TheJoe and I caught this on Friday. Amidst a very geeky summer of movies, another popular franchise is given another chance to captivate a new audience. Which it completely fails to do.

It’s a real shame because all the elements are there. McG does a very good job of directing and utilizing today’s technology to bring to life a man vs. machine war that could only be glimpsed in the previous movies. The action sequences are very well-done with some very excellent long one-shot sequences that give a very cool cinema verité quality to them.

The actors are all soild. Christian Bale takes on another iconic geek role as John Conner and plays him very well. Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the just released Star Trek) also admirably takes on a second sci-fi icon as Kyle Reese. I actually didn’t quite recognize him at first; a testament to his acting as well as to his skill at accents. Helena Bohnam Carter (Marla Singer in Fight Club, Beatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter series) give a good turn as Dr. Serena Kogan; a doctor whose fight to save her own life as well as humanity’s resonates into future more than she could imagine.

The story, which I find to be one of the weakest elements in a movie this deep in the sequels, is actually well done and quite cohesive, if a bit predictable (I think it’s thanks to the trailers and billboards that I could see twists through my plot telescope early on).

So all the elements are there, but it’s just not compelling. All these good elements didn’t add up to a good movie experience for me. I could follow the story, I could dig the action, but it just felt like business as usual. It didn’t really add anything new to the franchise. Man fights machine, machines develop new ways to fight man, John Conner is a prime target for Skynet… These plot points have all been covered before. It might even be less compelling since the novelty of time travel to the past to kill John has been taken away.

I can’t really recommend seeing this in the theater. It’s maybe worth a rental or download when it comes out that way. In the battle of the technique versus the soul of movie storytelling, in this case the machine have unfortunately won.