Succeeds in carefully removing everything that ever made this franchise worth the bother.

Rating: 3/10 (29 May 2009)

Well, I may not be a dedicated Terminator fan-boy, but I know how I like my unstoppable kill-bots from the future...and this new diet Terminator with extra cheese just doesn't do it for me, sorry.
Apart from most of the action sequences and the new robot designs, just about everything about this film simply didn't work.
The acting was pretty bad, although that may simply be because the dialog and characters were all so badly written. Either way; most characters in this film were either dull, annoying, or kept alternating between the two. In fact, one quarter into the movie, I realized that I'd started to root for the machines. Yes, I was silently cheering on props and CGI robots. That's how unappealing and boring I thought the human characters were.
The plot isn't much to look at either. This film has a running time of about 115 minutes. It doesn't have nearly enough plot to stay interesting that whole time. Even the fairly well executed action scenes that burst onto the screen every now and then can't prevent the flick from becoming just a bit dull halfway through. This is probably mostly because the meager story is chock full of unnecessary filler scenes and is awfully convoluted for a very basic script that gets only very little real storytelling done in nearly two hours.
The reason why I liked the first two Terminator films was that they weren't only well written and slick action thrillers. They actually contained some real character development, and even some philosophical and ethical themes. Nothing of the sort in this film, however. There's a few vague lines about fate. There's some obligatory jabbering about retaining one's humanity in a war against soulless machines. And that's about it in the philosophy department for this flick.
So in short; nothing of real interest in this entire film, not for casual movie goers or for Terminator fans. There are no interesting characters, no really significant revelations about the series' mythos, nothing. The only reason why I think you would want to watch this film is for the okay action sequences. But the obvious drawback of that is that you're going to have to sit through all the boring, dumb slop in between them.