Oh man, am I angry about this movie.
Hollywood writers have an expression when talking about a project that they’re working on:
this piece of shit.
Boy is this a steaming pile of turd that’s straight out of the nightmare factory of box office turkeys. Why do I care so much? Because Terminator is a modern day Hollywood classic. Cameron shaped two of the best sci-fi movies of the last thirty years with the first two in the series. His movies contained action, violence and then some, but they also contained real character, hard sci-fi concepts for the era, and more importantly they were the few films of the genre that actually had a strong feminist icon in the shape of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner. Where did it all go wrong?
I really had high expectations for this one, even though Charlie’s “McG” Angels was directing. Those movies weren’t exactly high on the brain matter scale, nevertheless they had a certain visual verve that looked exciting and eye popping. In addition to this Jonathan Nolan worked on the screenplay, and they even had Christian Bale on board as John Conner. Bale has had an excellent record in recent years when choosing his projects – good omens or what? Furthermore they had Michael Ironside on their side too, a genre mainstay, dependable for playing gruff outsiders and military generals – remember Starship Troopers? Finally they had Stan Winston Studios working on the robots. What could possibly go wrong with a team like that?
Well, in short – every fucking thing - excuse my language.
First off, the focus of the story is just all wrong. A future war Terminator movie isn’t tough to work out. It’s about one very important storyline. John Conner making sure that he gets Kyle Reese into the time machine to go back in time and protect and impregnate his mother. That’s the movie that needs to be shown, this isn’t the movie they made. Why? Because the studios and powers at be have been infected with sequelitis again. They’ve forgotten a really important axiom of film making – you tell the strongest story possible, don’t penny pinch with high stakes story points. However that’s exactly what they do with this movie and it condemns it the seventh circle of hell itself along with the Highlander sequels and Jar Jar Binks.
Future War Terminator should have been easy – just think this – Its Private Ryan with Terminators. How difficult is that? This should be a future with swarms of skeletal robots swarming across the nuked wasteland. I counted five. Seriously where were all the robots? Where were the land battles that had been hinted and shown in the previous movies? Where was our war movie? Not here. This film looks like a bad Mad Max movie with reject transformers from Michael Bay’s franchise juggernaut.
Storywise it's totally leftfield. The opening scene focuses on Marcus Wright played by the dead eyed Sam Worthington who will be in Cameron’s Avatar flick later this year. He plays a man who’s condemned to death but not before signing off his body to Helen Bonham Carter’s Cancer woman. She works for Cyberdyne by the way.
Fast forward to post Judgement Day earth where we meet an all grown up version of Mr Conner who likes to land helicopters on top of the T600s and then shoot them when they’re helpless in the head – very heroic. Bale plays Conner like he’s sitting in a VR machine somewhere far away. I’m beginning to understand his rant last year, he was suffering from that sinking feeling actors get when they realize they’re making a real stinker that’s going to mar their record for a few years.
After some pyrotechnics that kill everyone apart from our erstwhile hero Marcus is awakened and pulls himself out of a muddy hole, which is basically where the story is, but is unable to pull off the same feat itself.
Marcus wanders around for a bit, bumps into a big Frankenstein T600, saved by a teenaged Kyle Reese, and wonders what is going on – well so is the audience who have long since stopped caring.
Running concurrent to this Conner takes a dip in the sea to visit Ironside in his submarine. As you do, you know, jump from a helicopter into the CG sea from A Perfect Storm, and just, you know, happen upon a sub hiding the Resistance command HQ. Jesus – do they really think the audience is this stupid? Well apparently they do. Those guys argue for a bit, Conner gets an important bit of info about how to stop Skynet and then leaves.
I think at some point her learns that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, so Conner realizes he has to find his dad before they do. Here’s the beef, why does Skynet know this? Why is Conner telling everyone and his mum who he is? It makes no fucking sense. Skynet would have no idea who even John is at this point. He makes speeches across the radio, but as far as Skynet is concerned he’s just a nut at this point. Or am I missing something important? Obviously the screenwriters were.
Think about it logically. Cyberdyne systems lost its entire future tech after Terminator 2, delaying the rise of an A.I capable of taking over the world. Fast-forward to three, and the military have created it from a completely different source. If this movie is following on from those events, then this version of Skynet wouldn’t yet consider the Conners a threat, right?
Next point, the knowledge of John’s father would only be known by John and perhaps his inner circle, certainly, if he’s the wonderful leader we’re lead to believe then there’s no way he’d be stupid enough to tell people, right? So that begs the question why does Skynet have Reese as a target? Quite simply put - its lazy writing to create jeopardy quickly.
If that wasn’t bad enough the lack of strong female archetypes in this is unforgivable. Traditionally the Terminator films have always been built around female hero. That was what made the franchise stand out from all the others. Even in the lesser, Terminator 3, Kate Brewster, played by Claire Danes came across as a strong willed, determined and active heroine.
No such luck here. We’ve Moon Bloodgood who plays a pilot who’s name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to check up on. She plays Marcus’s love interest for about five minutes, and aptly enough, needs rescuing every five minutes as well, I can’t even remember what happens to her by the end – that just shows how utterly forgettable her role was.
Yet even that doesn’t compare to the utterly redundant role of Bryce Dallas Howard. She plays Kate Conner, replacing the aforementioned Claire Danes as the luckless wife of the permanently scowling John Conner. She’s practically a housewife in this movie, who does absolutely nothing of consequence other than stare wide eyed and give tedious exposition about what isn’t happening.
At some point after plot revelations concerning Marcus’s true nature, it all mercilessly arrives at the final act where after a Skynet trap that decimates the Resistance leadership, John leads a daring rescue of Kyle and other rag tag types from the Skynet HQ in San Francisco. What should be an exciting finale that should have been an extended and expanded sequence in the tradition of the original future war clips turns into a tired rehash of the climaxes to the original. Except this time I just don’t fucking care. We get two frames of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s a CG creation, before he’s conveniently burn with molten metal, and then oh well, you can probably work out the rest yourself.
This movie was supposed to have been a big budget blockbuster- quite frankly you really have to wonder where all the money went on this one. It certainly isn’t on the screen. There’s talk of this being the first in a new trilogy. Please God no! Just let it die for a decade and then do a proper reboot – please, pretty please with jam on it.
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