With that in mind, some of the shots captured here were fantastic, especially a few during a chase between Ducati-nators and resistance fighters trying to evade in a tow truck. The dogfights between Hunter-Killers and resistance A-10 Warthogs were exciting to watch as well. Generally speaking, most of the action sequences were well done, relying more on slick effects and choice camera placement than shaking the viewpoint to make things seem more exciting than they were. Industrial Light and Magic does what they do best again, giving us computer generated effects that are virtually seamless with the real world upon which they're digitally overlaid, including a digital rendition/makeover of the original Arnold terminator, returning him virtually (yet photorealistically) to his younger years.
Story-wise, the bigger picture works well here (what differentiates man from machine?), though it's not terribly deep and doesn't afford too much development. It wisely doesn't have aspirations to unseat T2 as the crowning jewel in the franchise, and gives you just enough to watch and think about without getting bogged down. It's the finer points of the plot and moment-to-moment interactions where it can start to break down.
For instance, Connor and Reese go toe-to-toe numerous times with terminators in their various incarnations. Rather than go for the quick kill, the machines seem more inclined to beat the crap out of their prey and throw them around a dozen times before going for anything resembling a kill shot. Terminators have metallic hands with pneumatic joints that could crush concrete, but instead of tearing these men limb from limb, they opt to just rough them up a bit. Makes no sense.
Similarly, you find out early on in the flick that a number of prominent figures in the resistance (Connor and Reese among them) have been marked for death within a few days' time by the machines. Despite being clearly identified by the machines several times throughout the movie, more often than not, the machines simply try to pester, capture, or contain these soldiers rather than killing them. I guess it could be argued that they'd be more effective if converted to cyborgs and inserted back into the resistance as spies or saboteurs, but that's never really addressed in the movie. All we know is that the machines want these guys dead, but forgo it at every available opportunity.
Then there's the "signal" discovered by a human that can shut down machines. It seems to have worked awfully well right up to the point that it's needed to great effect (possible spoiler, skip to next paragraph if you're wary), then we find out apparently all the machines knew they were supposed to play dead whenever they heard it and let themselves be blown apart. Instead, the one thing driving the movie up to that point gets nixed and they fall back on the same thing used to kill a terminator in T3. Meh. Given the great mistrust of humans toward machines, how this information got planted in human hands is a mystery.
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