The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

Really, I shouldn't be all that shocked.

But, the hype and marketing department taking care of the latest Terminator installment did its job too well that I was hoping for a solid movie. My expectations were realistic: I never expected it to surpass the quality of the best of the series, Terminator 2, but if it could at least keep in the spirit of the franchise, I would have walked away a happy customer.

The main problem with this movie is that it assumes the viewer knows the insides and outs of the previous Terminator trilogy. As a result, the director (McG, who should be fired) doesn't bother to get the audience involved with the characters sufficiently such as John Connor and Kyle Reese to really care what happens to them. Instead, most of the attention is on the character of Marcus (whom I didn't care for), and if a viewer hadn't seen any of the previous three movies, they might be wondering why John Connor is so special that he gets to stick around for future installments.   In addition, he creates some characters that don't really do anything or add to the story: the deaf 8 year old girl that accompanies Reese is an example.

It actually doesn't start off too bad. The first 1/2 of the movie gives us a good idea of what's going on post-judgement day 2018 with some decent action scenes (the "Human Harvester" 10 storey robot was pretty neat) but at the point were you discover Marcus' "secret" (which has been pretty much given away if you read up on movie news) it starts to all go downhill. It's one of those movies where you ask yourself, "Why did that character do this?" For example, the machines created underwater patrol robots. So while looking for a wanted fugitive, John Connor hovers above the water by about 10 feet, and all these water robots start attacking the helicopter, killing the pilot and the helicopter crashes. Did he forget they were swimming around or something?

And it was really puzzling to see the majority of the "resistance" be very quick to judge other humans and end their lives. I mean, if judgement day actually happened and billions of human lives were lost, you would think that there would be extra emphasis on making sure a few humans were still left standing. Most are quick to pull the trigger and ask questions later, which doesn't make any sense if they are supposed to be on the brink of extinction.

The ending is eye-rolling, involving a surgical procedure which you will figure out before it happens if you see it.. The final battle, involving John Connor fighting a CGI-faced T-800 series terminator of Arnold Schwarzenegger (which was actually very well done), is cliched and ignores past battles with these robots. I mean, the T-800 had everything thrown at him at suffered the equivalent of a knee scrape. I do not recall them being that tough to beat, which shows McG's laziness in respecting the story that was previously laid out and manipulating it to impose his own vision.  Fine details like this are missed: T-600s are supposed to have rubber skin, but they are just plain old robots with bandanas here.  

You know, the funny thing is, even though this film fell short of expectations, if they make a part five, I'll still go see it.  I guess I'm hoping they'll figure it out and deliver the goods we expect.  But they have to get rid of McG, he's a horrible director.  The original Terminator director, James Cameron, would have been a welcome addition to the production, but he's on to other things.