CAUTION: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS, AWESOMELY PLACED REFERENCES TO UNRELATED MOVIES AND CLEVER TURNS OF PHRASE

By Andrew Sposato

When we finally destroy Skynet’s defense grid and come upon the time displacement equipment, Kyle Reese can go back in time to save Sarah Connor I’m going back in time to stop this film from being made. Say what you will about the pros of preventing thermonuclear war, at least the war against the machines will unite all of mankind in a noble struggle for survival. The most this movie will do is unite the 30 people who saw it in misery.

The performances…

Arnold was… well Arnold, far from his powerful performance in Maggie (the review to that film is forthcoming as well).

Jai Courtney was… he’s in really good shape. As Kyle Reese, I found him flat. He lacked the intensity that Michael Biehn brought to the original. I didn’t care about him, if the T-1000 had skewered him like a kabob I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. He was there, he was hunky, he moved the plot along by delivering his lines, that was about it.

J.K. Simons nearly saved this film. He was light, subtle, endearing, and charismatic. Some actors chew on the scenery, he holds it up. If this movie featured him more prominently it’d have been much more palatable.

Emilia Clarke was as good as this movie would allow her to be. Her performance was sort of emblematic of the whole film. She did a spot on impression of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, and did a good job of playing it down the middle between Judgment Day Sarah Connor and Terminator Sarah Connor.

It should be noted that Linda Hamilton created a legendary character and made an unbelievable story-arch seem plausible. In the first film Sarah was the all American 80s girl, complete with feathered hair, and acid wash jeans, in the second film she was someone who could take Rambo’s milk money. Even more amazingly, you bought it. All of this begs the question: if Linda Hamilton did such a great job why relegate Emilia Clarke to just doing a Sarah Connor impression. If the original films were so good why did this one have to be made? I’ll tell you why: because studio executives are out for one thing, to squeeze money out of film franchises we grew up with until they’re dried out old husks of the artworks we once loved, they can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, they don’t feel pity or remorse or fear and they absolutely won’t stop, ever until we stop being snookered into seeing these warmed over re-skinned copies of the things we once loved. They don’t know how to actually create something, all they know how to create is abominable rehashed crap… Sorry I’ve got to be a bit more constructive.

That thing that resembled a plot…

I’ll give you the run down on the tenuous plot. The film begins with a cartoony, over digitized portrayal of Judgment Day complete with the obligatory chrome skeletons crushing skulls… the nuclear war with the malevolent self aware defense network Skynet. We then see the life of young Kyle Reese(Jai Courtney) and immediately we see that the producers of the film have disregarded all of the solid background laid down in Terminator Salvation. He’s no longer a one man resistance, trying to earn his stripes, he’s not an ingenious unlikely lone survivor of a nuclear war, he’s a lonely kid. Just as he’s about to be blasted by a terminator in a sewer he is miraculously saved by John Connor (Jason Clark) repelling from the ceiling.

From there we get a tour of the battle field and find out that the humans are winning (hurray!) and are about to strike a final blow to turn those T-800s into bumpers. We see some really interesting scenes here and I will concede it was an imaginative take on the war with the machines. It was the one part of the film that shows us something we actually haven’t seen before: the humans liberating a death camp and coming across the time displacement equipment.

We see a young digital, Arnie taken off the assembly line like a brand new Chevy and sent back in time. They were too late. Or were they? If John Connor’s still there, then didn’t the machines fail? So many questions. If only the producers of this film had struggled with these questions the way I did, or if they’d even considered them. Heck if any questions had even danced on the edge of their consciousness, maybe this would have been a better movie.

Unfortunately for the audience, the producers took the easy way out. They send Kyle Reese back in time and as he’s in the time travel sphere thingy he sees a mystery man attack John Connor. The mystery man was Matt Smith of Dr. Who fame. Of course, for how badly written this film was he might as well have been Dr. Who. Any who (get it?) Reese goes back and we settle in.

The next few scenes are basically a shot for shot redo of the original Terminator. The film sort of takes on a weird, your childhood home in a dream, sort of quality. The shots are all the same, but not as well done. It’s supposed to make you nostalgic for the old film but instead you end up just wishing you were actually watching the original.

A young, computer composite Arnold is transported back to the past in the big blue super hot ball, walks over to the punks hanging by the observatory. Here, I was disappointed because there was no computer created young Bill Paxton. Right as doppelganger Arnold is about to turn one of those thugs into a hand puppet we see a mysterious stranger. [SPOILER] We see an older, more grizzled Arnold, and he’s been waiting for, well Arnold. This should have been exciting, Arnold costarring alongside himself for the first time since The Sixth Day (remember that gem?). We get a good robot slam fest, and we see that apparently Skynet doesn’t believe in quality assurance because old Arnold isn’t as fast or strong as the new young Arnold. In this movie old Arnold was sent back in 1974, so by the time he meets up with young Arnold he’s only 10 years older yet he’s glitchy and jerky, more like a Ford Pinto than the hyper alloy battle chassis we thought he was made of. Guess Skynet should have used union labor. With a little help from Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and a Barrett .50 cal they dispatch Mr. Universe and move on.

Next up, Reese gets clothes from the hobo (same thing, different day) and mugs a cop for his gun asking him the date. This time the cop gives him the date, location and time, in a really eerie I wish he hadn’t sort of way. Turns out it’s a T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee). A chase ensues through the department store and like before Reese is arrested by two cops, but this time our liquid metal friend kills one. Reese saves the other, babbles about it being a robot, cyborg, whatever, a brief gun fight follows. Just as the T-1000 is baring down on them a Brinks truck smashes through the store front whacking him away. There’s another chase (one of many, suspenseless unimaginative chases throughout the film) and they manage to kill the T-1000 after young Arnold is briefly reanimated and killed again.

Then for some reason, which I couldn’t be bothered to remember it’s revealed to us that Judgement day had been postponed. No longer August 29^th 1997 but some other year:2017. Why? Something about the timeline changing while Kyle Reese was in the circuits of time, and honestly I feel like the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure time travel rules made more sense and were easier to follow. So they leave 1984, without loving a lifetime in the one night they were together thus not conceiving of the great Jon Connor, and show up in 2017 naked as jaybirds in the middle of the highway. Arnold’s skin was damaged so he stays behind and waits another 33 years for them and he’s supposed to meet them.

And then Jay Jonah Jameson saved the day…

By this point in the review I hope it’s apparent that I think this movie was horrendous. It was nigh unwatchable, but for the great J.K. Simmons. When I saw his name in the opening credits I was thinking he was just some new Dr. Silverman, the hapless, cynical criminal psychologist from the original. Earl Boen was great, but have you seen Whiplash? Reese and Sarah are in custody at a hospital and one of the cops who shows up is the afore mentioned Simmons. My reaction when he showed up and started speaking lines was thank God, someone who knows what he’s doing is here, it was kind of like any time my dad showed up and I was stuck in the middle of a home improvement project. Simmons was dazzling, he didn’t steal every scene he was in, he was the scene. In this film he’s portraying officer Obrien, the young cop that Reese saved. Apparently the last 33 years he’s been obsessing about that fateful night and feels pretty good about having been vindicated.

Then Jon Connor shows up and things get all eerie again. It was so ham-handedly done, they practically zoomed into just his eyes fiendishly rolling from side to side, his eyebrows furrowed. Unsurprisingly he’s a new kind of Terminator, because why not? Skynet also subscribes to planned obsolescence. No wonder they lost the war, instead of fighting they were constantly researching all of these wonder weapons. What was my point? Oh yeah, this film was awful and the “twist” was more predictable than a one sided coin flip. Somehow Dr. Who had turned Jon Connor into a new unstoppable killing machine. Even this wasn’t original, because he was basically just a Borg from Star Trek (remember Star Trek: First Contact? Great movie with sensible time travel rules, Jonathan Frakes is a great director).

So now a few more chases happen, the final show down in Cyberdyne, trying to stop the ever counting down release of Genysis, a mysterious new software operating system that will be Skynet, and again they blow it up, killing evil Jon, and everyone lives happily ever after (everyone except those who saw this movie). I’m skipping a lot because, to be honest, going through this movie again just makes me want to jump into a vat of molten steel.

At the end of the day, this film fell flat. It missed, and it missed big. I hope this Terminates Terminator sequels.