Narm / Terminator

In General

Found her T-spot

• Any post-Judgement Day callbacks come across as little more than pandering to nostalgia, with the end results sounding more like impressions than anything real. Especially glaring inT3, given how it flat-out discredits anything that happened in T2.
  • Variations on "I'll be back" tend to ignore the context of the original line, with characters saying it pretty much any time they're about to walk offscreen.
  • "Come with me if you want to live". Fine for the first film. A moment of reassurance in the second. Every other time? Just there for nostalgia. Dark Fate is probably the worst, with "Come with me, or you're dead in 30 seconds."
• Just the fact that every featured T-800 ends up losing an eye for that post-apocalyptic cyborg look. After a while you've got to wonder if the sunglasses are a necessary precaution.

The Terminator

• "Cyborgs don't feel pain. I do."
• Sarah shouting, "MOVE IT, REESE! ON YOUR FEET, SOLDIER!"
• The scene in the factory near the end is both scary and Narmful. It was terrifying when the Terminator walks out of the burning wreckage. It became Narm when the Terminator's torso was crawling for the gimped Sarah Conner and she was struggling to walk away... it was akin to the world's slowest and most pathetic chase.
• Sarah's roommate's boyfriend (Matt) says this when the Terminator breaks into the bedroom he and his girlfriend are using:
  "Don't make me bust you up, man."
• Reese's face as he empties his shotgun into the Terminator for the second time in the club.
• During the police station shootout, the "Hey!" Vukovich yells out before opening fire on the T-800 can come off as rather unintentionally funny in the way Lance Henrickson delivers the line.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

• The T-1000 (an extremely obvious dummy) hanging limply like a ragdoll from the car when the T-800, John and Sarah Connor escape Pescadero.
• Kyle Reese's cameo in Sarah's dream is poignant, save for a wide shot revealing his very dated-looking sneakers.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

• The dark leather look was considered so dated in 2003 that the only way to recreate that iconic look was by having the T-850 mug a male stripper.
• The scene where the T-X inflates her breasts to distract a police officer. It's blatant fanservice in a movie series that's not known for fanservice and a huge step down from the T-800 and T-1000's iconic badass intros. The line said seductively to the cop soon after doesn't help:
  T-X: I like your gun.
  Officer: (confused) What?
• The female terminator tends to spend a lot of time trying to be sexy for a killer robot, as opposed to the previous two models being nightmare-inducing killer androids. See in particular the scene where she "analyses" a blood spot by licking and sucking her finger in a pointlessly lengthy and sexualised way.
• The scene where the TX tests out her flamethrower after her primary weapon is damaged in battle. She torches a tree casually while a timid trucker watches and flees in terror soon after. It comes across as silly like she's just showing off how cool her flamethrower is.
• There's a scene where the T-850 smashes the T-X with a urinal, breaking it into pieces. It's as silly as it sounds. The film doubles down a moment later when the T-X picks up the T-850 by the scruff of the neck...and the crotch. The film takes a moment to show how the emotionless robot T-850 seems surprised by the crotch-grab but doesn't do anything to, you know, stop her from picking him up and running him through several stalls like a battering ram.

Terminator Salvation

• The panorama shots depicting a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles were supposed to be breathtaking, but post-apocalyptic LA looks just like Capital Wasteland! This is Special Effect Failure — the CGI equivalent of an ugly matte painting — as the graphics for Fallout 3 were less than state of the art when the first two games came out, and the film came out after them.
• John Connor, a resistance fighter trained from birth to fight the machines who knows from repeated firsthand experience that they can imitate voices perfectly, backtracks when he hears Kyle Reese's voice despite knowing Kyle is already gone and runs right into the T-800. He then rolls over a railing and lobs himself off a raised walkway to get away from the T-800 as if he's trying to break his ankle on landing. He breaks his ankle on landing.
• John Connor pounding on Marcus' chest and yelling "WAKE UP!"
• After we know what Christian Bale did in the set, it's hard to take any scene where Connor yells at someone seriously.

Terminator Genisys

• From the post-credit scene, the core of Skynet looks like a giant glowing ball of evil. Because of course it does.
• The film's very title. While "Genisys" is an actual computing term, it's kind of amazing that alone didn't kill the film at the script stage.
• Some of the pre-release images invited this due to the over-the-top expressions, with Matt Smith in particular looking like he's having a stroke while firing his gun. In other images, the T-800 looks like it's mugging for the camera.
• The new Terminators's denominations taking very freely the numbers. First the T-1000, then the T-3000, then the T-5000... (although admittedly is not so bad next to the T2 3-D: Battle Across Time attraction featuring a T-1000000.)
• Emilia Clarke's acting frequently comes across as unintentional Leaning on the Fourth Wall due to her forced, patronizing explanation of the plot to Kyle Reese. Reese's Dull Surprise reactions to those explanations are not much better.
• The fact that the Resistance army is composed now of healthy, clean and well-fed men without shortage of cool weapons and fancy armored uniforms should be enough narm for how out of place it is in the Terminator universe, but it turns even worse when said body armor looks like out of a Stargate-verse cosplay party or an airsoft competition.
• John's and Kyle's appreciations about how when the war is ended they will be able to use their hands to something other than killing. Although it is easy to get what they mean, the word choice is particularly jarring for people whose enemies are inanimate machines.
• Kyle Reese stepping into the time portal butt-naked with the entire resistance getting a clear view of his John Connor-factory. It's even better in the previous scene, as a female Resistance member is the one to inform Kyle he'll need to be naked upon entering the time portal and she looks like she's trying not to act too giddy at the thought.
• When Reese is being sent back in time, the T-5000 moves his attention from the time machine to John Connor. Unfortunately, due to the way the scene is lit and framed, it looks like Matt Smith is looking directly into the camera, as if to announce "Hey kids! I'm in this movie too!"
• The scene where a young doctor patches up Kyle and Sarah after their incident on the freeway. Not only is he making a personal phone call while treating patients (a strict policy violation in any credible healthcare facility) and rather nonchalant about making small talk with two people who are about to enter police custody as suspected terrorist bombers (who he's treating without supervision or protection), but he brags that "everything I do will be uploaded and online, 24/7." It's the kind of line one wouldn't even hear from today's generation of social media obsessed teenagers... never mind the fact it's not even that impressive at the time of the film's release, let alone enough to be the huge game-changer the movie makes it out to be.
• The revelation that the giant teddy bear Pops carries into the hospital only contains a small shotgun, instead of the Gatling Good or heavy machinegun everybody in the audience was thinking the freaking thing was being used to hide.
• Doubles with Special Effects Failure, but it's hard to take John Connor's "death" sequence in the parking garage seriously when a shotgun blast at point-blank range doesn't leave a single mark. That not even Kyle noticed it when he pounced on him to check his state is even more jarring.
• Jason Clarke's melodramatic gesturing while Connor confronts Reese and Sarah at the parking garage can easily draw laughs. For a moment, he just looks like he is about to throw a Kamehameha.
• These two clashing bits of dialogue:

  John Connor: I'm not man. Not machine. I'm more.

  John Connor: The machines will rule this world!

• "One billion preorders." Okay, sure. Let's assume that 1/6 of Earth's population would want to use the app. But one billion people preordering it? The number is so ludicrously high that it's nearly impossible not to laugh.

Terminator Dark Fate

• The trailer has one moment where a hammer hits the new Terminator's leg and it makes a very cartoony splat sound.
• The Mother Mary exchange, as if they needed to make the symbolism of the previous movies obvious, while also trying to give the lines themselves weight they really don't earn. Being fair to Hamilton and Davis though, probably nobody could have saved those lines.
• Sarah randomly saying "She's John" after the big reveal, as if we somehow couldn't possibly get it without that.
• The entire subplot about the T-800 having found a "family" after killing John Connor. Everything about it seems like an a boy and his terminator made for tv movie. It's at this point that the movie leaves continuity reboot and jumps straight into self-parody.