Salvation Used to Come with a Sense of Humor

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2009)

The sci-fi series about cyborgs and the audiences who love them trundles on, giving us the least impressive (but still entertaining) installment to date.
Judgement day has come and gone and the war between humans and machines is in full swing. John Connor (a super serious Christian Bale) is now in charge of the resistance, and a new breed of terminators built from combining humans with computers is under development. Meanwhile, SkyNet has issued a directive to kill Kyle Reese, John Connor's father, so that he can't come back in time and protect Connor's mother so that SHE can give birth to John Connor, who will one day lead the human resistance against the machines. Am I repeating myself? Thus the plot outlined in the four Terminator movies has finally come full circle (literally) like a dog chasing its tail.
"Salvation" is flashy and well made, but there's also something humorless and dogged about it in comparison to the earlier movies. There's none of the tongue-in-cheek humor, and McG can't stage action scenes as well as James Cameron. There's lots of nifty special effects on display here, but nothing you haven't seen before. The actors don't seem to be having much fun, and the Terminators themselves don't play a very large role, which means the plot of this installment is much less compelling than its predecessors. It also easily has the cheesiest and dumbest ending of the series, or of any number of other movies I've seen recently, for that matter.
And for the life of me, I still can't figure out how John Connor ends up being older than his own dad, who he spends most of this film trying to protect. If anyone can explain that to me, please private message me and I'll be eternally grateful.
Grade: B-