The Terminators (2009)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2014
SYNOPSIS: If you're a fan of late 80s/early 90s TV, you may remember the addition of A. Martinez to the cast as the definitive sign that LA Law had jumped the shark. That's true in this movie, too. Only, in this case, he appears in the first five minutes.
It's an unidentified time in the near future where the world is exactly like ours except every household has a muscle-bound TR-series robot to do all the things we wish we had sinister-looking robots in muscle shirts and fatigues to do. They're all controlled from an orbital space station, to make servicing them as inconvenient as possible when they go nuts for no reason and start killing everybody.
A. is the sheriff of a small California town which also includes local resident Chloe, her cheating husband, the irritating bimbo he's cheating with, and a bunch of other people with even less backstory. When the TRs start killing everyone, Sheriff A, Chloe, and the rest (other than cheating husband and bimbo, who are off cheating) flee into the wilderness to get picked off one-by-one -- a surprisingly easy task since, thanks to a programming flaw in the brains of the writers, when the TRs attack a large group, they always fixate on a single individual, who they kill about thirty times over while everybody else runs away.
Meanwhile, the cheating husband and the bimbo go to an abandoned refinery to have cheating sex and get killed by TRs. Well, cheating husband does; bimbo flees and disappears from the movie for a good hour, much to everyone's relief (indeed, her absence is the best thing about the subsequent hour).
Meanwhile, back in the actual plot (such as it is), Sheriff A and his little band of survivors run across a rancher who used to work at the robot factory that made the TRs. He knows that the TRs are all controlled from the space station and, if they can just get up there and hit the master off switch, they'll all shut down. This would seem like an insurmountable problem if it wasn't for the spaceship parking lot conveniently located nearby. Unfortunately, none of the spaceships have fuel, so they have to make a cross-country trek to pick up fuel and then return it to the ships. This provides plenty of opportunity for even more of the survivors to be picked off. Unfortunately, their trip back takes them through the refinery, where they find and rescue the bimbo, who rewards them by crying incoherently for the entire rest of the movie.
Back at the ships, a gun battle results in Deckard Sheriff A discovering that he's a replicant terminator TR unit, leading to a fierce debate over whether or not this means that his acting has been so wooden intentionally. They arrive at the station, along with a marine strike team, who barely manage to live long enough to say "hoo yah!" before getting slaughtered by TRs. Fortunately, the bimbo panics and wanders off immediately to cry hysterically in private, while the rest of the group gets on with the serious business of getting killed by TR units -- including the ones you were sure were going to survive the movie. In the end, only the suddenly Ripleyesque Chloe is left, making it the central control room where she... gets ambushed by a TR unit and pinned up against the wall by the neck, while useless bimbo who didn't even belong in this movie and hasn't had a coherent line in over an hour, shows up and punches the off switch, shutting down the TRs and saving the world. The end.
I can honestly say that, unlike every single other plot development, I didn't see THAT coming.
Greg Pearson
