It is truly sad when you have to watch a beloved movie franchise get slowly ground down into the dirt, especially when there was initially so much potential.  "Terminator Salvation" is an exercise in squandered potential, and considering the serious star power in this film, that is a heck of a lot of wasted potential.  And I'm not just talking about the film's main stars, Christian Bale and Sam Worthington, but the excellent supporting cast that was almost completely wasted.  Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese was okay, but so many of the other supporting players should have either had a bigger role or been written out entirely.  However, the truly sad fact of this film is that the story was woefully inadequate.  It seemed as though the director felt little other purpose to the movie besides throwing out some painful (read: awful) melodrama, tying up the various story threads from the other films, and setting up for another potential sequel.  Even Bale and Worthington seemed to be phoning it in for a large chunk of the film, but in a strange sort of way.  They seemed to be overdoing every bit of emotion to the point where their performances had little to no real depth, something which the Terminator series always seemed to do very well.  Even the robotic performances from Arnold in the first two films in the series were very deep and strong, full of human emotion.  Another key problem is what I'm going to term "Die Hard 4 Syndrome."  This dreadful syndrome occurs when a movie series that traditionally applied R-level ratings to its films changes to using PG-13 ratings, thus destroying any potential maturity to the new film in favor of potentially netting a larger viewer base.  Overall, the film is a acceptable action film, though it pushes no envelopes, brings nothing new to the genre, and honestly makes a godawful mess of the Terminator series.  I'd still say it's better than T3, but maybe for the next film they should consider a director and actors who seem like they actually care about the film.