-By Kevin Lally

For movie details, please click here.

In this age of movie reboots like Star Trek and the new Batman series, it makes sense that The Terminator, with its constant new incarnations of killer machines, would be a prime candidate for re-engineering. The third entry in the series (and the last to star future California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines erred on the side of cartoonishness before delivering a stark bummer of an ending. Terminator Salvation, by contrast, is as somber as summer movies come; it’s a highly efficient action showcase, but the fun quotient of the Schwarzenegger films (especially the first two directed by James Cameron) is gone.

Christian Bale, the rebooted Batman himself, plays John Connor, the fabled Resistance leader whose future existence was preserved by time-traveling soldier Kyle Reese in the 1984 original, battling the lethal cyborg (Schwarzenegger) sent from the 21st century to hunt and kill Sarah Connor, John’s future mother. Got all that? The new film, set in 2018, reverses the roles, as the now-adult John Connor seeks to protect the teenage Kyle (Anton Yelchin), his future father who will sire him in the past once time travel is invented. Still with me? Or do you have a metaphysical headache?

John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who wrote Terminator 3, add yet another complication to movie #4: a new character named Marcus Wright (Aussie Sam Worthington), who was executed in 2003 for the death of two cops and donated his body for medical research, only to re-emerge alive and half-cyborg in 2018. Marcus, who has some major reorientation ahead of him in this grave new world of post-apocalyptic robot rampaging, encounters teen resistance fighter Kyle and his mute, nine-year-old friend, Star (Jadagrace Berry), and together they battle the giant machines that are plucking humans for nefarious new experiments.

Kyle and Star are captured, but the curiously bulletproof Marcus escapes, and eventually winds up in Connor’s camp, where the truth of his heavy-metal nature is revealed. Can Marcus be trusted? Will Connor save his dad-to-be and the future of the human race? Well, rest assured that the future of the Terminator franchise, at least, seems safe enough.

McG, the shorthand-named director behind the Charlie’s Angels films, handles the action set-pieces and metallic CGI monsters with assurance. Early on, there’s a virtuosic faux single take that incorporates a helicopter crash, a nuclear explosion, and a mano-a-mano battle between Connor and a relentless cyborg. Unlike many overblown summer tentpoles, the movie clocks in briskly under two hours and is seldom dull.

But those who savored the low-budget 1984 original and Cameron’s groundbreaking, high-tech 1991 sequel will find the tone here dramatically different (emphasis on dramatic). The first two Terminators, however high the stakes, were often a hoot, chiefly because any film built around the limited thespian talents of Schwarzenegger can’t take itself too seriously. Both Bale and promising newcomer Worthington (soon to be seen in Cameron’s 3D epic Avatar) dial up the intensity here, as if no one told them summer movies are ultimately meant to be escapist. The glum, grey world pictured by McG, Brancato and Ferris has its own integrity, but the hapless victims, hardened warriors and hotwired predators that populate it aren’t exactly engaging company. The most warm-blooded presence here is Moon Bloodgood, persuasive as the post-apocalypse’s feistiest female resistance fighter, even when saddled with lines like “I don’t meet a lot of good guys these days.”

Memo to McG: Next time, don’t terminate all the lighter moments. War isn’t 24/7 hell.