TERMINATOR COUNTDOWN

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/05/2009 (6040 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES — Last year, in newsrooms across the coun­try, editors and reporters were shocked — shocked! — over hearing Christian Bale’s angry verbal outburst in a workplace en­vironment.

OK, not really.

Bale’s sustained rant against an indiscreet cinematographer was mainly newsworthy because it leaked online, where the audio was masticated to a soggy pulp in the blogosphere, with audio snippets utilized in musical mash-ups and an episode of The Family Guy.

Despite Bale’s subsequent published apology, many members of the public might harbour ill feelings toward the actor. But in Hollywood, well, let’s just say the billion-dollar gross for Bale’s mega-hit The Dark Knight tends to mitigate a lot of negative feelings.

In any case, the rant has tended to distract people from the movie he was making. Terminator Salvation is a continuation of a revered Hollywood franchise, begat when James Cameron unleashed his low-budget, sprint-paced sci-fi classic in 1984. Cameron followed it up in 1991 with a bigger, even better movie with state-of-the-art visual effects and an even more complicated time-travel plot.

Cameron abandoned the franchise, but star Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on for the 2003 film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a third film in which a humanoid-looking robot from the future is sent back in time to expurgate the life of human rebel John Connor, thus ensuring the rule of machines.

Terminator Salvation, which opens in theatres Thursday, takes the franchise in a different direction in many ways.

Let’s count down the ways:

111

"We never thought they would let us blow up the world at the end of T3, honestly," says John Brancato, who wrote the original scripts for both Rise of the Machines and Salvation with partner Michael Ferris. "We walked into a meeting and Mike and I talked about it as the only reason this movie exists. If we don’t do it, it’s just a retread to T2," Brancato says, adding that he anticipated a major fight over the issue. "But that actually flew the first time we discussed it."

That victory meant the movies could now be placed almost entirely in the bleak violent future only sporadically glimpsed in the first two Terminator movies in images such as a robot foot crushing a human skull.

"People were really intrigued by the hints they got of the future. And I love post-apocalyptic movies when they’re done properly," Brancato says. "It’s like a western. You’re stripping the world of a lot of crap that’s in the way and gets to be very essential: what it is to be human, what it is to survive."

 

11The director known as McG (Charlie’s Angels) went to England to pitch Christian Bale on the idea of starring as Marcus Wright, the half-cybernautic hero of Terminator Salvation. (The role ultimately went to Aussie actor Sam Worthington.)

 

McG didn’t realize that his visit would alter the future of the franchise.

"You can imagine how I felt when I went over to England and I said: Hey Christian, I want you to play Marcus, it’s a great character." Bale told him: "I want to play Connor."

"Alright, I gotta get back to you in a little bit," McG told Bale.

Writer John Brancato says the character of Connor, central in Terminators 2 and 3, was actually a minor character in their script, which is set in 2018, years after the supercomputer Skynet has devastated most of the planet.

"A lot of the workload was integrating (Connor) into scenes that were already written in our original concept, and having that feel integral and sensible, as opposed to grafted on just because there was a big star in the part."

Dark Knight writer Jonathan Nolan was drafted to beef up the John Connor part, turning the film into a "two-hander" that divvies up the action equally between the characters of Connor and Wright.

 

2. The movie pays specific homage to past Terminator movies, especially the first one.

"The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human … sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero on him."

— Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator (1984)

 

Plotwise, the entire set-up of Terminator Salvation is taken from that tidbit from the first film, in which Reese tells John Connor’s mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) about the T-800s — robots with human skin.

"The coming of the T-800s, that is indeed the problem," says McG, adding that the supercomputer known as Skynet conceives of harvesting human survivors "to get the tissue to take and work over the titanium chassis of the T-800."

The film has other tributes to past films, including the line "Come with me if you want to live," uttered by a teenage version of Kyle Reese, played by Anton Yelchin.

In the first film, Kyle Reese purloined a pair of Nike "Weapons" and in Terminator Salvation, we see that even in the post-apocalypse, a guy can feel a sense of product loyalty. Teen Reese wears them, too.

"Those are the shoes he likes because he feels survival is a little more likely wearing them," McG explains.

 

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not in the movie … well, not exactly.

The star of the first three movies, Schwarzenegger wisely declined to participate in the fourth as the Californians who elected him governor might have taken issue with movie work distracting the Governator from more compelling duties.

"We spoke at great length and he was always very supportive and very helpful, but he has a job to do, running the state of California in a difficult time," says McG.

That said, well, there is a Terminator robot who bears a certain resemblance to Gov. Schwarzenegger as he appeared in the first film. It is a product of scans of Schwarzenegger taken by special effects wizard Stan Winston back in 1983, and translated into digital animation by Industrial Light and Magic. McG says the effect "services the responsibilities of a Terminator film to push forth the idea of visual effects by writing code that has Schwarzenegger in his prime appearing in our picture."

McG says Schwarzenegger was amenable. "He ultimately said, ‘As long as you make it clear that I wasn’t down bouncing around craft service and keeping my eye off the ball as to what was going on in Sacramento, then I’m agreeable to it.’" McG says. "We got to a very, very good place and he’s seen the movie and I think he’s very enthusiastic about it."

 

 

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