Terminator Salvation

It’s 2018 and robots of various size, shape, menace and loudness are dispatched to eliminate whatever humans might be left from the nuclear “Judgment Day” of a few years earlier. But one guy (Sam Worthington), who thought he died on death row in 2003, just woke up feeling a lot like the experimental prototype of a genocidal cyborg. Another guy, the “prophesized leader of the Resistance” (Christian Bale) isn’t having any of it. He just needs to find the teenager (Anton Yelchin) he’ll eventually send back in time to become his own father. (Look, you had to be there.) Director McG, trained in narrative mess-making through music videos and Charlie’s Angels movies, reassembles this franchise of diminishing returns in an approximation of working order, but with some pretty essential-seeming parts, like personality, left in a pile on the floor. (Arnold does make a brief, mute appearance.) Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut gets the post-apocalyptic look just fine; maybe Bale’s famous on-set tantrum should’ve been aimed at screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris, mysteriously asked back after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.