"Terminator Salvation" is pretty good

I went to see "Terminator Salvation" the other night. I thought it was pretty good.

Good:

• Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, a serial killer who's executed in 2003 and wakes up in the post-nuclear machine Holocaust in 2018
• Depictions of a nuclear-blasted Los Angeles. LA never looked so good. Especially Hollywood.
• Applying the "Oz" process to the daylight scenes, making everything appear whitish and washed out, bleached and dead in the post-holocaust world.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, or a reasonable CGI facsimile of him, as a brand-new T-800 Terminator
• Helena Bonham Carter as a dying, cancer-stricken scientist who gets Marcus Wright to donate his executed dead body to science. Needless to say, Skynet finds a use for both of them, post-mortem, in 2018.
• Anton Yelchin as a young, intense Kyle Reese, the soldier who is eventually sent back to 1984 in the original "Terminator" movie to protect Sarah Connor, who will give birth to John Connor, who will eventually lead the Resistance.
• Creepy Terminator assembly line, where we see T-800s like Arnold being built. We've seen them in video games before, but not on film.

Not So Good:

• Very few wisecracks in this movie. After all, humanity is fighting for its collective life against Skynet. Not much room for one-liners. Plenty of room for gunfire, though.
• A bad case of "Transformers"-itis, where giant humanoid Harvester machines, similar to Transformers, are stomping around and causing destruction. I thought it was a little silly. The nice thing about the original "Terminator" film was that it was pretty believable. Even the giant Hunter-Killer Tank in the original "Terminator" film, grinding its way through city ruins at night while hunting humans, was quite within the reach of human/machine technology. But the Harvesters in "Terminator Salvation" are too much like "Transformers" for my taste. Too much CGI.
• "Mototerminators" are motorcycles with Terminator brains and rockets. But sadly, they lack a kickstand, so they can never stop moving, or stand themselves up if they fall over. It seems like a terrible design flaw.
• Disjointed editing. People seem to be able to walk a very long way in a very short time at certain points in the movie.
• "Stargate SG-1"-style of using obviously-ineffective weapons against the machines. In the movie, humans are still using regular firearms against Terminators, with lackluster results. You would think they would have captured some HK plasma weapons and duplicated them for infantry use by 2018.
• Complete absence of radiation poisoning. Other than the everpresent threat of being perforated by Terminator gunfire, LA residents seem to be remarkably healthy, when they should be suffering from radiation poisoning... hair and teeth falling out, open sores, internal bleeding... the usual. Apparently Skynet used only reduced-fallout neutron bombs to destroy civilization on Judgment Day.