'Terminator': Soullessness of an old machine

When machines finally take over the world, they'll probably make movies that look like "Terminator Salvation."

Technically proficient, assembled from welded-together bits and pieces of other movies, but not much in the way of human imagination.

The fourth in the series is set on a colorless, near-annihilated Earth, where small bands of resistance fighters battle the drone armies. The movie is wall-to-wall effects — I wouldn't go so far as to call them special — that rehash stuff you've seen ad nauseam in "Transformers" and Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," all the way back to "Robocop."

The robot soldier with the gatling gun arm? So 1987. And can someone tell my why a robot soldier is wearing a turban?

C'mon, "Salvation" — up your game. I saw better gear in "WALL-E."

There's exactly one nifty invention here — a mechanized snakehead fish that has infested the waterways, and kills any human unlucky enough to fall in.

But that's it for the $50 million or so Warner Bros. spent on computer animation. Quite a rip-off.

They do get their money's worth, though, from some of the non-animated components — i.e., the humans. Remember them?

Hooray for Moon Bloodgood as a fighter pilot who flies wearing leather pants and a bustier. I should probably mention at this point that Moon Bloodgood is a girl.

And "Salvation" does discover a convincing movie tough guy in Sam Worthington. He plays a current-day death row convict who agrees to submit his body for scientific experimentation, and wakes up 10 years later as a cyborg.

Has he been dispatched by the machines to kill John Connor (Christian Bale) and other key resistance figures (Anton Yelchin), or is he a rogue man-machine, free to choose sides and change his mind? I'll never tell, but I will say that the more machinelike he becomes, the more Australian he sounds.

In the closing moments, all will be explained by the movie's impersonal villain, a computer. This indicates that no matter how much artificial intelligence machines acquire, they'll be no smarter than the average self-styled mastermind in a "Perry Mason" episode, bragging about his yet-to-be-completed scheme, with predictable results.

In the end, the resistance discovers that machines have the same potentially deadly flaw as so many summer movies: Expository dialogue.