Alias T4. If, as an exercise in nostalgia, you can recollect the delectable feeling at the end of T1 (as it was not yet known) — a storm on the horizon, a bun in the oven — you would be hard put to look upon its three successors as anything but a redundancy, a prosaic elucidation of the better-left-unsaid, an undermining of the original concept, an overplaying of the dealt hand, an extraneous climax overextended into an anticlimax, nothing to do with aesthetics, only economics. That probably won’t trouble the army of thrill-seekers, immune to nostalgia, who can content themselves with thunderous sound effects, video-game action, music-video atmospherics (desaturated color, clouds of smoke, sheets of rain, showers of sparks), comic-book dialogue (“Point a gun at someone, you better be ready to pull the trigger”), and a hodgepodge of robots more “primitive” in design, but not in FX technology, than the Arnold Schwarzenegger model: a towering Transformer-bot, roadworthy motorcycle-bots, amphibious alligator-bots, airborne Stealth-bots, metal skeleton-bots. With Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Moon Bloodgood, and Bryce Dallas Howard; directed by McG. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd