At a certain point in "Terminator Salvation," grizzled savior of mankind John Connor (Christian Bale) heads out the door to do battle, turns to his pregnant wife (Bryce Dallas Howard), and growls, "I'll be back."
Oh, please. Tell us something we don't know.
The audience laughs with relief when he says that, of course, grateful to have a reminder of the loopy, relentless B-movie drive that enlivened the first "Terminator" 25 years ago. Pleasure is not on the punch-list this time, sadly. The latest installment in the venerable sci-fi action franchise turns out to be a straight-up war film, grim and muscular and thundering and joyless. It's the color of cement, and it weighs as much, too.
Will "Salvation" make a lick of sense if you haven't seen parts 1 through 3 (leaving aside TV's "Sarah Connor Chronicles")? Nope. Some background, then: In the earlier movies, the machines of the Skynet corporation have taken over Earth and done their level best to wipe out mankind, nuking cities and sending killer cyborgs - terminators - back through time to snuff out the future leader of the resistance both before and after he's born. One of these cyborgs was subsequently elected governor of California.
The new film almost but not quite closes the series' Mobius strip: The year is 2018 and John Connor (note the initials) is a revered leader of the ragtag remnants of humankind. Having concocted a radio signal with the power to jam the machines, the underground resistance plans a full-scale assault on Skynet Central in San Francisco.
This is complicated by two factors: The arrival of a mystery man named Marcus (Sam Worthington) and the abduction of a teenager named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) into Skynet's concentration camp system. (The latter plotline includes visual echoes of the Holocaust; yes, it's offensive.) Those in the know will recall that Kyle must be saved because he'll go on to become John Connor's father after he's sent back to protect his mother . . . it gets complicated.
Most unusually, no one takes a trip in the Wayback Machine in "Terminator Salvation" - the new film is unique in resisting the temptation to muck with the temporal flow. Prologue aside, it's all 2018 all the time, and that's a bummer. The pop thrill of the "Terminator" series was always its mock-profound time travel gimmickry: The future kept barreling back to the past. Everything was tense.
Here, everything is war. The director is a fellow named McG and apparently he emptied out the paintbox on his "Charlie's Angels" movies, since "Terminator Salvation" has been daubed metallic gray from one end to the other. It's like watching ordnance on parade. Bale might just be the grayest thing here, since his John Connor (you can't not call him by both names) never blinks and says all his lines in the same hoarse bark. The performance is hellaciously focused, all right, but it's also the dullest acting Bale's ever done. Perhaps he's saving the passion for YouTube.
In the void left by the star, the film becomes more about the character of Marcus who (flashing lights, klaxon horn, spoiler alert) has a slight personality crisis brought on by the fact that he's half machine and doesn't yet know it. What drama "Terminator Salvation" possesses lives in the scenes between Marcus and curvy freedom fighter Blair (Moon Bloodgood, whose name, if it didn't exist, would have to be invented). He's a machine who wonders if he can love. She's a woman who wonders if she can love a machine. How would they raise the kids - with oil changes every 2,000 miles?
The other characters fade into the background, victims of clumsy storytelling. Neither Yelchin as Reese nor Howard as Mrs. John Connor has much to do, and rapper Common, as the hero's best friend, has even less. Blink and you'll miss acting legend Jane Alexander as a resistance matriarch. The PG-13 rating - a first for this series - is reflected in the presence of an adorable, sad-eyed, mute tyke named Star (Jadagrace) who tags along after Reese before transferring her affections to Marcus.
The lovingly filmed detonations are the real stars of "Terminator Salvation" - and the rock-em-sock-em chase scenes and the giant CGI battlebots and the falling chunks of masonry. For all the pricey action, though, you rarely feel the wow the other films delivered, especially the two directed by James Cameron. At one point, Marcus and Reese have to fight off souped-up motorcycle-bots, and you suddenly pinpoint the movie's problem - the villains are literally faceless.
Actually, in one scene they wear a face that's surreally familiar. A door opens and there stands the Terminator himself: Arnold Schwarzenegger, buck naked and lethal as ever. But wait - The Governator is still in Sacramento, and his face has been scanned and digitally wrapped onto the head of Austrian bodybuilder Roland Kickinger.
On the evidence of "Terminator Salvation," the machines are winning.
