We can rebuild it... We have the technology

Rating: 1/10 (5 June 2009)

The machines have taken over the world, wiping out humanity and making them live like rats among the desolate wastelands littered with human skulls and the remains of a desperate struggle for survival. Right? Not exactly. Let me explain. That description of post-judgement day America was heavily featured in the first two movies and is what we all expected to find plastering the scenes of salvation, coupled with epic Saving Private Ryan style battle scenes as the resistance make a futile attempt at stopping the wrecking ball that is sky net. unfortunately it seems sky net is not the unstoppable force that we were led to believe, with the resistance camped out in daylight, in plane-sight for anybody who cares to look and the terminator army comprising of a few T-600s (clearly sky net hadn't realised how susceptible to bullets these models were) and some rejects from the transformers movie. So John Conner (Cristian 'Master of Accents'*pfffft* Bale) has discovered that Skynet is after Kyle Reese (his father who is younger than him but went to the past to stop his mother being wiped out so john could be born and ended up biffing her and getting her pregnant, but surely john had to be born before hand so maybe he would be born anyway - i digress) and John must pick between his life or mankind... Oh yeah, there's this guy Marcus, who's not a guy but a terminator (which we all knew cus of the trailers) but they don't know on screen until half way through the movie, but its got organs, oh wait... i don't care anymore. It all climaxes with the rather disappointing raid on sky net (which proves rather easy for our hero, ya know, considering its the Skynet HQ... HALLO!) and then a thought provoking aftermath - "what truly separates man from the machines"... very poetic. It could have been, if the acting wasn't so undeniably "aaaaaangrrryyy", with Bale delivering his 'American-Jason Statham-angry' voice he used in his incarnation as batman. I swear there was even a scene where he was just shouting into the radio for no real reason... I understand why hes angry, roped into this heap of a mess, relying on its use of millions of dollars worth of FX and an orchestral underscore and nothing on narrative or character development or interaction that commits the viewer through emotion or engaging dialogue. IT Doesn't EVEN USE THE ACTUAL TERMINATOR THEME!!!! JUST THE DRUMS!!! The movie is rated PG-13 or 12A and rightly so, it features nothing cool what so ever, and very little violence to command a higher rating. There See a few small battle scenes, a lot of chasing (which, fair point, the terminator movies were all about the chase) and a massive chase scene with a giant robot, and some terminator bikes. These bikes have USB ports on them by the way... laughable isn't it. But wait, what the hell, considering the Terinators are unstoppable, i never seen one persons head get punched through, or stepped on, in fact, human deaths were very little, but with little action comes little deaths (except myself dying on the inside). You cant blame the studios for this, they are just trying to gain a new generation of people into the franchise... In case you hadn't guessed that was totally sarcastic, blame the studios. In focusing on a lower target audience they have eliminated the fans, messing up what could have potentially been the best movie ever. This movie could had easily been the epic return to form we all hoped for after the 'not so bad, but terrible compared to the rest of the series' Rise of the Machines. Instead were left bitter, twisted and a little dead inside that this diabolical mess was able to get made. The best bit is a brief fight with a CGI Arnie, which while the highlight of the film, shows just how unsatisfying and unoriginal the rest of the film is... Give the budget of this film to any fan of the originals and they could easily make a better film than this. And they could easily churn out a better script than this 10 page drinks coaster. OK, the effects are pretty good, just wish they were used to create something totally different from this. My advice is this, if your going to watch this, don't say i didn't warn you, this is grade A compost heap stuff. With the license they had and the money they used to make this, it could have been a spectacular, instead its a complete turkey of a film that without its high profile brand name would fall flat on its metal shiny arse and fade into the bargain bins... the only upside of this films release is that DVD prices for the original trilogy will plummet. bewsh 1/10 - watch T1 and T2 instead and bathe in nostalgia... avoid this at all costs because you will be disappointed, and empty.