After seeing "Terminator: Salvation," the latest incarnation of the Terminator series, it's pretty clear this narrative has become bankrupt and insipid, drained of reflection and humor in an orgy of noise and pointless action. Maybe it's just director McG's fault - his "Charlie's Angels" films were similarly pointless - or maybe it's that any Terminator film without Arnold Schwarzenegger has no implicit merit.

Even the once-promising Christian Bale, usually an interesting guy to watch even when swaddled in Batclothes, expends too much serious energy in this mess (though he disappears for the middle half of the movie, while we follow cyber-hunk Sam Worthington around). Can't the guy crack a smile, or tell a joke? Sure, he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders, or at any rate the survival of the human species. But first off he should be entertaining, goddammit, I paid good money for this movie!

Smarter critics than I might point out the relative dearth of yin energy in this film - the initial Terminator movies featured the Sarah Connor character, played by Linda Hamilton (they were also directed by James Cameron, who knows a thing or two about action movies - about cinema - that McG will never learn). It's a good point: after all, the role of women in the evolution if not survival of humanity is necessary, isn't it?

Here we have Moon Bloodgood, who looks good in fatigues but is an unconvincing actress, and Helena Bonham Carter with a shaved head, but there's no real feminine heart in this film. Lots of machines, lots of noise, lots of fireballs, lots of CGI, but no heart.

Well, that's not quite true. There is a loving look or two passed between Bale and Worthington, and the pixie energy of Anton Yelchin as the young Kyle Reese (the other main character in the first Terminator movie) is welcome. But then there's this mute psychic child cliché (Jadagrace) lurking about, and unstoppable machines which can somehow be stopped, and tidy little nuclear blasts that never hurt the heroes, and, finally (and gratefully), an Arnold-model Terminator in CGI.

Compared to the new Star Trek, this is an abject waste of time and the death-knell for a once promising series. If there's yet another sequel - and of course there could be, unless attendance for this one drops off a cliff, which it should - I don't plan on spending another dollar on it, much less ten.