If you have never seen another Terminator film, the franchise’s latest installment, Terminator Salvation, will be utterly baffling to you. The good news is that if you’re a fanboy well-versed in the series’ robotic lore, you’ll leave the theater just as confused and dissatisified as all the noobs. In other words, it is an equal opportunity snoozer replete with lumbering action sequences, misplaced character development and an unrealized love subplot. Ahhh, summer.

The film opens in a jail cell in 2003 as Marcus Wright, played by a dialect-confused Sam Worthington, signs his body over to Cyberdyne systems before his lethal injection. Flash forward a decade and a half and we find the world in ruins after the internet-induced nuclear holocaust we know of from the previous film, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Whatever humans are left spend their time fighting robots, which are just angry, steely machines; not quite the androids we have come to know over the years. John Connor, whose performance is phoned in by a grizzled Christian Bale, now holds some form of prophetic role in the world as a radio preacher. Read on…