Oh lord. Where to start?
Christian Bale? Not the man for this job. You could have replaced him with a wind up toy that yelled periodically.
The dude that played Marcus had a couple moments of really brilliant acting through body language.
The script was so fucking bad that nobody could have saved this. Also, they totally lifted the entirety of the Reese/Star in LA bit from fucking Fist of the North Star. See Bat/Bart and Lin from that. Every line was either boring or stupid.
The signal thing? Who the fuck transmits that from their HQ? Put that shit in something near the front line. Nobody would do what they did.
The heart thing? Ok. Seriously. That was some stupid shit. Why would you give somebody a super alloy skeleton that provides less protection than a standard human one? If you blasted all the skin from my chest, do you think you’d see my heart? No. For that matter, wouldn’t you see lung there even in the shoddy terminator chassis? Or was it just SkyNet decided “Lungs are easy, but making a simple pump to replace that heart would be tough”? The fucking transplant at the end was as stupid. Yeah, let’s just plunk that in. I’m sure this veterinarian in the middle of a wasteland can pull off an organ transplant with no problem. Let’s not even think about tissue compatibility and rejection. Ghod, the retardation. Conveniently this also means the only good actor and character is dead. Yay?
Marcus in general could have been a great character. Take away the retarded lines, delete all the shit about his fucking heart, and let the man work with anger and silence. He was great at conveying the sense of someone with a killer just beneath the surface.
His back story needed something else though. Where the fuck was he for 15 years? Was he converted then frozen? Did they just freeze his body? What the fuck? We could have spent an entire movie exploring this guy, in a good story, but instead we get some bullshit.
Oh, and christ, that whole ‘you did everything we wanted you to’ bit. What kind of retarded fucking plan is that? There wasn’t even any reason for SkyNet to give a shit about John yet. Even if there was, it could have ended it by destroying that first fucking chopper. GAA!! THE STUPID BULLSHIT OVERWHELMS!
The giant robots? Stupid. There’s no fucking reason for them. The scout drone thing? Stupid. SkyNet never bothered with something that couldn’t hold a gun unless it had one bolted to it or, at the very least, had something stabby instead. 50 of some capture model droid would have been better, and seem more fitting. Not that there seemed to be any fucking reason to capturing people anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, the 4 armed thing looked cool, aside from being CGI, it just didn’t fit. The T-600? Fucking awesome.
My biggest non-story issue was the sets. They ranged from cheap looking and unambitious to just cheap looking. Also we jumped around a lot for no reason.
Now, the biggest story issues.
For one, the resistance was too organized and well armed. John was supposed to be the one gathering people up, training them, and really driving the whole thing. Instead he was just some asshole in some other asshole’s army. He wasn’t revered as some kind of prophet, he was revered for being really fucking good at killing terminators, outsmarting SkyNet, and organizing. That was the whole point of his mother raising him the way she did. Fucking idiots.
Next up is the feeling of danger. It wasn’t there. There was sunlight and everything. When you watched Terminator the first time, did you get the impression these people saw daylight? I sure didn’t. I got the impression of “Nuclear Hell-Hole”, and people surviving by living in warrens that resisted detection mostly because they were surrounded by fucking ruin. “It’s safer in the day” my ass. There’s no day anymore. “They’ve never pushed this far in before”. Fucking why not? They are an immortal army of super-steel with no concept of fear, rest, or anything else of the sort. Don’t even get me started on how I felt about them having aircraft, or a fucking compound all to themselves.
Last, let’s talk aesthetics. Why would there be any manual controls in or near anything SkyNet built? It literally controls everything. That door needs to be opened? Ok, it’s open, or kicked in by a Terminator. Also, people, drop the iPod look. Did SkyNet need a face? No. Would SkyNet have any kind of display anywhere? Not likely. Humans are to be killed, that is all. Would it give a shit about Marcus after using him? No. He would have been liquified and recycled. Also, his metal face bit looked terrible, wobbling from shitty makeup to shitty CGI.
Oh, and of course the cinematography mostly sucked. From shitty camera jumps to a bunch of shaky cam.
I see it was written by a couple of assholes that should be roasted and fed to animals you don’t like. Too bad they wrote the screenplay for Surrogates, since before now I was hoping that would be good.
EDIT: I realized that it slipped my mind to mention that being punched directly in the heart by a super strong killer robot will probably result in you needing more than a jolt to revive.
Also, on further reflection, who the fuck does John Connor think he is? He thinks he’s sooooo important that he scrapped a seemingly viable plan to save his own hide. Way to go Narcissus. And again, why the hell did SkyNet care one whit? Sigh.