Terminator is one of the few franchises that managed to accomplish that ever elusive superior sequel, while The Terminator was and is held in high regard, the slightly less gritty and depressing and rather more upbeat and explody Terminator 2: Judgement Day is probably one of the most beloved and popular films in the science fiction or action genre. Naturally, such popular franchises seldom stay on the shelf forever and a few years back we had the rather less well received Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines... which was kind of a rehash of 2 and really seemed like a gratuitous set up for today's topic, Terminator: Salvation.

The "problem" Terminator 2 had was... Judgement Day was averted - that's kind of why they gave Arnie a molten metal bath. So, while Terminator 2 espoused free will and a maleable future... 3 went "Oh, yeah - sorry guys, the war is inevitable, sucks, right?" thus making the events of the film fairly pointless but nicely setting up the events of Salvation, a jolly post-apocalypse fight against giant killer robots. Ok, people sized killer robots... well, some of them are giant - which is awesome.

In fact, one of the best things about the film is that we aren't limited to the iconic shiny skeletons, walking around with plasma weapons. We've got mecha terminators, motorcycle terminators and even kind of little snake ones. It would have been pretty easy for the designers to be lazy and just stick with the established staples, so it's good to see that they didn't skimp on this aspect.

More interesting than the design is the fact the focus of the story is rather less on John Connor. He's got a good amount of screen time but Kyle Reese has a decent amount and a new character Marcus gobbles up plenty of it... in fact, it's really more his story. Which is something of a surprising choice. Really, the logical angle of attack is Kyle Reese and John Connor with their somewhat bizarre relationship...

So, the story? How about the story? Ok - we start out with Marcus on death row. Then we jump to the future, Christian Bale is shooting robots and being awesome... sadly, no one else quite passes the "must be this awesome to live" test and they all die. Yup, there's an inspiring saviour of humanity - managing to preside over the death of everyone in his squad.

Anyway, Marcus and a young Kyle Reese meet up and Kyle doesn't think there's much suspicious about a muddy guy, wandering around the post-apocalyptic wasteland, oblivious of the fact humanity got its ass beat by Skynet and now there are killing death robots, looking to kill any meatbags they see.

Inexplicably, Kyle Reese is a high priority target... but that means Skynet would know the future. So... why would it keep the deathcamps and not just murder everyone if it knows that future stuff? Anyway... we go through some nice actions scenes. Marcus finds his way to John Connor - turns out Marcus is actually a machine... and there is some signal that stops Skynet. The big plan is to use this signal to stop Skynet - even though it's a really obvious trap... guess they should have had admiral Akbar with them.

So, Marcus was designed to go to the Skynet HQ all along - who'd have thought! But he's actually got his free will. This doesn't stop Skynet from going all SHODAN and going through exposition on its plan. Long story short, the battle is won but the war is not yet over - and John Connor gets Marcus's heart... making him mostly just a McGuffin.