Zack Heisey…Fries your brain like an egg. The Terminator films have always included time travel and diverging timelines. In the past, they have been complex, but not extremely difficult to follow and keep track of. That is not the case here. Many time periods are covered and future-altering actions affect several different timelines. It is not hard to understand because it is complex or intelligent. It is hard to understand because it is dumb and poorly thought out.
Wait, this is a remake? The entire conceit of the film is the change of events in comparison to the original film. That’s an interesting launchpad, but the film forges no new ground. It is stuck trying to pay homage and reference previous films and when it does try to go off the beaten path, it feels just like every other blockbuster of the past 20 years or so. And for a film that’s pretty relentlessly paced, it’s actually quite boring, as well. The characters that were so likable in the 80’s and 90’s are unrecognizable here, often times being monotonous and even annoying at times. And don’t even ask about those attempted one-liners.
But it looks cool, right? No, it really doesn’t look cool. The action setpieces range from bland and boring to hilariously, ridiculously awful. The action starts off at the beginning as pretty nondescript and eventually nosedives into lunacy with blatant disregard for believability and physics. The one thing that even the worst blockbusters can often be counted on having, cool CG effects, is missing here, too. This looks like the CG of a $150 million blockbuster of 2005, not 2015.
Gives Salvation a challenge for its position as worst in the franchise.
