To be fair, a lot of my opinions on this movie are colored by its opening. That dull, horribly written, godawful opening. You’d think this movie would start with killer robots or nuclear holocaust, but no. At the start of the movie, we’re treated to Sam Worthington talking with a cancer-ridden woman.
Even worse, this sequence is followed by a text crawl. A text crawl. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Killer robots have nuked the world, driving humanity to near-extinction, but they’re not going to show us?! Hell, it’s bad enough that we’re expected to read lengthy backstory at the start of any movie (Star Wars exempted, obviously), but why the hell did this text crawl come AFTER THE FIRST SCENE?! What a boneheaded way to introduce a movie, stopping it dead in its tracks for a fucking text crawl.
Okay, that particular rant is over. Aside from the horrid opening, how was the rest of the movie? Well, I’m sorry to say that most of the characters were jokes. The female characters in particular seem to laugh in the face of James Cameron’s reputation for creating strong women. Bryce Dallas Howard was completely wasted here, the little girl character was absolutely unnecessary, Moon Bloodgood’s character could have played a part in the climax but was entirely forgotten during the third act and I’m still trying to figure out what Helena Bonham Carter was doing in this movie or why her character existed. Then there’s Christian Bale. I realize that on paper, he seems like a great John Connor. In practice, unfortunately, he was a one-note character who over-utilized a slightly modified version of the Batman voice.
The movie only has two redeemable characters. The first is Anton Yelchin’s Kyle Reese, who played an active role in the movie, seemed rather clever at points and actually had a character arc. The second is the movie’s true main character, Marcus. He did pretty much everything in this movie, he was established as a sympathetic character, he was killed off at the end. Seriously, what the fuck?
Additionally, I’m very disappointed in Danny Elfman. I realize that he’s not exactly used to working with someone else’s toolbox, but this score was just uncharacteristically bland. On the plus side, this movie was visually stunning from top to bottom and it had some rather clever nods to the prior movies. The action scenes were also very good, though punctuated by logic snafus and a few laughably bad wire stunts.
In the end, I have to give McG and company credit for trying, but not much else. Clearly, they did the best they could with what they had, but what they had was a rancid screenplay diluted by interference from Bale, the WGA strike and who knows what else. The ambition on display is tangible, but it wasn’t enough to save this franchise.