Starring: Sam Worthington, Christian Bale, Moon Bloodgood, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michael Ironside

The fourth Terminator movie is all heavy metal mayhem and little else. If you are in it for the impetus to shovel huge handfuls of popcorn in your mouth – whatever is not knocked out of your hand by the THX sound waves – then hey, you are in for a grand old time.

If you favour things like substance balanced with style, flashy stuff that still makes sense and ooh, character depth then you are better off checking out Star Trek.
This is not to say that Terminator Salvation is bad. It is good, but it is just not great, in the way that the original Terminator was a brilliant low-budget B-movie and T2 was a gloriously executed expansion of all the ideas from the first one.

It is a little better than T3 Rise of the Machines and it certainly seems louder than all the previous three movies (so much so that Christian Bale seems to be shouting all the time just to be heard above the audio effects).

Finally, the action in a Terminator movie has fast-forwarded to the desolate war-ravaged near future after Judgement Day, the moment that the ruthless artificial intelligence known as Skynet declared all-out war on humanity.
It is 2018 and John Connor (Bale) IS NOT YET THE MESSIANIC LEADER OF THE HUMAN Resistance that he was touted to become in the earlier movies.
He is still relatively low down on the Resistance totem pole, with the real command committee hiding out at sea in a submarine (and led by Michael Ironside).

A raid on a Skynet facility ends disastrously for Jon’s forces. He alone survives, but someone else walks away from the carnage – Marcus Wright (Worthington), a man we see in the film’s prologue being executed for murder.

The movie involves a Resistance plan to end the War with the Machines, but Marcus arrival and the information he carries put a bit of a crimp in it.
There are moments in the film that betray a fan boy’s obsession with T2 continuity and consistency: Kyle cocking a combat shotgun one-handed, like Sarah Connor did. John Connor setting an audio lure for SkyNet’s hunter machines by playing Guns N Roses, You Could Be Mine, a favourite of his younger self and the source of that frightful scar the “old’ John Connor sported at the beginning of T2.

There are also moments that do not make sense. After taking such pains to stay hidden and silent, the Resistance makes an awfully noisy go of trying to apprehend an escaped prisoner in one loud, undoubtedly expensive and essentially pointless sequence. A Resistance fighter (Bloodgood) is convinced way too easily to go against her commander’s wishes. And Bryce Dallas Howard always looks as if she just stepped out of a beauty parlour.

What the film rally lacks though is some real depth to John Connor. This is understandable if you consider that initially. Connor was not even supposed to have that bid role in the film – it was meant to be Marcus’ story actually.
The expanded Connor role does not give Bale much to do except be really intense and strike heroic poses, but the character ends up being somewhat two-dimensional as a result. Still anything is better than “Bratty John” that we have been getting on The Sarah Connor Chronicles over on TV.

It is really Worthington’s show, and his is by far the meatier of the two principal male roles. The actor, who will be seen in several more high-profile films including James Cameron’s Avatar and the Clash of the Titans remake, seems bound for great heights.

Terminator Salvation offers us a fresh setting by taking place almost completely in a dark future. But it just engages us on a purely gut level, occasionally touching our hearts, but almost never providing any food for thought.
Still, machines do not require sustenance, do we? I mean “they” of course.

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