Movie Review: Terminator V, Lost in Time

It was... alright.  More of a reboot than a continuation of the last two movies, it pushed the plot debris aside by establishing a new time line where different stuff happens.  Happened.  Is going to happen.  Something.  For all that, it's getting into the time travel paradox cheat, where anything can happen because "oh, The Machines must've sent back another robot even before then."  And when will then be now?  Soon.

So the plot of the whole thing is a mess, and John Connor looks like the armored-up love-child of Robin Williams and Sean Penn.  Ugh, creepy.  So, what were the good parts?  Some of the re-creation of the 1984 original movie from the viewpoint of coming in from the future was pretty good.  The digital mapping of Young Ahnuld into the action along with subsequent fights with Old Ahnuld was interesting.  The fights, chase scenes, and special effects, even though we've seen these all before, were top-notch.  And the campy humor, the comfortable laughs at the T800's efforts to be more human, extending on the second movie's similar plays, those were a welcome relief.  Finally, the acting was uniformly up to par for this sort of action movie.

Again, it was.... alright.  The time travel paradoxes and how they were used in the plot were pretty amateurish in comparison to two recent efforts, Primer and Predestination.  Whoever wrote this thing really doesn't have a clue about plotting these things out in such a way that you get a coherent, interesting story.  If you're really desperate for a summertime robot rock'em-sock'em, it'll do, but.... well, it was alright.

Bottom line: 2 out of 4 stars.