Terminator: Shenanigans

Just to give you an idea of how utterly fucking stupid this movie is, you don't even need to go past the opening credits. It seriously tells you the title of the movie twice. In the span of, like, 40 seconds.

Nevermind that it should possess a colon, so it reads "Terminator: Salvation". No, it reads "Terminator Salvation".

Anyway, after the second reveal of the title, we have an idiotic prologue that features nothing recognizable to the Terminator world. And there are more individual producer credits than letters in the director's name.

(Remember when We Are Marshall came out, and McG was all about being taken seriously. But he didn't drop the McG thing, so then he made this retarded robot war movie?)

So then, after the prologue, we get a text scroll, setting up everything we already know about a war against the machines.

But we don't get to see the initial uprising. No, we just get John Connor in the middle of everything. (He also can't fly a helicopter for shit). The resistance is already well formed, and has massive bunkers and hangars filled with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of planes and military hardware. Hey, here's a thought, your enemy is an indestructible robot army that has the foresight enough to have little robots come out of the larger machines. These robots (including a hobo terminator) require no sleep, and possess scanners that allow these machines to hunt down humans. So these robots, which have the foresight enough to actually create "Hydro-bots" in case those pesky humans decide water might be a viable option to escape, can't find the only band of humans flanked by all the military equipment, that seems to be only a few miles away from the large Cyberdyne headquarters.

(HOBO-Nator)
Oh, and did I mention that nothing that happens in this movie is of any consequence to anything? It's true.

See this? This doesn't happen in the movie. You don't get to see this. You get to see running away, and dust, and crashes and Bryce Dallas Howard's cross-eyed acting.

There are a few cool sequences, like the robot motorcycle chase, and John Connor's fight towards the end was the only time I actually had a smile on my face. But the movie is shenanigans. It made me appreciate the finer nuances of "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past". Four hours ago, I would've sworn of the 2 giant robot fighting movies we get this summer, at least this one won't be as stupid as the other. Now I'm starting to regret those words.

I obviously have a fondness for the third movie, because of the circumstances under which I saw it, but this movie makes the third one seem like Blade Runner. (The final cut, even). At least that movie had some balls. This one is all flash and noise.

Goddamn this movie goes full retard.