Someone clue me in - how many alternative futures are we going to have to deal with in the Terminator universe? I’m getting positively bewildered. There’s nothing wrong with the acting - Christian Bale and Sam Worthington are excellent. But what are they doing, exactly?

As I recall, in the original, Kyle Reece was a close friend of John Connor, who carried around a snap of Connor’s mother Sarah, and fell in love with it. “I came across time for you, Sarah,” he says at one point. He and John Connor were about the same age, and Connor was the leader of the resistance against Skynet. Or something.

Now, hearing that Sam Worthington was going to be in this movie, I somehow picked up the erroneous impression that he would be playing Kyle Reece, because he is about the same age as Michael Biehn was when the first movie was made. Wrong - he is actually Marcus, the prototype for Arnie’s cyborg assassin - or something. But I thought Arnie was the only one when he was sent back? The place seems to be crawling with them and this is years before Reece and the Terminator travelled through time...

Marcus is also, apparently, Kyle Reece’s new BFF in this alternate trip through the future - and Kyle Reece is some young kid whose only importance to the plot is that John Connor knows this stripling will father him in the past. Christian Bale, as Connor, is about the right age when Kyle was sent back into the past - but this Kyle is much younger.

But then Kyle went back in time in 2029, and this is set in 2018, so judging by Bale’s grizzled look, Connor must have been pretty old 11 years later - maybe he was more of a mentor to the young Kyle? Where was I? Oh yes, the resistance is being led by the guy from one of the awful Highlander sequels, Michael Ironside.

But I thought John Connor got the survivors out of the concentration camps and taught them to fight, as his mother had taught him? To quote Kyle Reece - “But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those (expletive avoided) into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink. His name is Connor. John Connor."

There was even a CGI Arnie in there somewhere - and the coat that Kyle Reece wore in the original, which apparently belonged to Sam Worthington’s character Marcus, and...and what the heck is Helena Bonham Carter doing in there? I think my brain just exploded.

When I get my head around all this, I’m sure I’ll follow the plot better. What did Sarah Connor say - “a person could go crazy trying to figure this out.” You had no idea, girl.

Terminator Salvation (Widescreen Edition)