I used to like Christian Bale. I liked him right up until the day that he found out he was lactose intolerant, it all went downhill from there. The problem you see is that Christian Bale BLOODY LOVES Shredded Wheat and as such has it for breakfast every single day. He used to pour milk onto the Shredded Wheat, thereby softening them for easy delivery to the stomach. Not anymore. Now Christian Bale eats this healthy morning meal sans milk!! The effect this has can be easily summed up in this simple formula:
Shredded Wheat – Milk = Shredded Vocal Chords.

Jesus Christ Christian Bale, Batman was your LAST film. For the love of God, stop barking all your lines. You’re the leader of the resistance, not a pack of dogs. Take a Lozenge, clear your fucking throat and… ACTION. Other than the gravelly delivery, Bale was his usual haunted, pointy self and I think he did fairly well considering the shitty lines he had to deliver and the inexperienced lighting team he had to deal with.

The film itself is the typical CGI loaded bollocks that Hollywood has been churning out for the last few years now. I’m utterly convinced that George Lucas runs a workshop for no-talent movie makers called Magpie 101. I imagine their textbooks read something like this:

Chapter 1:

Don’t think of your audience as regular adults like you or me. Instead, think of them as very small babies or even magpies. If you storyline is convoluted and stupid and you fished your script out of a river, then just dangle something shiny (in this case, CGI) in front of moviegoers. They’ll be so engrossed in the pretty pictures that they won’t even care how well your film hangs together.

Fuck you McG, we do care.

We grew up with The Terminator and Terminator 2, which are both excellent films in their own right and only use special effects to enhance the movie experience. To McG, special effects seem to be the movie experience. Spend more time developing characters and story so that at the end of the film, your bad guy doesn’t have to have a Blofeldesque monologue to fill in all the numerous plot holes. I can’t remember exactly how the scene went, but I think this is pretty accurate;

Bad Guy: I did this so you’d do that and meet him here, get captured there and then escape and go here to do this and make him go there while they’re doing this and that and then I put one elaborate trap here and another there then throw HIM into the mix and then …here we are.

Hero: Wow. That’s a pretty elaborate plan. There were a fuck of variables, but everything seems to have come together just as you planned. Despite the very VERY low probability of that happening.

Bad Guy: Well, it’s done now. I win and you won’t stop me.

Hero: Sorry, did you say I won’t stop you, or I can’t stop you.

Bad Guy: Well, I’m pretty sure you could stop me, but I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t. I really thought we were really bonding, I feel like you actually underst….Hey! Wait! Where are you going?

Hero: To stop you, you dumb shit.

BANG! CRASH! PUNCH. KICK. BOOM!!!!

Hero: I win.

Bad Guy: Bollocks.

One of the great things about the first two films was the sense of purpose the robots sent to kill John Connor had; they were there to kill people and kill them they did. No such luck in this film, it’s like the robots know they’re on camera and don’t want to hurt anyone in case someone files a lawsuit. Therefore, cue dust flying up as the machines shoot the ground around people (never the people themselves) and then, if it’s mano a machino, everyone gets thrown around a little bit for dramatic effect. Fuck. That. You can be damn sure that if I was a human killing robot with a mini gun, then every one of those little meatbags that came close would be shot right in the face, no wonky targeting computer for me. Then, if it came to close quarter muscle hand to hydraulic hand combat I’d either punch them right through their puny human chest plate and rip out their heart or failing that crush their skull like an egg with my 20 tonne psi hand clap.

You want to make a shitty Terminator film McG? Fine. But at least make it an 18 rating, for pity’s sake.

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