Watching Terminator Salvation solidifed my current stance on the Terminator franchise: I think they should just quit. All we ever needed to know about this world, this storyline, these themes, was told to us brilliantly through James Cameron's first two Terminator movies. A few years ago, after Cameron relinquished control, we got an unnecessary, almost parodical third movie, and then later a television series (which wisely separated itself from the third movie). I watched that show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, all the way through its two seasons to its recent cancellation -- it started off strong but then petered out, its storyline becoming sadly convoluted and less interesting.

Now here's McG, trying to keep the property alive with Terminator Salvation. No time travel at all this time -- the story takes place squarely in the future, though we're not sure which one. Is it the future prefacing the first Terminator movie, or the one taking place after it? Have the events of the 2nd and 3rd movies affected this timeline, or had they not happened yet? Does it really matter? I probably shouldn't care, but this is a large part of what bothers me. The nerd in me wants these timelines to resolve, but I know they don't make any more sense when I think about them too closely. And when more and more creative hands dip into this universe, it will only make less and less sense, unraveling the relative elegance established by the first two movies.

So let's move on, then. Outside of mythology, what do we have? A big, loud action movie, that's what. Frankly, Terminator Salvation is a decent summer ride -- McG shows he knows how to choreograph computer-assisted warfare, and his film mostly boils down to guns, explosions, and lots and lots of robots. His main actors, Christian Bale as John Connor and relative newcomer Sam Worthington as the mysterious Marcus Wright, display a lot of masculine mettle. When divorced from any sense of context, the action works pretty well, but it also doesn't stand out on its own. It needs context -- investment in the characters, the story, the situation -- to give it urgency.

And that's what's missing. Unfortunately it's inherent in the direction the films are taking -- they're about the future, which is actually the least interesting part of the Terminator story. The first movies were so involving  because something was at stake -- the prevention of the end of the world, or at least the insurance of the birth of the leader who would end the end of the world. If we're already in the end of the world, what are we worried about? Perhaps we're concerned with whether or not John Connor can reach the point where he can stop the master villain computer, Skynet, or send the necessary beings back to the past to help ensure his own birth and survival as a youth. So why make this movie mainly about a totally new character, Marcus? I'll admit he's a fairly interesting character, and his inner conflict contains the movie's main theme about where humanity comes from, but this really should be about John, if anything. And as played by Bale, he has no conflict, just a lot of intensity and a single-minded goal.

About that goal -- and this is where I put my fanboy hat on -- it doesn't make much sense. Effectively, Skynet knows the whereabouts of John's eventual father, Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who, if you recall, is sent back to the past in the first movie to meet, protect, and fall in love with John's mother. So John is trying to rescue him from Skynet. Meanwhile, Skynet is using Kyle as bait to trap and kill John. Now, this means Skynet knows Kyle is John's father, so why wouldn't it kill Kyle right there, knowing that would prevent John's birth? Are we assuming that, in the future, it will one day invent time travel to send a Terminator back to the past to kill John's mother? Isn't that an overly complicated plan to come up with later when they could simply get rid of Kyle right now? Or does that fail to work because by killing Kyle now, the present remains the same and John won't be "erased" from existence? If that's the theory, then sending a machine back in time to kill his mother wouldn't work either.

See, this is a headache. And that's not even half of it -- there are other things to scratch your head over if you think about it too much. This needs to stop. Terminator Salvation is an OK movie -- better than the last, but nowhere near the first two and showing no signs of potential longevity. Frankly, it neither adds to nor subtracts from the mythology. And with Judgment Day upon us, there's no more tension, nothing compelling left to explore. It's the end of the world indeed.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated "PG-13" for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and language.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.