Judgment Day finally happens in Terminator Salvation, and as Sarah Connor predicted, anybody not wearing two-million sunblock has a really bad day. Connor's all-important son John is now a thirtysomething man (Christian Bale) in a sun-bleached rubble-world, a doom-prophet and military wannabe having yet to fulfill his destiny to lead a rabble of survivors against the pitiless machines.

Given the nigh-impossibility of series hero John Connor being picked off by a lucky T-600 in this film, the suspense factor is low throughout. The only time Connor's jeopardy feels viscerally real is in a well-executed battlefield helicopter crash sequence, which McG shoots almost in the first-person, creating a kind of flight-simulator experience; it's a creative demonstration, though a bit too self-conscious for its own good. Back in his bunker with very-pregnant wife Kate (a shockingly underutilized Bryce Dallas Howard, who spends most of her screen time staring at things), Connor acts as a one-man political opposition party, grudgingly taking orders from bona fide resistance leader General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), who commands his meager troops from the relative safety of a roving submarine. Sending out radio signals to potential survivors, Connor manages to snag the attention of a few such stragglers, including plucky Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, his face in a perpetually upturned sneer to suggest a teen Michael Biehn) and mysterious stranger Marcus (Sam Worthington), whose arrival shakes up the dynamic of the resistance, hastening a confrontation with Skynet that feels deliberately scaled down to ensure a potential sequel, an increasingly common and silly event-movie gambit.

Marcus's identity as a cyborg that thinks it's human, which is revealed midway through the film but is easily discernable from an outlandish prologue in which he trades horrific dialogue with Cyberdine toadie Serena Kogan (an embarrassed-looking Helena Bonham Carter), is a remarkably clunky conceit coming from a series rife with grand ideas, both visual and thematic; it also stands Marcus up as a very poor comparison to the previous "good Terminator"—i.e. the guy who the producers hope you're not thinking too much about while watching this film. When that familiar face from the past does finally pop out for a much-rumored cameo, it's a remarkable piece of visual-effects work, though also a completely random event, in a film loaded with them.

Salvation is a film that draws its inspiration from other, inferior franchises instead of its own, much-beloved mythology. It's rife with the dumbest callbacks imaginable (that Guns n' Roses song again, really?) and is often propelled by neither internal logic, nor the kind of storytelling magic that can cause us to forgive the odd plot hole or two. Like the human skulls crushed under sleek metal feet in those feverish sequences, the Terminator film series is finished.