whatever it is, there has to be an explanation up those alleys for someone letting McG (Joseph McWhatever) direct and having the masterminds of Catwoman write the story of a movie of these proportions, people who hardly have written anything else in their lives, except the most ridiculed and trashed movie throughout human existence. If you watch this movie the way you watch a parody of a horribly bad movie making style of the past (i.e. porn movie plots and porn movie realism in human behavior/dialog), then you can get through this movie and enjoy it. That's how I did it. <br /><br />Example: Marcus awakes, gets attacked by a Terminator, asks Kyle Reese: - "What was that?". Kyle answers: - "A Terminator". Marcus ponders no more. No questions like "what's going on, what am I doing here, why do my arms feel like robot arms, where is what, who is who, how did everything happen, who made the robots, why do they want to kill us". No questions. No amazement. No reaction. Just a stupid look and business as usual. "I'm going North", he says. Of course. That's where any Mad Max/Resident Evil 4/text-adventure game from the 80s player would go. North. For no reason. <br /><br />And so it goes on, until the end: John Connor gets operated on in sandy desert wind, instead of inside a tent or a building. That's the lowest point throughout the movie. It's not cheesy and stupid, it's something worse. Marcus is like "I'm a bad-ass, murderer, a human terminator who should survive on a Terminator power cell (another dumb "plot before attention to realism" mistake), I'm your greatest asset this time around, but sure I'll die, here's my heart. Everyone deserves a second chance, but I deserve to die now. Yes. Have a nice day, good bye". <br /><br />The special effects earned it a rating of 5, though they were ruined in day light shots by cheap-looking filters reducing color saturation, common in B-series on TV ever since Saving Private Ryan set the standard for the phenomena of filter-credibility, to be abused ever since. 'B-series' is the keyword to describe the atmosphere in the movie if you disregard the special effects. Only in a B-series do you expect a Terminator to survive rifle fire in one scene, die from it in the next, taking several grenade launcher hits standing up in one scene and getting blown 100 feet backwards from a single shot 5 seconds later. McG (or Zorro, as he'd probably prefer to be called if that name wasn't taken, despite his fear of flying making him drop out of Superman 4 due to filming in Australia) compared the making of the movie with Apocalypse Now, in the sense of the gritty, explosive realism. The only valid comparison is that both movies where in Development Hell at one time, but Apocalypse pulled through. Terminator: Salvation is still there, but was, for some strange reason, released to the public anyway.