CGI done by a master, plot & script by 3rd grader

Rating: 3/10 (23 May 2009)

This movie makes you appreciate how great James Cameron is. In the first movie Kyle Reese says he is coming from the 2024 and the Arnold model terminator was new. This movie is set in 2013 and Kyle Reese is a teenager. The basic frame work is there and the CGIs were excellent particularly the motorcycle robots. Part of this sequence is in the trailer. Another nice point was using Michael Ironside as a leader of some kind of quasi official resistance movement.
Now how the heck did they mess this up? It starts in the year 2003 where a guy is about to be executed via lethal injection. A woman doctor begs him to donate his body to science. You think oh she will be a part of the plot but no, she is not seen as a living person again. Now the guy is killed via lethal injection. He is dead but somehow the doctor must have jumped in and cut out his brain and heart and in spite of the lethal injection apparently neither organ is damaged. Flash to 2013 and the guy pops up with a functional human brain and heart in what turns out to be a terminator-lite body.
So here are the first couple of problems. In the first movie Reese said the early terminators had rubber skin and were easy to spot but this body appears perfect not rubbery at all. Ignoring that you ask why did they use the guys heart? The brain you can understand but why would they bother with the heart when there are no lungs? Well it's a plot device.
The robot with a human brain guy hooks up with teen age Kyle Reese is living in burned out LA with what seems to be an eight year old girl. Between the two of them they work out some pretty elaborate booby traps. Why are they there? You would think Reese would be the type of person to try to save an eight year old rather than turn her into a front line fighter but what the heck.
He has a series of adventures and winds up with John Conner trusting him to help rescue teen age Kyle Reese who is a captive of the terminators. Another captive is Jane Alexander who is introduced, has a couple of lines and you think, if they put in an actress of her status they would use her later in the movie. But no it's just a delightful cameo for no apparent reason.
The camp that the machines have doesn't sound anything like the one Reese described in Terminator 1 but again you can ignore that. Now we find out that the robot with a human brain was programmed by the machines to trick John Conner to come in. Okay so they built the robot and got a feed from what his robot eyes saw. Why didn't they just explode his power source when Conner was inches from him instead of this elaborate ploy? Now in the high light of the movie a Arnold model terminator gets loose and attacks Conner. That is fantastic CGI. Now Arnold kills the robot with the human brain & heart with a heart punch. Conner brings him back and together they defeat the terminator and get loose after Conner is impaled.
At this point the movie was okay but here in the last 5 minutes they completely lost me. Conner is in the desert under a canopy and his wife/doctor says his heart is damaged. Now we understand why the robot with the human brain was given a heart!! He says he will be an organ donor! His wife doctor immediately agrees and apparently they had a team of surgeons and a heart/lung machine standing by in the desert there. The blood /tissue types match and wham bam thank you mam the heart transplant is successful.
What kind of doctor would ripe a heart out of a living person in order for a transplant? The only time I saw this before was in "Monty Python's Meaning of Life". That time it was funny this time it was like a 3rd grader wrote it. What kind of leader would agree to take a living heart from one of his followers?? It was just too stupid for me.
Why was the human brain the machines choose the one from the lethal injection guy that was in a pickle jar or someplace for 10 years when they had hundreds/thousands of captives to choose from? Did you see "Frankenstein"? Or "Young Frankenstein"? Maybe the robot sent out to get a human brain accidentally dropped the good one and picked the lethal injection one. Why have the human brain at all when they could make the outside of him perfect? The outside was really all that mattered.
So if you are interested in CGI effects you might enjoy it. I did not.