Terminator Salvation 魔鬼終結者：未來救贖

But it seems unlikely that audiences will be caring much about the niceties of relativity when "Terminator Salvation" offers so many outsize distractions: towering mechanical assassins; writhing, giant-sub-sandwich-size chrome centipedes; humans engaged in an epic battle for the planet itself – and a movie that mixes summer blockbuster hysterics with moody, visual grit.

Ex-music-video maker and "Charlie's Angels" director McG, ignoring the constraints of the time-space continuum and essential insanity of the franchise, approaches "Terminator Salvation" with near-Talmudic gravity. The result is a movie that takes itself far more seriously than the "Hasta la vista, baby" tone of previous installments.

But he doesn't skimp on the scary stuff. Picking up the apocalyptic cue from "T3" – in which the leader-to-be of the human rebellion, John Connor, is still waiting for all hell to break loose – McG drops us in 2018, with the machines of the malevolent/corporate Skynet well into their campaign against humankind. Connor (Christian Bale) is at this point an insubordinate lieutenant to Gen. Ashdown (Michael Ironside), but has been prophesied to be the savior of mankind. Hence all those Skynet-commissioned trips by cyborgs trying to kill him in the past. And the urgency of keeping him alive for the future.

We moviegoing, 2009-model humanoids exist in a cinema world where almost anything seems possible on-screen, and thus very little is still capable of nailing us to our seats. But McG manages to create palpable fright, mostly through his use of time: When rebel woman Jane Alexander is suddenly plucked out of our field of vision and through the roof of a shanty, it happens with an abruptness that tells us we better keep our eyes peeled. Anything might happen (like the skyscraper-size robot that just appropriated Jane). When it does, we don't have the luxury of slo-mo.

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