Before you sit down in that dark theater this weekend to see Terminator: Salvation, if you are a fan of the Terminator franchise, this movie is not for you. The very first words out of my mouth after walking out of the theater were “This was a terrible Terminator movie, but a pretty good Transformers movie.” Truer words haven’t been said abut this film. We at The Flickcast had our doubts about this film, between Bale’s outburst on set and McG slowly stepping out of the limelight, but none of us expected the film to be this bad.

Even going into this without expectations, it’s pretty hard to salvage a good movie from the two hours or so you’re in the theater. With bad accents and love story subplots, this movie forces fans of the franchise into a blinding rage by the time the credits role. I had the luck of being in a packed house with fans who were hooting and screaming when the first titles came on the screen. Their demeanor changed pretty quickly as the movie went on.

What makes this film a better Transformers film than a Terminator film? How about the complete lack of anything “time travel”. It’s understood in Terminator canon that they don’t find a time travel device until the fall of SkyNet, but how can you continue a franchise and not even address one of it’s biggest plot points? That would be like making a sequel to Back to the Future all about how peaceful and trouble free the McFly’s are in 1996. The closest they came to this plot point was the voice of Sarah Connor on a tape recorder giving John instructions from the past (not Linda Hamilton, by the way).

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Not many know that Terminator: Salvation hitting theaters in less than a month isn’t just another tale in the legend of John Connor, but hopefully the starting point of a whole new cinematic trilogy. The director of the film[s] (and regular persona-non-grata in the fan community), McG recently sounded off in an interview with Film Journal on his thoughts for a sequel, which will count as the fifth film in the Terminator franchise, and probably the most confusing: (Possible Spoilers)

I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011. John Connor is going to travel back in time and he’s going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They’ve figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than [just] one naked entity. So you’re going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be fucking awesome. I also think he’s going to meet a scientist that’s going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves.

While this is great news for anybody who was a fan of Robert Patrick in T2, this doesn’t sound like very good news for fans of the franchise, or even coherent time-travel stories. This throws out the Terminator rule that “only living flesh can be sent back in time”, which is why we got gratuitous Arnold butt-shots back in the 80s. If one were to break down McG’s statement, there are plenty more holes in our Terminator universe. So does this mean he’s just messing with our heads in an attempt to be hip? And where is Summer Glau??