Milking the cash cow

Rating: 4/10 (19 January 2012)

When last we left this movie franchise Terminator 3, in addition to being a rather terrible movie, had rendered Terminators 1 and 2 completely irrelevant by declaring that Judgement Day and the war with the machines was inevitable. No fate but what we make? Yeah, never mind that. There is a fate and that fate sucks. So here we are in this latest movie, Judgement Day has come and gone, the world is a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland and the few humans left struggle in their fight against the machines. Well, if nothing else the few glimpses we got of this war in the previous movies were intriguing. Maybe they could make something out of this. No, they couldn't.
This movie is an example of a terrible idea even more terribly executed. The story begins with John Connor leading an assault on a Skynet base. The base gets blown up real good in a nuclear explosion. Only one person survives. Surprise! The one survivor is John Connor. Convenient. Showing no ill effects from having survived a freaking nuclear explosion Connor goes merrily about his business of being the savior of humankind. Well not so merrily actually as Christian Bale portrays Connor as the most morose, uninspiring "hero" anyone's ever seen. Dude's so lame you almost want to root for Skynet. Speaking of Skynet these machines apparently haven't gotten any smarter since the previous movies. They still want to kill John Connor. They still fail miserably at it. This time they have an absurdly convoluted plan involving some Terminator-ish creation of theirs. This creation is Marcus, who when we first meet him is a death row inmate about to be executed in 2003. Then he wakes up fifteen years later and...well, a bunch of nonsense happens.
Anyhow this new character of Marcus could have been intriguing but he got shoved aside when Bale stomped his feet like a petulant little child and insisted he play John Connor. So Connor came to the forefront and boy does the movie suffer for it. The Connor character is a dud. After hearing so much about this great leader and savior when we finally see him in action what a letdown it is. Is it Bale's performance or is it the character himself? Who knows? Whatever it is the character doesn't work. Sam Worthington, playing Marcus, certainly comes across better than Bale does but that's really not saying much. A young Kyle Reese shows up. Anton Yelchin plays that part and he probably does better than anyone else in this mess of a movie. The tough female heroine role this time goes to Moon Bloodgood. Linda Hamilton she ain't. What a horrible, horrible actress. Every time she opens her mouth you cringe. The movie also features an exceedingly pregnant Bryce Dallas Howard who gets absolutely nothing worthwhile to do. Of course the one person the movie most significantly does not feature is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Making a Terminator movie without Arnold? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Whatever killing machine Skynet may conjure up it ain't gonna be as cool as Arnold. And heaven knows there are plenty of killing machines, including some giant monstrosities which apparently got lost on their way to the Transformers set. All the show-off visual effects can't hide the fact that the story stinks. And after sitting through this rather awful movie, just when you think it can't possibly get any worse it does. The ending is ludicrously, absurdly, laughably bad. And you can see it coming a mile away too. I hope whoever wrote that ending had their paycheck bounce. Would serve them right. Mind-blowing in its stupidity. It's the final insult in a movie which insults the audience's intelligence as well as insulting the legacy of the first two Terminator movies everyone loved so much. Terminator 3 started this franchise down a slippery slope. This movie drove the franchise off a cliff. But as long as there is money to be milked from the Terminator cash cow you know there are more of these movies to come. Heaven help us.