Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2014)

The whole thing is an uninspired mess and makes for a very poor 25th anniversary present for "Terminator" fans. McG is just not a good director. Arnold Schwarzenegger's absence leaves a void that isn't filled. As I said in my "Terminator 2" review, he isn't a very good actor but he still makes for an entertaining one in his own way. Plus his deficiencies were more than made up for by the strong supporting cast, particularly in the first two films. In contrast, the cast of this film is generally rather poor. Christian Bale's "shout acting" is not just bad but very irritating and really quite laughable and his "badass" voice isn't much better. Sam Huntington, Bryce Dallas Howard, Moon Bloodgood and Common are all either bad or make no impression whatsoever. Anton Yelchin - who actually bears a passing resemblance to Michael Biehn - is better but not by much. None of the characters really have any personalities. As in the marginally better "Planet of the Apes" (2001), the strongest cast member is Helena Bonham Carter but she's in it for all of five minutes. Michael Ironside and Jane Alexander deserved more screen time as well. I really appreciated Linda Hamilton's voice only cameo as Sarah. However, I think that they missed a trick in not bringing back Earl Boen, the only actor besides Arnie to appear in all of the first three films, as Dr. Silberman.
Again like "Planet of the Apes" (2001), the script had some interesting ideas - Skynet being aware of John Connor and Kyle Reese's importance due to the influence of its own time travelling Terminators from the future, John finally meeting his much younger father, Marcus not realising that he is a hybrid and Skynet taking on a human face to communicate with him - but it seemed like a first draft rather than the finished product. I quite liked the idea of linking into the original film but it wasn't very well executed. I felt that it was the sort of thing that would have been better dealt with it in a tie-in novel or comic book rather than in a film 25 years after the fact. Continuity can sometimes be a double-edged sword in that respect as you don't want to remind people of better films when they're watching your bad one. The fight with the T-800 prototype and Arnie's "digital cameo" was definitely my favourite part of the film but even that's not great.
In spite of my many problems with this film, I'm still looking forward to the fifth one "Terminator: Genisys" (in spite of its stupid title) as it seems to be taking a "back to basics" approach with Arnie back in the saddle and, seemingly, the return of time travel to the series with the casting of the 27-year-old Emilia Clarke as Sarah.