With much buzzing, beeping and whirring, the Terminator franchise comes to an absolute creative standstill, or even goes clankingly into reverse, with this fantastically dull fourth episode. Look closely in the battle scenes and you can see one of the red-eye Terminator robots yawning, leaning over to another robot and mouthing the words: "I actually voted for Stavros Flatley."
It is set in that post-nuclear future of smoky wreckage, CGI ruination, battered bridges and buggered buildings prophesied in James Cameron's original 1984 film. The star is notorious crosspatch Christian Bale, playing John Connor, the freedom fighter battling robot-machine tyranny. Connor, you will recall, is the resistance hero whom the machines tried to wipe out by sending California's future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to whack his mom. Connor and his comrades discover what they think is a kryptonite-type weapon which will win the war: a signal transmitter that appears to immobilise the robots.
They certainly need all the help they can get. Because Connor has chanced upon evidence that the machines have developed an all-new, human-looking super-duper, so-unstoppable-it-makes-previous-Terminators-look-stoppable Terminator. Where, oh where, can this chilling prototype be? Meanwhile, a mysterious warrior hoves into view, insinuating himself into the resistance fighters' ranks: one Marcus Wright, played by the Australian actor Sam Worthington. But as we have already seen this same character in the pre-credit sequence on death row, pledging his body to science, it isn't hard to guess his tragically conflicted secret. Inevitably, we are to be reintroduced to that self-defeating concept already rolled out in T2: the "nice" Terminator, the Terminator we're sort of supposed to be rooting for.
Fundamentally, Connor and Wright utterly cancel each other out; all the crash-bang action is entirely uninvolving, looking frankly less exciting than the chase scene at the beginning of Walt Disney's Bolt. There's nothing to compare with the magnificent showdown between Arnie and Linda Hamilton at the end of the first movie, and the only woman on view here is Bryce Dallas Howard, playing Connor's winsomely pregnant partner who is at all times wringing wet.
If the contest was about who can be the dullest, Bale would win hands down. His belligerent, resentful facial expression is that of a stunned ox, or a vexed moose, or a rhino that thinks it's overheard someone calling its mum a slag. All the world has now heard the famous on-set meltdown that Bale had while making this film, weirdly maintaining his American accent while raging at director of photography Shane Hurlbut for messing with the lights while Bale was trying to do a scene. (Almost as many will have heard his apology, phoned into an LA radio station, expressing concern that anyone would have thought less of Hurlbut, and emphasising that he is in fact an outstanding professional.) Perhaps the tantrum should be released as a bonus feature with the DVD - or perhaps it is rather that the film should be the bonus feature, and Bale's super-strop the main event. It is certainly more exciting and more deeply felt than anything in the fictional action.
The terminators themselves, once so scary, are now starting to resemble a chorus line of grumpy C3POs. And despite being notionally formidable warriors, they have an unfortunate eccentricity, which is to prove convenient for the narrative. If you can get close enough to stab them in the back of the neck, they go limp and floppy for a good few minutes! What a very unfortunate design flaw for these Terminators. Why didn't the "machines", those implacable foes of humanity, think to stick a metal plate on the back of their necks?
And the other thing is, for the third time, he's beck. The original Terminator comes very briefly out of retirement, digitally created to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger as he was 25 years ago, in his primped, pumped pomp. Oddly, this obviously unreal Arnie doesn't look as excitingly and creepily unreal as the actual, real, non-CGI Schwarzenegger did all those years ago. Nothing and no one in this film looks as gloriously mad as he did in 1984, and no one is capable of the droll, subversive hints of humour that helped to make the film and its star such a smash.
Famously, Schwarzenegger's later switch from movies to politics was so quick that he was fully installed as governor of California just as the DVD edition of Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines hit the stores. Well, now that his career in public office is beginning to tank, who knows if the de facto leader of Hollywood's Austrian-American community won't be back for T5? After all, Sly Stallone returned for another Rocky and another Rambo. Perhaps Arnie will feel the need to stick in the old red contact lenses for another sentimental outing. Perhaps this can be all about the problems that a Terminator faces in his autumnal years: the slowing up, the grandchildren, the bittersweet visits to the prostate clinic. It couldn't be worse than this.
