"Terminator Salvation," the fourth installment in the sci-fi franchise that began way back in 1984, has just about everything you'd expect from a "Terminator" film: gleaming metal robot exoskeletons that implacably pursue their human prey, human-looking robots sent to infiltrate mankind's domain. . . . Hell, it's even got the line "I'll be back" and a computer-generated Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The year is 2018, and the long-prophesied war between man and machine has ravaged the planet. Skynet, an artificially intelligent military supercomputer has become self-aware, and — just like H.A.L. in "2001" — paranoid. Viewing humanity as a threat to its existence, Skynet launched a nuclear first strike against humanity (see the finale of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"), followed up by genocidal attacks by robotic weapons systems.
Leading the human survivors amid this devastated landscape is one John Connor (Christian Bale), who survived assassination attempts by three Terminator-class robots sent back in time to whack him while he was still a youth. Now a grizzled veteran, he leads resistance raids against robot-held outposts while looking for a man known as Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), for Kyle will grow up to go back in time and protect John's mother, Sara, from a Terminator, and in the process become John's father. (See the first "Terminator.")