Robots

I recently finished the Philp K. Dick short story "Second Variety," which is about robots that take over the world and are trying to kill all the humans. It was somewhat amusing if fairly predictable. Then I went to see Terminator 4, which is basically about the same thing.

I'll say I went in with pretty low expectations because while almost everyone seemed to complain about how Terminator 3 didn't show us the promised war with the machines, I actually liked it and thought that it was a good idea not to show that. I also liked the ending about how the future can't be changed. The problem with a war against robots is that it is actually stupid, so it's best seen in the little glimpses that we got in the first couple movies. I should also add that I wasn't expecting much from Christian Bale, fresh off ruining every scene he was in in the latest Batman movie.

That said, this movie managed to be even dumber than I could have imagined, and I pretty much loved it. Don't get me wrong; it is a failure on basically every level, managing to undercut even my low expectations, but it is such a spectacular failure that it's hilarious. As I was saying, a war against robots in the future is basically on its face stupid, and Terminator 4 does a good job of showing us how stupid it is. In particular, it does a good job of making the robots so stupid as to be laughable in an attempt to make it believable that our protagonists could survive for more than about five minutes.

One glaring example is that there even is a human resistance. If you've seen the previous movies, or even if you haven't, because they remind us multiple times what happened here, you know that the supercomputer Skynet set off nuclear warheads all over the world, leaving only a few people alive, which it then hunts with Terminators, which are generally human-shaped robots. How stupid would this all-seeing military supercomputer have to be in order not to make sure all the military sites would have been taken care of? Yet the resistance is shown with fighter jets, helicopters, all manner of weaponry and even a freaking submarine. Where are they getting this stuff?

Then, after that, this brilliant computer decides that the best way to hunt down humans is by making absurdly slow humanoid robots that just kind of wander around until they find someone, then try to punch him to death. Seriously, they're basically like life-sized rock-em-sock-em robots. Of course it also builds giant robots that pick people up and put them in boxes (it is said that Skynet is doing experiments on people, but only briefly, and this is never explained) and robot motor cycles that are defeated by, I kid you not, putting a rope across the road in front of them WHILE THEY WATCH so that they clothesline theirselves.

Maybe the best part of this Skynet stupidity is that it has a crazy and convoluted plan to, big spoiler, kill John Connor. Here are some more spoilers for you. Skynet manages to use one of these big box robots to capture John's father, Kyle Reese (he is from the future if you haven't seen T1) and use him to lure John to Skynet's central complex thing. John is worried because if he doesn't send Kyle back in time, he himself will never exist, blah blah, Terminator is always about this stuff. At first, Skynet doesn't realize it is Kyle Reese, but then once it figures it out, it separates him because it also knows that Kyle is the key here. Then it proceeds to NOT EVEN TRY to kill him, just leaving him in a box for John. When John inevitably comes and rescues him, it tries to kill each of them with a single, unarmed terminator for each.

Beyond that, the script is mostly just ridiculous cliches and one dimensional-characters (given it is an action movie, but these characters are particularly egregious examples of hackneyed writing in the genre). Here are the ones I remember:

John Connor (Christian Bale) - angry. That's all. At least Bale doesn't do the stupid Batman voice.

John Connor's wife (?) - She is a doctor, I guess, and that's about it for her characteristics. Unless you can count the distractingly wooden performance of whoever it is that plays her as a character trait.

Kyle Reese - Young and inexperienced, but enthusiastic about the resistance. He's not that annoying other than you can pretty much determine his entire character within the first minute he is on screen.

Star - Little mute girl. This one amazed me as being the most cliched character I think I've ever seen, somehow. Can't blame the kid playing her for a character that literally could have been written out of the script by simply scratching out all of the million or so times somebody screamed her name.

Barnes (Common) - From rapper to basically worthless character, quite the stretch for him. He spends almost every second he is on screen scowling, and that is about it.

Marcus Wright - Spoiler, he is a robot. He's the tortured guy who just woke up in the future and has to discover why (he is a robot). He was on death row and feels guilty. This ultimately leads to some of the worst dialogue I have ever heard about hearts. If you see the movie, you will know immediately what I am talking about as soon as it starts. Unfortunately, the hearts theme continues to walk the line between annoyingly bad and laughably bad throughout the remainder of the movie.

Pilot Woman - I forgot this character's name, which goes to tell you how well developed she was. It's not like she's even a minor character; she's just that worthless. As soon as she appeared on the screen you could tell she was going to be a love interest for Marcus, and the writers seemed content to let your intuitions serve as backstory for her because they basically just throw her at him. She has some kind of weird eye paint, which is also kind of annoying.

Robots - hilarious. I should mention that probably the best acting in this movie is done by a computer generated Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is without a doubt the best part of the movie when he shows up, and it's made even better when you realize that Skynet has deemed that a single naked robot-man is the best way to kill John Connor when he is in the center of an entire army of robots and robot planes and robot motorcycles and probably other stupid robot stuff that actually have guns.

There are some other people in the movie, but they are basically even more worthless.

I just want to reiterate the point about how bad the hearts thing is before I end this post. If I hadn't heard it with my own ears, I would have thought it was a parody of action movie dialogue.