Usually by the time the final trailer for a big movie greets the dawn the general consensus is that the potential audience has seen almost the entire film. Badly designed trailers can ruin a movie in 2 minutes just as easily as they can generate unfathomable amounts of hype. The fine line between revealing too much and exciting too little has been sharply tested today as Warnerbros. released their brand new Terminator Salvation trailer which clocks in at a whopping FOUR MINUTES of footage.

This is the kind of extended trailer normally reserved for ComiCon or Showest, something you show the advertisers as a way of getting across the tone and scope that the film is going for, not members of the future audience. In this case, it is the first real idea we’ve had as to what the storyline of this particular film is, and interestingly enough, 4 minutes seems like exactly the right amount of footage to convince you to bump this one to the top of your must-see summer movie list.

Sure a lot of it is stuff you’ve seen before, but the extra context gives it all the weight and scale that a gritty post-apocalyptic sci-fi blockbuster should be looking for. Does the fact that it takes them 4 minutes to make this movie actually look good comment on the quality of the film? I’ll leave that up to you. We grabbed ourselves some pretty compelling screencaps below as well as our inferior quality embed. Head on over to Apple’s trailer page to check this one out in all its HD glory. McG’s monstrosity terminates on May 21st.