A Waste of a Terminator Film and Out of Line for the Series

Rating: 3/10 (9 February 2015)

If this were a stand alone movie, it wouldn't be that bad. The problem is it isn't, it is a movie that attempts to pick up the mantle of the Terminator series and carry it forward. The problem is the movie is attempting to change the very essence of the franchise mid-stream.
The original Terminator film came out in 1984, at a time when Hollywood was suspicious of science and progress. E.T. was released the same year and science was hardly a friend of our little buddy in that film.
The premise was simple, mankind eventually creates a sophisticated AI that ultimately turns on us. It represented the best of Sci-Fi storytelling and it continued through the blockbuster T2 and the palatable wrap-up of the pre-Skynet phase of storytelling in T3.
To reprise the series post-Skynet should have been a slam dunk. John Connor is no longer the future commaneder, he is in command, and is taking the fight to the machines.
However, for some inexplicable reason, most of this film is spent not carrying forward the story, but completely changing the tenor of it, hard to do 4 films into a franchise.
So this movie is about a mostly machine, yet still human cyborg walking the earth for no apparent reason. I guess he is supposed to represent the glory that can come about when man and technology are married together. Of course that idea is the complete antithesis of the message of the early Terminator films.
Our cyborg quickly finds he is a target of the machines and also a target of the humans. Yet he redeems himself by using his machine self to rescue John Connor by rescuing his future father and John Connor. In other words, the machine becomes the hero.
You could argue this was the same thing that happened in T2 when Arnold comes back as a good Terminator to protect John. However, there was clear human intervention to make that Terminator good AI.
We are left in the dark through this entire movie as to what the intent of the scientist (played by Helen Bonham Carter) was in creating this cyborg.
So at the end, the machine is the hero, the machine saved John Connor, and it is a story of the redemption of a single machine amidst a war being raged against humanity by all other machines.
So in short, it makes no sense, and because of that performed poorly at the box office and likely denied Terminator fans a conclusive 5th film in the franchise showing the ultimate victory for humanity.
So best of luck rebooting this series as anyone under 30 likely has no idea what it is supposed to be about any more.