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Bale, on the other hand is greatly underserved by the script and the direction. His John Connor, as much a leader of the Resistance as he is a reluctant messiah reaching out to the remaining pockets of humanity armed with a ham radio and everything his mother ever told him, never quite becomes compelling enough and it's not entirely his fault. Not for one moment do you see the man who inspires countless others, like Kyle Reese, to soldier on in the face of certain annihilation. It's almost as if writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris expect the audience to do all of their legwork for them. We all know that John Connor is this amazing leader who has a remarkable ability to inspire his soldiers, but we only know that because we saw the first Terminator movie and Michael Biehn told us so. This film was the great opportunity to see Connor in action, striving and working towards ascending to this height – to show why this is a man that other men are willing to die for. There's just not enough in the movie to inform us (to liberally paraphrase Dennis Green) that he is who they said he was. I almost wish the "What don't you fking understand?!!" diatribe had made it into the film. That would have at least given Bale something interesting to play.

In uneven fashion, there are patches of blah here and there interspersed with some neat action sequences. I especially enjoyed a series of scenes where Marcus attempts to escape L.A with a teenaged Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and a mute little girl named Star (Jadagrace) in tow. There are T-600s and Hunter-Killer flying machines as well as a 50-foot-tall Terminator with a gun for a head all trying to track down and destroy this sorry little band. Even in the year 2018 with hardly any folks left, driving down the Freeway is still its own kind of miserable hell.

The biggest thing that's missing from this sequel is the center. This is also the film's most egregious error. The first 2 Terminator films had the wonderful focal point of Sarah Connor and how her life is inexorably changed by the appearance of the T-800 into her world. Even with all manner of killer cyborgs, explosions, sentient computer systems and nuclear holocaust afoot, the emotional center of those films relied on her relationships with Kyle and later the adolescent John Connor. The strength she finds in herself through her love for them and that same strength which she then turns around and passes on to them is what provides the breadth of soul to those two movies. Passion like this is sorely missing in Salvation until the denouement and by then it feels almost ungraciously tacked on. In simple terms, somebody needs a heart and somebody loses one. It's too bad this movie only finds its heart when it's too little, too late.

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