It may have had more to do with budget constraints than authorial vision, but for whatever reason, James Cameron understood something about post-apocalyptic wastelands when he made The Terminator in 1984. Namely: a little bit goes a long way. Aside from a few flashbacks, Cameron left the future offscreen. It was a gloomy, doomy abstraction that hovered over Sarah Connor even as she dispatched her would-be robot assassin.

The Terminator was a masterpiece of thrifty exploitation; if it had a message, it was that technological progress, while responsible for some seriously cool shit, was the enemy. That prophecy was fulfilled in the slick but awful Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and is reiterated by Terminator Salvation, a film made with the financial resources to conjure a convincingly barren post-nuke America but which remains utterly impoverished in terms of ideas.

It’s frankly boring to watch John Connor (Christian Bale) stalking around dusty landscapes, bellowing into communication devices about how to best win the war against the machines, etc. Ostensible intrigue comes in the form of a Terminator who doesn’t know that he’s a Terminator (Sam Worthington), but the actor’s battle against his own British accent is more compelling than the character’s interior man-machine struggle. And besides failing to invest the characters with any interest, the script wreaks nearly as much havoc on the series’ continuity (Kyle Reese never mentioned anything about befriending a cyborg!) as McG’s frenetic direction does on our eyeballs.