Terminator Salvation

Directed by McG

(PG-13)

**

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After 25 years, John Connor is still fighting machines.

Terminator Salvation is “a boys-and-their-toys-gone-wild, eardrum-shattering, metal-shredding vision” of the sci-fi series, said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. For fans, the fourth film in the man-versus-machine franchise will be “mostly worth it.” For the rest of us, director McG’s “mash-up of everything that manic imagination and money will buy” may lead to sensory­ overload. “What’s left of the human race continues to rage against the machines,” and John Connor (Christian Bale) is still in command, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. But while the machines are “bigger, shinier, and meaner than ever,” the plot is thinner­ and flatter. It often seems that McG, best known for the hokey Charlie’s Angels films, wants to be taken seriously. But all his pyrotechnics, heavy artillery, and technical hijinks can’t hide the film’s empty emotional core. It’s action for the sake of action. Humanity may not be “fated to fall victim to machines,” said Keith Phipps in The Onion. But it should beware of films like Terminator Salvation, another “finely crafted but soulless product” from the Hollywood Machine.