Terminator Salvation

Skip it. This is the film that finally shows the war the first two only glimpsed, and the result is the best argument for why they only glimpsed it.

The future in The Terminator is forty seconds of blue-lit rubble, skulls under tank treads and a chain-link fence, and it is terrifying because it is almost entirely withheld. Salvation gives you two hours of it in daylight, in brown and grey, with helicopters and a submarine and a factory, and the machines become military hardware rather than nightmares. The scale goes up and the dread goes out.

Its structural oddity is that John Connor is not the protagonist. Marcus Wright, a condemned prisoner who wakes in the future not knowing what he now is, carries the story, and his half of it is the half that works. Bale plays Connor as a man shouting into radios, a role the script never finds anything for beyond prophecy maintenance. The production's troubles, including a widely circulated on-set recording, became the story of the release.

There is one good sequence, an unbroken-looking take around a helicopter crash early on, and a strong idea about whether a machine that believes it is human should be treated as one. The film does not pursue it. Dark Fate later discarded this along with Rise of the Machines, so nothing in the series proceeds from here either.