Terminator Salvation

The full title of this movie should be Terminator Salvation: Sorry, There's Profit to be Had!  Or maybe Terminator Salvation: Ragingly Inessential!  Nothing about the Terminator saga cried out for another film, but the brief images of post-apocalyptic robo-combat from the first films are certainly sturdy enough foundation for a guaranteed box office bonanza.  On that score, the movie is a moderate success. Watching Hunter Killers and skinless T-800s and human-snatching giant robots with guns for heads blast away on the landscape is pretty neat, and director McG is laudably workmanlike while directing the action scenes.  He knows what chumps like Michael Bay have yet to figure out: giant, laser-shooting robots are fun to watch, so it's a good idea to allow the audience to, you know, actually see them by nailing the camera down and resisting the urge to edit everything into a Cubist nightmare.  

As for the characters, they don't have much to do but alternate between yelling and glowering.  Christian Bale is his usual humorless self as John Connor and Sam Worthington slips between American and Australian accents as a conflicted cyborg.  Everyone takes the proceedings very, very seriously, but none of their strenuous emoting amounts to much.  The filmmakers are cognisant enough of the broad themes of the other Terminator movies; the nature of free will, the meaning of humanity, to drop in classic lines of dialogue that fans will recognize, but not much more.  The ideas are given no room to breath between the rote scenes of robo-combat that, for their impressive special effects and competent staging, are achingly familiar.  They even contrive to end the movie in a spark-shooting foundry so similar to the one from the end of T2: Judgement Day that the producers very well could have saved money by reusing the old set.