The salvation of Terminator Salvation is that it actually didn’t turn out that badly. Considering the external pressures and the numerous, unaccredited script permutations, it’s a wonder that this film has its act together as well as it does and it’s thanks to a strong cast and a filmmaker that has a surprising vision and attention to detail. In short, McG, an average director with a strange name, astounded and confounded by making a Terminator that works in spite of the fact that it doesn’t match James Cameron’s classic and its first sequel. But without Cameron and without Arnold Schwarzenegger (sort of), taking the audience on a highly anticipated trip post-Judgement Day makes a very good argument for this franchise’s continued endurance.

Taking place in 2018, the story follows a young rebel soldier named John Connor (Christian Bale). Finally living the day he knew was coming and was trained for all his life, Connor leads a small pocket of freedom fighters against SkyNet, a computer system that rules the world and subjugates the surviving humans with its fiendish Terminators. Connor keeps the faith with humanity through kind of fireside chats over the radio. Some consider him a saviour, while the leadership of the resistance from their hidden submarine consider him just another soldier, albeit one with a chip on his soldier.

For Connor and the rest of the resistance, the game changes with the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a former death row inmate that willed his body to science, shortly before his execution in 2003. Waking up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of 2018 Los Angeles, Wright hasn’t got any clue as to how he got there, or how he’s still alive. It’s meant to be a big reveal, but it’s really no surprise, that Wright is a sleeper agent Terminator. More than that, he still has his human brain and heart, making him something even more unique than the regular, run-of-the-mill T-800.

Worthington is of course the big news of TS. The Australian-born actor has a lot of buzz behind him having been cast both in this film and James Cameron’s Avatar. But without getting too judgmental, I have to say that Worthington has yet to prove the hype right. Now that might be because that McG still doesn’t know how to work with actors, or it may have been the shortcomings in the story, but Worthington is only slightly engaging, doing the almost minimal he has to do in order to make Marcus more human than the average Terminator.

But acting is a big problem for this movie, and Christian Bale, for all the passion heard in his vitriol fuelled tirade against the director of photography for interrupting a scene, translates very little of that passion to his role. How is John Connor different from any other military shouting head ever seen on film? The answer is not much, at least with this script. But at least he gets screen time. Whether it’s Michael Ironside as the ill-fated leader of the resistance, to Bryce Dallas Howard as Connor’s wife, several key parts are kind of treated as an after-thought, employed only according to the demands and limits of the script.

The one exception I think is Anton Yelchin as the young Kyle Reese. Much like he and his fellow Enterprise mates did in the newly refurbished Star Trek, Yelchin catches a certain essence of Biehn, as in Michael Biehn, and translates that into a new unique performance. In fact, overall, Terminator Salvation does a decent job of managing its past while trying to launch something new. There are numerous winks and nods to past films, from Linda Hamilton’s voice on an audio tape to the Governator’s face being pasted on a young body builder.

The action is solid, if not overly memorable, and I think there are some interesting ideas at the heart of the story. However, when the action gets going and the story barrels towards its climax at SkyNet central, all story and character considerations are called off in favour of explosions and gunfire. And then that’s combined with an abrupt ending that leaves a lot up in the air, although it’s substantially better than the original ending the studio wanted to go with.

It’s easy to forget that amongst all the action, the first two Terminator films were just as equally about the inter-personal relationships of the characters too. Salvation tries, but that balance still isn’t achieved. Still, it’s light years ahead of Terminator 3, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.