Wait... what? o_O since when?

 Yeah, I though T1 and T2 were both excellent popcorn movies.  I didn't see T3, but Salvation's very good for all that it is.  

Well, to me, bad dialogue is a dealbreaker. Lots of people say (for example) that Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was an okay movie; I vehemently disagree. The dialogue was just too awful, and the acting and delivery of that poorly written crap was too wooden.

T1 had just atrocious dialogue and acting, for the most part. I don't mean simply poor delivery; it was not well written. I know that perhaps I should be cutting it some slack for being so old (as well as a classic), but I just never dug it (there were definitely scenes that were memorable, like the afore-mentioned police station scene, the dance club scene and the scene where the T-101 takes the shotgun from the gun store).

T2 I felt they got lucky on because so many of the cast were simply at the top of their game at the time. Again, nothing was particularly well written (and this was glaringly obvious when it came to actors who were not talented enough to add anything to the delivery, like the child actor who played John Connor), but the cast gave a very convincing performance and when you combined that with Cameron's masterful cinematography, it rendered whatever faults the script had rather moot.

Yes, I agree, it was certainly also a groundwork laying landmark in film.

Oh dear.

Well, I'll have to say, you might not like Salvation very much then. (They did do a boob shot in production, but decided to cut it out at the editing table because they said it seemed out of context/strictly gratuitous).

You should like Star Trek, though.

 Salvation is PG-13 for mass marketing purposes, so no boobs to be had, unfortunately; I think they're actually trying to sell some toys and happy meals this time around.  Which is sad, because Opie's daughter has quite the rack and I bet they're really freckled.  The vaguely ethnic fighter pilot character I could take or leave.  

 I never had a huge problem suspending disbelief for the time paradoxes.  I always wondered why they didn't just program the original terminator with a way to broadcast the data he acquired in the first attempt on Sarah Connor.  That way, if he failed, they'd know where he was if and when he saw Sarah for the first time.  Then, they could send another terminator to hide in the bushes and kill her.

It's my understanding, that the events of T4 are to be considered as following properly from the events of the first 3 movies.  Confusing to me are the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I had thought, and I don't recall where I got the idea from, that in Terminator time travel was only backward.  In The T:SCC (forgive me, but it's a lot to write out), there is time travel to the near future (2007) as well as backward time travel by the machines and future humans.  I can accept on principal that since T:SCC follows directly from the events of T2 and that Sarah Connor does in fact die of leukemia eventually, that despite the 'temporal war' being waged, the events culminate in no significant changes to the timeline such that T3 can proceed without bringing in the time travels of the teenaged John Connor.  Simply to add voice, T3 was a horrid, horrid movie.

On the matter of Star Trek, I have one major problem: I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone so I won't mention anything more than that the familiar sort of paradox on which the movie is based always, whenever it has been used in any Star Trek, ends in the timeline being restored and the alternate timeline disappearing.

Spoliers ahead, mateys!

Except in the case of the new Star Trek, which is clearly occurring in an alternate reality.  Trust me, come the Salvation sequel, we'll learn that Kyle Reese doesn't actually have to go back to father John Connor, because the actual father of John Connor was a Kyle Reese from a slightly different alternate future that won't be happening because of the actions of that other reality's Kyle Reese.  In fact, we'll probably learn from some source or other that there is, in some alternate reality, a John Connor (I'll call him John Connor Prime in honor of Leonard Nimoy's Spock Prime) who shares a mother with the Salvation John Connor but not a father, thus clarifying the Paradox and ruining the theoretical sex lives of millions of internet nerds.  I'm hoping it'll be the nervous black guy from T2.  Or maybe Ash from Evil Dead.

Which Is half the appeal of the movie for me. I like this premise!

Also the Voyager series didn't always resolve time paradoxes with the disappearance/negation of the alternate line. In many cases, it would be made evident that the alternate line continued to exist and was not undone, but the characters involved were all returned to continuity with their respective lines and the series continued with its own history preserved.

 (DISCLAIMER:  I haven't seen either of the new ones)

I kind of like the time paradox solution in T1-T3 (regardless of the suck factor of T3).  Basically, you can fuck with the timeline all you want, and some shit is still going to happen.  I know it doesn't make any logical sense, but the sense of despair it instills is good for the plot.  I mean, shit.  Sarah fucking kills the biggest baddest machine ever, and the war still happens.  She goes paramilitary on the inventor of SkyNet, and the war still happens.  She destroys the second terminator, the protector destroys himself, and they destroy the chip from the first terminator, and the war still happens.  They beat the third terminator and have the ear of the man with his finger on the button, and the war still happens.  I like the inevitability, and the sense of continuity it gives to the whole thing.

With Star Trek, I think of the time paradoxes like most people think of their eccentric aunt who buys everybody socks, no matter if there's a holiday or not.  Or... maybe like Tolkien and his stupid Deus ex machinas every time he'd worked himself into a corner in the plot.  Seriously, it's just bad writing.  If you can't continue a series without fucking with the timeline, it means you need to hire some new writers.

Oh, and I don't care if the movie is great fun to watch.  I will probably enjoy it, but seriously... figure out a way to do a prequel or whatever.  That's fine.  But if you have to do all this time-space continuum shit to have a story, you're not very creative.  That's been one of my biggest knocks on Star Trek for years.

Seconded.

One doesn't thave to think about it very long to realize that John himself never had any chance of preventing Judgement Day, as doing so would then also prevent his own birth (Reese would never have been sent back in time)... and if that happened, of course, he obviously couldn't play any part in stopping Judgement Day.

Weak as T3 was, the one way it could've been made worse is if they decided it was time for a happy ending and had John actually save the world from the nukes. That would've completely wrecked the franchise.

...

Ugh, some people here have terrible taste in movies. The Terminator was a great movie for its genre, and for its time. I think younger people don't appreciate movies like this because they've seen so many modern day action movies with mind-blowing CGI and special effects. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was even better. In fact, many action/sci-fi movies don't even come close to this movie TO THIS DAY. Terminator 3 was more of a typical sequel but was decent...not as good as the first two but very watchable. The last Terminator was garbage. It had a few neat special effects, a fairly decent cast, but it wasn't remotely entertaining. I enjoyed the Dark Knight, but Christian Bale's performance in both this and the Dark Knight was uninspiring. Dude really needs to lose that fucking raspy voice. It didn't work in Batman and it lingered in this newest movie. It's kind of sad when the Transformers 2 TRAILER has more special effects than the entire Terminator Salvation movie.

Btw...Terminator Salvation is unbelievably predictable. So much I thought I was suffering from Deja vu the entire time I was watching it.