3 stars. A pretty decent movie, and considerably better than I thought it would be. I'd say it's a million times better than T3, but we all know there's no such movie.
Since one cannot rate what one hasn't seen, I'm not going to hide spoilers here.
Pretty much every criticism you've read from the movie reviewers holds true. It's disjointed, parts skip by too quickly, etc. The plot and story is mediocre, at best (though no worse, and maybe even a bit better, than the woeful mess of a plot that was Star Trek). Certain things that they bring up (like that one 'transmission' thing to turn off the machines) have little effect on the overall story. Some of the dialogue was the typical bad cliched stuff - sometimes terrible (so much so that right in the middle of the movie you'll ask yourself "Who writes this stuff?!"). And it is very predictable.
However, even with the movie's (many) flaws, it's still pretty darn good. Bale should be damn embarassed about his tirade about the cinematographer - it's that damn cinematographer that likely helped save your movie from the otherwise normally wretched McG. There was virtually no shaky cam, and many action scenes had the camera pulled right back and steady so you could see what was going on and the effects of whatever battle was currently raging. As cignus pfaccari noted above, the action sequences sure were impressive.
What I really appreciated was the internal consistency with the rest of the Terminator movies. John Connor certainly seemed like John Connor. He played the same GnR song from T2 during a nifty sequence in which it was very appropriate - quick and to the point, too. There was a great superimposed/CG cameo of a T-800 that we all know and love, and that really worked. And for me, the biggest thing: this movie really explained why Skynet gets into such a tizzy about Connor and starts developing a time travel device. We always wondered: why is Connor so important? Are the all-powerful machines actually losing or at least, are the humans holding their own? Yes... yes they are. Very cool.
And no time travel!