Wow. I'm having a hard time recalling another movie in recent memory that started with a solid 15 minutes that had me totally on its side and then descended into complete and utter garbage and became an unconscionable failure on every possible level.
I don't even know where to START...Jai Courtney SUCKS as Kyle Reese. EVERYTHING about this character is wrong here. Everything. Emilia Clark is definitely mis-cast as Sarah, though quite probably one of the least egregiously terrible things about the film. The whole Arnold obsession with this franchise needs to stop...I mean, the whole franchise should stop, but if they keep going just keep him away, please. The "smiling" gag was awful.
Let's back up though...I guess, I dunno, like I said, I have no idea where to even START to wrap my head around this pile of excrement. The "smiling" thing though leads me into a fairly sizable complaint: pretty much everything flies in the face of everything that's been pre-established. The "smiling" gag is a minor symptom of that. It's already been established that the Arnold model terminator (seriously, can someone tell me if this is a T101 or a T800? Why is there still confusion about this?) can mimic human emotions...in only a matter of days...when taught by Eddie Furlong. "Pops" (UGH) has been with Sarah for 20(?) years. He still can't smile right? The bigger complaint I have with this, and this goes from not only a point of anger about continuity, but also general internal logic and overall drama, is that all the machines just straight-up DIE when Skynet's central core is destroyed? I always thought it'd be more like they lose their communications and ability to strategize on a global scale, but still have their standing orders and are still very deadly, just EXTREMELY disorganized and MUCH easier to ultimately defeat. Nope. They all just shut down...but wait...then how in the name of holy blue bumbles can any of the machines function in the past? There's no Skynet in 1984 (or 19XX when Pops first rescues Sarah), how can he function? Shouldn't he, according to the rules the movie establishes, get to that point in time and instantly just turn off because there's not Skynet central core?
Then there's the (spoiled by previews, because it's always a great idea to have a trailer give away the huge twist of a movie...like when all the trailers for Empire Strikes Back prominently featured the "I am your father" line, remember that? No? Oh right...) problem of the T-1-Connor. Unbelievably ill-defined, and yet at the same time overpowered, and yet at the same time stupid weak and yet at the same time over-explained. We have to labor through the actual "creation" of this thing, which anybody who sees the machine grab him and then what he turns into could have surmised, and yet we know nothing about it. What can it actually do? Don't worry about that, we'll just make it up as we go along. "Hey, in this scene, we need it to be able to grow a huge claw-hand to punch through a guy's chest." 'Do it. Nobody will care.' What is the PLAN here? It shows up, and claims to be willing to kill Reese and Sarah, so why doesn't it just do it right from the get-go? What's the plan here? "Hey, I'll let you live if you agree to let Skynet kill billions of people." ? I don't...WHAT?!?! Also, this thing is so overpowered (No bullets or punching can stop it or slow it down) that we have to constantly invent excuses for there to be lots of magnets or electricity so it can be forced to stand still while our human characters slowly back away in fear. It crushes the pacing. And yet, it's also weak as hell...
Also, it recombinates DNA into fluctuating capacitation of decoupled hemosplondifing? And "This timeline stuff isn't so hard"?
I also can't be the only person who noticed, and hysterically laughed at, the T1000 in the beginning wanting to go faster and thus smashing his foot through the gas pedal and through the floor of the car in order to make it go faster. Prreeeeetttty sure cars don't work that way.
Speaking of not working that way, helicopters. NOPE. Nope nope nope.
JK Simmons is utterly wasted here, not to mention a nonsensical character. An alcoholic crackpot who's convinced that time traveling robots have been around for the past 30 years? Why would that person still be on the force?
This movie actually shoots for the moon, "Let's do a sequel, a prequel, a reboot, and a remake all at the same time. Let's fan-wank people with tons of nostalgia bombs and direct rips of lines and moments, and at the same time introduce a bunch of new stuff to the mythology. Let's give people everything they expect in a new way." Unfortunately, it fails MISERABLY...or spectacularly, I kind of haven't decided yet.
It's either just a complete pile of garbage that is overly convoluted, occasionally poorly paced, mostly terribly acted, horribly scripted, and not anywhere NEAR as clever as it thinks it is....or it's all of those things in a damned entertainingly stupid way. I just can't decide which, though I lean towards just flat-out terrible because I did find myself pretty bored and like I would have walked out of a real-money theater and demanded a refund or passes to another movie had I paid full-price to see this monstrosity, and also because this movie doesn't even REMOTELY stand on its own two feet. It's SO dependent on the previous films, in terms of establishing its characters (which this movie doesn't bother to do), its pre-existing story (which the movie also doesn't bother to do), and the aforementioned fan-wankery (which it actually DOES bother to do in some shots to such an extent that a new viewer would almost HAVE to lean over to the person they're watching with and go, "Is that FROM something else?")
Is some of this overly harsh? Probably...but this movie can't even hold-up under MINOR scrutiny or maintain its own internal logic consistently. It's also SO over-the-top in its action as to be boring (when school buses are dangling off the side of bridges by their...I-don't-know-what-was-holding-it-ons then I just check out because it's more than one step too far; it's like 10 steps too far.