NOISY, unrelenting and gloomy as gun metal, if machines take over the world they'll probably make a film like Terminator Salvation, the fourth instalment in the killer robot saga. Twenty-five years ago, Terminator was a classic combination of mind-be
nding science fiction, special effects and Arnold Schwarzenegger demanding your clothes, like a despotic speak-your-weight machine.
Now the series has dwindled to Terminator Salvation, set in an uncertain future which unconsciously mirrors its own hard times, given the failure of the last film, Terminator: Rise Of The Machines and the recent cancellation of its TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Creator James Cameron is long gone, leaving the jump leads to Terminator's complicated mythology in the hands of McG, a director previously best known for restyling the jiggle and bounce of two Charlie's Angels films.
As we know from Terminator: Rise Of The Machines, a powerful computer defence system, Skynet, has nuked most of humankind to make room for the robots. By 2018, the survivors look to their spiritual leader John Connor (Christian Bale) as the man to defeat the machine army because he was told he would when he was a boy in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Meanwhile, convicted murderer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) awakes from his death row lethal injection in the Californian desert with no memories and no clothes. But is he alive or dead? And is that accent Australian or American? With no time to ponder, he acts like any self-respecting action man in a world where the budget has been spent on effects rather than script: he roars at the sky, grabs a coat, and heads into the nearest post-apocalyptic cityscape, where he hooks up with ragtag teenager Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and his mute child companion, Star (Jadagrace).
"What day is it?" asks Marcus. "What year?" This reprises a line from the first Terminator movie; and there are others, and they'll be back, because tapping into our affection for the earlier films is the only way to generate emotional resonance for a film as shallow as Salvation. John Connor has a rich background from the previous films, but here he's not much more than a morose super soldier. Considering that he's constantly surrounded by death, terminators and leather clothes in high temperatures, his gruff mien is understandable, but Bale's famous tantrum on the film's set was far more interesting than anything Connor does on screen here.
Another loss from the Terminator series is the absence of a strong female character. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor once stood tough, here we get a pregnant Mrs John Connor (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose only duty is to alternate expressions between gravely loving and gravely anxious, while a butt-kicking pilot (Moon Bloodgood) provides a subsidiary love interest for steel-jawed Marcus.
More diverting are the machines. Arnie shows up in prototype form, thanks to an effect where the Governator's face is digitally scanned and wrapped around the head of Austrian bodybuilder Roland Kickinger, and while nothing in this joyless flick has the wit of Schwarzenegger's deadpan performance, at least a couple of machines are more garrulous than Christian Bale.
The film's main source of evil may be a sophisticated computer system, but just like any other villain, it isn't above bragging about its incomplete plans for world domination, whilst leaving important red buttons exposed to the good guys' view. No matter how much artificial intelligence machines acquire, it seems they will never evolve beyond the kind of evil genius who can't help over-explaining his motives or attaching laser beams to the heads of sharks.
You can only wonder at a franchise where we're supposed to root for the humans, yet in every adventure the most interesting, and often most humane, characters are the robots. I especially enjoyed the fact that all of the implacable Terminator robots are naked metal skeletons except one guard who sports a raffish bandana around his steel skull. You can imagine the snickers in the Terminator staff room: "That No49: he thinks he's Rambo."
• On general release
