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Havoc, hardware in new 'Terminator'

'What day is it? What year?" asks the deeply disoriented dude who seems to have emerged from the primal ooze into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

'What day is it? What year?" asks the deeply disoriented dude who seems to have emerged from the primal ooze into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Well, they don't say what day it is (maybe Sunday, because what's left of Los Angeles seems mighty quiet), but the year is 2018.

In Terminator Salvation - fourth in the cyborgian series launched by James Cameron in 1984 - the man with the questions is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), and the weird thing is that at the beginning of the movie, he's strapped to a table in a California correctional facility being put to death for murder. In 2003.

Message to Hollywood: stop with the time-travel stuff.

A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG (né Joseph McGinty Nichol), T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to X-Men Origins: Wolverine on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)

It takes a while for Marcus Wright to meet up with Terminator Salvation's other brooding, buff protagonist, but meet up they do. That would be John Connor, who is either mankind's savior (yes, the monogram on his bathrobe is JC) or a "false prophet," depending on whom you talk to. Connor is a fierce fighter leading what's left of the human race (a scruffy band of men and women in Mad Max hand-me-downs) against Skynet and its army of relentless Terminator machines. Christian Bale plays Connor, and boy is he serious.

Bringing the film's action heroes together is the young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, Chekov in the new Star Trek), a figure who looms large in Terminator mythology but here seems to be pretty much a pip-squeak teen lucky to have avoided annihilation. He lives on a diet of two-day-old coyote ("better than three-day-old coyote," he cracks, offering Marcus a bite), and for a Most Significant Reason the machines have him down as a primary target.

Message to Hollywood: stop with the time-travel stuff.

McG, the man responsible for the two Charlie's Angels movies and We Are Marshall, marshals his troops and his visual-effects crews to get off a few terrific set pieces. (The cockpit POV sequence of Bale's Connor commandeering a helicopter, watching as it ascends and then comes crashing back to Earth, its rotors shredded, is awesome.) The movie's landscapes - especially the jagged, rebarred silhouettes of the frayed freeways and nuked skyscrapers of L.A. - are dazzling in a doom-laden way.

But, oh, the dialogue. Michael Ironside, as a resistance leader at odds with Connor, actually barks: "Stay the course!" Bale will have none of it: "If we stay the course, we are dead!" he snaps. "WE ARE ALL DEAD!"

With metaphorical blather about technology sapping the humanity out of us and wincing allusions to the Holocaust, Terminator Salvation is a picture with delusions of grandeur. (It's also a picture rife with supporting players at a loss for what to do - you know a movie's in trouble when you start checking out the extras in the background.)

There are welcome moments of self-referential humor (one involves some eerie CGI work and a Hollywood star of the 1980s), and Moon Bloodgood is as cool as her name, playing a resistance fighter who can't resist Marcus. But generally, the tone is solemn, severe, sermonistic.

Terminator Salvation ends with a baleful Bale voice-over, a summation of the horrific man vs. machine business we've just witnessed, and a portent of the conflicts still to come.

"There is a storm on the horizon," John Connor says. He's not talking about the weather.