T’would be a Dark Fate indeed to be the Terminator franchise it seems, as Terminator: Three: Four performs in line with the three prior Terminator Threes at the box office, aka “I’ll (probably not) be back (for a while again)”, despite sort of not actually being terrible this time and at least being far better than Terminator 3: Rise of the: Cringe-Machines, Terminator 3: Generic Sci-Fi Salvation, and Terminator 3: Convoluted Tales from Genisys Space… but aaalso sort of shitting all over its own lore in a preeetty major way. Your CPU may well be a lyurning compuder, Ahnald, but you haven’t lyurned all that much!

Talking of it not being terrible this time though, let’s talk about some terrible things that aren’t in Terminator Six: Three: Four!

  • There’s no Elton John glasses!
  • There’s no “talk to the hand” cringe-lines!
  • There’s no Christian Bale throwing on-set tantrums!
  • There’s no Borg-Queen-esque “living embodiment of SkyNet” clichéd cheap ass-writing!
  • There’s no dragon-associated people who can’t act at all and the only part of them that can act is their eyebrows and sure they’re well pretty but my god they also are bad at acting!
  • The glimpses of Future War we get aren’t too vaguely-nondescript and aren’t full of not-Terminator-looking-stuff!
  • There’s only the standard Terminator-amount of time travel!

So… no problemo?

No, son; not today. There is no no problemo today. Not for you. No no problemo for you but that which we make for ourselves. And unfortunately when you have this many people involved in writing a film, that usually means fewer no problemos rather than more. One writer’s super advanced future-no problemo ends up fighting with another writer’s no problemo that they sent back to the first script meeting to defend the third writer’s adolescent no problemo that will turn out to be the leader of the no problemos but only if-

There are plenty of good things in this film, not least the new not-a-T-1000 T-1000 looking a bit Mexican so you can call him the T-Juan-thousand. Ahnald is on fine form as the new old T1 Ahnald, Mackenzie Davis is fantastic as the new old T2 Ahnald, there’s some flippin’ great action and fight sequences, and at one point people literally get to a choppah.

But it shits all over its own lore, so if you care about Terminator 2, the lore-shitting-on’ll leave this film with some cheap-looking plastic faux-metal squibs stuck to its own shirt that’ll look pretty janky if you actually look at them and you don’t even have to look that close. I promise you that sentence makes sense.

Anyway, this is definitely the best Terminator 3 even for its lore-shitting, but the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, can we stop shaming me please I’m getting tired of this; fool me four times, I’ll just not bother going to the cinema this time” factor had killed it before it even powered up its shiny new dulled-gunmetal-grey time machine. I doubt a successful Terminator 3 is even possible any more.

I rate it Terminator 3 out of Terminator 6, probably?