Pun Salad

<voice imitation="emily_litella">

"Terminator Salivation? That's disgusting! Those killer androids are menacing enough, you want to make them drool, too? Didn't we get enough of that in the Alien movies?

"Wait, what?

"Oh, that's quite different! Never mind."

</voice>

A small prequel sets up the plot driver: Marcus (played by Sam Worthington) is about to be executed by the judicial system. Thanks to Helena Bonham Carter's badgering, he donates his body to "science"; although it turns out the scientists work for Cyberdyne, who, as we know, go on to invent technology that ends the world.

The next thing Marcus knows, he's in the future, and Skynet has blown up most of humanity. I hate it when that happens.

John Connor (Christian Bale) is a major fighter in the resistance, of course, but he's not the leader. That's General Ashdown, played by well-known hardass Michael Ironside. And John has not yet encountered Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), but thanks to his mom's posthumous instructions, he knows that he pretty much has to. (Since we've seen the previous movies, we know this too.)

If you don't understand anything I just said: there's absolutely no reason you should see this movie.

And (generally) we also know what has to happen: Connor and Reese have to meet up; Marcus has to help out; Ashdown's pig-headed stubbornness will nearly doom the good guys; some major character is not gonna make it to the end of the movie, and there's only one candidate for that.

I wanted to like this, but… sorry. Christian Bale is a fine, intense, actor, but his talent is expended to no purpose here. There are lots of explosions, chases, and other PG-13 mayhem, all with decent special effects, but not much very interesting. Perhaps realizing that there's not a lot of reason to care what happens to the adults in this movie, the makers threw a cute (and mute) kid into the perilous mix. Shameless.

There's a scene near the end where we see a scowling old friend from the first movie, but that just reminded me that I liked that one a lot better.