Alright this is gonna have Spoilers up the yin yang so if you plan on watching this movie don’t scroll down. So...yeah....give me a minute. *sips coffee, looks down...looks back up* This movie is a Question Mark. While I enjoyed the action and the violence I am confused as to the point of TDF. What were they trying to communicate? In the first scene (after they tried to add substance by giving us Sarah’s emotional, insightful testimony from her time in Pescadero during T2) Sarah and John are enjoying their time in what I think is Mexico. It’s 1998 and it seems everything is fine and dandy. Until a Model 101 shows up out of frackin nowhere and blows John away. *sips coffee* WHAT THE $&@“?! Seriously. What jack-a-nape wrote this? Sarah has been training for YEARS to protect her son and kick ass. On top of this she spent what I assume is years in Pescadero State Hospital. Did you see T2? How she got out? She is ferocious! And do you know what she was doing when John was gunned down? She was sitting with her back to the doorway! Training and paranoia don’t just up and vanish in the wind! She wouldn’t have been sitting there, she would have been prepared. Anyways....moving on. With the arrival of the latest terminator also comes another soldier from the future. Yup, this again. I personally don’t have a problem with the character of Grace; she was wonderfully flawed. The terminator is another Ok This Terminator Is Gonna Be Even MORE Badass type. They just keep having to introduce crazier types to keep audiences watching (or so they think). The new savior of humanity is a young woman from Mexico. Apparently she becomes the leader and not give birth to one. More on this later but that’s just the story here. Terminator finds Dani Ramos (the young woman) at the same time as Grace. Fight breaks out. Grace can go toe-to-toe with the terminator (Rev-9) because shes been augmented. The events of T2 has changed the future so much that not only are the terminators different but humans can undergo surgery to become augmented. Oh and Skynet is now called Legion apparently. Sarah Conner suddenly shows up and saves everyone’s bacon. Fast forward and she reveals that she’s been getting text messages about where and when terminators pop up. Yeah apparently there have been numerous. Kinda curious to know why but that never gets revealed. Grace reveals that she knows where to go from a tattoo on her side and the location lines up with info on Sarah’s phone. So they head thataway. Where we find...the Model 101 that originally killed John. *sips coffee* So....his name is Carl. And he does drapes. He’s been working and doing his own thing for years. He’s in a relationship with a woman and her son calls him Dad. Kinda odd but I see where they were going with this. They were trying to bank on the emotional I Want To Learn To Be Human that Uncle Bob was doing in T2. This just feels a bit weak. Another way to keep Arnold in the Terminator franchise. It’s overdone people! Apparently he also knows when terminators pop up in our time because of some weird chrono-science thing. Makes no sense at all. One of the weakest points in this movie. So they all team up and eventually through some crazy action scenes they defeat Rev-9. Grace sacrifices herself to provide an EMP device from her internal battery. Carl gets his ass handed to him but he ensures that Rev-9 is destroyed. It’s fun to watch but it’s poorly written. I have a feeling that there are political aspects threaded throughout the movie. They had to kill John but what was it for? To let a woman lead the next revolution against Skynet-not-Skynet? Grace is a strong woman who is trying to fight a man who can literally show his “inner evil”. Carl was once a powerful killing machine but he felt like a laidback old fart who is more interested in drape texture. I hate to think of it this way but it’s just the way its written. This is what I meant by a Question Mark. Why did they make the movie this way? Why were they trying to rewrite the franchise? It’s like McG taking over to make his own interpretation (Terminator Salvation). So this is my own review. It’s another flop and yet another attempt to make Terminator good again but it falls short.