If you arrived late for “Terminator Salvation” and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns. A wrecked car falls into the bike’s path, at which point we are given privileged access to the display screen inside the robot’s brain. We get a blood-red projection of the obstacle ahead, and with it, for a second or two, the words “Analyzing alternatives.” Slide under the wreck, crash through it, or skirt around the side? I felt sorry for this anxious bike, which may have been having trouble at home, and it certainly delivers a more measured performance than some of the leading actors. Nonetheless, that brief digital readout gives the game away. The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives, and, when in doubt, pick whichever is louder.

Take John Connor, whose destiny is to lead the human resistance movement against the evil techno-empire of Skynet, a defense system that “became self-aware,” we are told, and turned on its creators. In “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Connor was played by Edward Furlong as wry, resourceful, and laid-back; in “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” he was played by Nick Stahl as a cocky wuss. And now, in “Terminator Salvation,” he is played by Christian Bale as a scar-nicked warrior, consumed by a messianic belief that he can save the world by shouting. After the opening battle, he answers his radio with yelps of “Here!” and “Connor!” as though introducing himself to a befuddled and very deaf grandmother. A notorious clip, leaked to the Internet ahead of the film’s release, showed Bale melting down on the set and bawling out a member of the crew, but let’s be fair; next to the finished product, that lively address feels almost Edwardian in its courtesy.

Connor is well matched, in the decibel contest, by the machines. We get snapping croconators, metallic assailants that snake through rivers and try to eat a helicopter. As for those bikes (Bale has to mount one of them, which he may have found rather demeaning after riding his nifty Bat-Pod in “The Dark Knight”), they are launched from the shins of a giant Terminator, which treads on a gas station as if trying to squash a roach. The film’s director, McG, who is clearly not content with the man-size killers of the previous movies, has ordered the larger model; but it feels like a backward stomp, already spoofed this season by the towering heavy of “Monsters vs. Aliens,” and, I fear, about to be outcrunched by the vast villains of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” the trailer for which is more exciting than McG’s entire movie. At least Transformers have some color in their cheeks, whereas this disheartening saga is tinted in duns, umbers, and unrelieved mouse-grays. There is a nice warm glow at the climax, when a Terminator gets engulfed in molten metal, but, sadly, the same thing happened to the T-1000 in “T2,” and, to be frank, that liquid-orange look is so last century.

All of which raises the question: when, and on what possible ground, did someone decide that the Terminator franchise should be no fun to watch? Say what you like about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but there was no mistaking the gleam in his eye—a searing scarlet gleam, true, but still a gleam. He, like James Cameron, knew precisely how much irony should be folded into the line readings, and into the encounters between man and cyborg, so as to leaven the sense of doom. That is now gone, and “Terminator Salvation” is a confused, humorless grind, with nobody, from the stars to the set designers, prepared to prick its self-importance. The narrative device that propels characters across decades is still functioning, at a pinch, with Connor managing to be older than his own father (Anton Yelchin), which could prove awkward when they come to talk about sex, and a condemned criminal named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) being reanimated after death and spirited to the year 2018, but it’s surely not a good sign when time travel gives you a sense of déjà vu. In the words of one resister, “A person could go crazy thinking about all this.” By the end, I felt as weary as the Terminator whom we meet in the bowels of Skynet, and who, for some reason, wears a bandanna around his skull, like Rafael Nadal. The poor wee thing. Is he hot? Would he like a glass of water? I know the machines are self-aware, but this is ridiculous.

If the owners of the Terminator brand ever wish to revisit the Teutonic route, traversed in such crunching style by Schwarzenegger, they should take a good look at Benno Fürmann. His footsteps might not be as large as Arnie’s, but he still cuts a forbidding figure, with blue eyes that could easily double as lasers. In a new German film, “Jerichow,” he hardly ever starts a conversation, preferring to speak only when spoken to—like a polite child, or a prisoner in the dock. He doesn’t move much, either, unless there are specific tasks to fulfill, such as loading a truck or putting his hand in a woman’s mouth to stop her from crying out as they try to make silent love. (He bears a bite mark to prove it.) When he does shift a gear, into violence, it is over within seconds; watch him in a warehouse, dodging a punch, landing two hits of his own, and tripping the other guy onto his back. At that point, with equal neatness, the writer-director, Christian Petzold, cuts away, and we are left shaking and ringing, as if we had just taken a blow ourselves.

The early scenes of “Jerichow” are an object lesson in the slow release of dramatic information. Drop by drop, this man’s story accrues: he is called Thomas, he was with the German Army in Afghanistan, his mother has just died, he is living alone in her house, and, apart from that, he has nothing. He seems to have arrived, not at the end of his tether, but simply at an end, radiating dead calm where the rest of us might panic or collapse. I half-wanted this zero state to continue, so that we could observe him explore its limits; instead, the plot swings up, as I guess it must, to bar his way. He meets a local businessman, a Turkish immigrant named Ali (Hilmi Sözer), who has a string of snack bars, which he runs on a tight rein, and a German wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), who is no less under his command. Ali needs a driver—and, you sense, a friend—and Thomas fits the bill.

You know what happens next. In particular, if you know “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” in either version, or Luchino Visconti’s “Ossessione,” or the James M. Cain novel from which the three movies sprang, the shape of the tale, in which a drifter enters a dry marriage and starts a blaze, might feel all too familiar. But those were hot numbers, whereas Petzold, the most cool-headed of the younger German directors, has siphoned the steam out of the story. As in his previous film, “Yella,” with its stripped-back vision of the modern workplace, the music and the editing are as sombre as the motions of the camera. Sex—curtailed, despairing, without a hint of raunch—is never the issue here. Laura and Thomas are not electing to be lovers but, at a more basic level, fighting to become living souls. At one point, they hold hands in a dark wood, like Hansel and Gretel. As for Ali, Sözer’s careful performance deepens the role of the cuckold to a degree that none of the Cain movies could be bothered with. He is brutish and unhappy (brutish because unhappy), doing well from his adopted land yet lying low, somehow, as if he were an illegal refugee. No wonder he is given a diagnosis of a bad heart; it clearly belongs elsewhere. “I live in a country that doesn’t want me, with a woman that I bought,” he says.

That last detail refers to Laura’s debts, which he took on when he married her. Thomas, too, begins the movie among loan sharks, and Petzold has remarked, in a statement on the film, that not until he viewed the finished work did he realize “there is not a single scene in which money doesn’t play a role.” In short, “Jerichow” is the right movie at the right time—and, with its dangerous stealth, it unfolds in the right place, too, among the flat fields and the half-deserted roads of Jerichower Land, in the former East Germany. Cash is tight (almost everyone, Laura included, tries to chisel Ali out of his profits), and employment is thin on the ground. Thomas’s first job, before he joins Ali, is to lie flat on a machine and pick cucumbers, his face to the soil. It’s as though Petzold had crushed “The Postman Always Rings Twice” against “The Grapes of Wrath,” film noir against the parched hopes of the Depression, and transplanted what was left to an unregarded corner of northern Europe, where the sunshine feels like a cruel joke. “I love you, Laura,” Thomas tells her. “You can’t love, if you don’t have money,” she says, like someone rebuking the Beatles. So compact and controlled is this fine film, with its bitter closing twist, that, against your instincts, and despite your prayers, you fear that she may be right. ♦