The year is 2018 and the war against the machines rages on. John Connor [Christian Bale] is a soldier in the resistance that holds a lot of influence as many of the soldiers believes in the prophecy that John himself has been told all his life that he is the true leader of the resistance and will lead man to victory in this war against the machines. Marcus Wright [Sam Worthington] is the first type of machine to ever be made with human tissue and seem completely human. The machine itself believes it is human and only remembers its human memories and nothing of becoming a machine. After Marcus is brought to the resistance headquarters that John Connor commands everyone starts to question what is going on.

I think my biggest problem with reviewing this film is that the biggest plot point that really is the reason for this movie, other than the millions of dollars it will generate, is technically a spoiler. However, if you’ve seen all the other Terminator films then you already know that it needs to happen. Personally I find it a bit of a creative cop out for the movie to completely centre on something that we already know needs to happen. Now we never knew how this did happen in the original movies all we know is that it happened and that’s all, but I’m fine with that. I would have preferred it if John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, the writers, had come up with something that moved far away from anything that was mentioned in the previous films, other than the man vs. machine bit of course. So if you’ve seen the movie you should get what I’m saying here, if you haven’t this might be slightly confusing but I hope you understand what I’m trying to say here. I was promised a new Terminator that took us to a part of the story we didn’t know about only to be dragged into another continuation of the same story we had heard about from the 80s and in the end I think it would have been best if that is where the story stayed.

My problem with the movie has to do with the fact that it isn’t sure what it wanted to be. The film starts out with this whole prequel feel, that it wants to explain a number of things that we didn’t know about, like what was happening around the time the T-800 was first made. However, as you watch this movie you realise quickly that the McG decided a long time ago to not care about the actual story and want to make it into a huge budget action film where he had huge fucking robots blowing shit up and humans running away really fast. So the movie spends its entire runtime pulling between these two extremes and it never really finds a proper middle-ground where we can figure out what kind of movie it really is and enjoy it for that.

What drove me up a wall was wondering how people didn’t figure out that Marcus was a machine quicker? Now the film doesn’t explicitly show you this but by the looks of it McG definitely implied that for the entire movie Marcus never ate. Now you take a two day hike with someone and he never eats how do you not question that? Blair [Moon Bloodgood] may have been one of the dumbest on screen soldiers since Meet the Spartans.

The action in the movie is pretty weak. I continue to say that Terminator never had the action better than it did in T2 and almost two decades later they still can’t top it. I found that even though McG had better CGI and a bigger budget to get it all done with James Cameron still remains king of the franchise. It is all evident in the sequence where a group of humans are fighting (i.e. running away from) a huge robot with a gun as its head and it spits out these motor cycle bots from its legs. Now all of that sounds really cool, but the execution I found was really poor. I sat there wondering how were three more or less militia soldiers able to do what an entire army couldn’t. They have no special insight into the ways these machines worked and they definitely didn’t do anything that actually hurt the machine. So how did they get away? Or at least be able to get as far as they did? Now some may tell me that it was because they wanted him alive, but I didn’t think that in that scene the massive bot knew that.

One thing that I definitely enjoyed was the nostalgia. I’m a huge fan of these movies, and when I say these movies I mean the James Cameron ones. When we got to see the T-800 [Roland Kickinger], I have no idea how they made him look so much like Arnold back in The Terminator, it just set off a few happy splosions in my mind and that was a good thing.

In the end the movie felt half-assed and that definitely didn’t sit well with me. There were a few scenes that I liked for visual appeal and some nice explosions, but overall I recommend this as a wait for TV movie.

IMDB says 7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 34%

I say 5.0/10