Comic-Con: You've been warned -- 'Terminator Salvation' is 'not for pansies'!
Jul 26, 2008, 08:04 PM | by Whitney Pastorek
Categories: Comic-Con 2008, Film
The familiar guh-guh-guh guhguh music filled the air at this afternoon’s Terminator Salvation
panel, where a giant T-600 loomed over stage right, its red eyes
boring a hole through everyone in Hall H, as McG and most of the principal
cast members took time out from shooting the movie in New Mexico to
stop by and share. (Christian Bale, pictured, was M.I.A., doing Dark Knight press in Japan, but McG left him a message — that of 6,500 people screaming — on his voice mail.)
And it was McG’s show, to be sure, the Charlie’s Angels director running the panel like a car salesman — or, perhaps, the manic preacher of Terminator gospel.
But it was the footage we were there to see, and footage we got: a
trailer-esque clip that revealed this re-imagining of the John Connor
myth is part silvery washed-out Children of Men cinematography, part Mad Max
road-warring, and a lot of skull-crushing robot action. Anton
Yelchin — as a young, Oliver Twist-styled Kyle Reese — gets to deliver the
all-important “Come with me if you want to live” to Bale; Sam
Worthington appears to hold his own as new Terminator Marcus Wright.
They’ve not yet finished the visual effects, so what we saw was all
tactile — crashing trucks, Soviet-style Terminator tanks, silver fingers
reaching out to scratch Bale’s sweaty face...
But hey, what’s up with the Terminator
franchise, people? We’ve had two James Cameron movies, a third that
twisted the story up in knots, a TV show that’s got John Connor
dripping around like Morrissey’s younger brother... what more is there
to say? Turns out McG thinks there’s plenty, and he’s promised not to
bastardize it. After consulting with the three pillars of Terminator
lore — James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the late Stan
Winston — he’s giving us a look at the year 2018, in the post-apocalyptic
future after Judgment Day. (Please do not make me tell you the current
date of Judgment Day. At the moment, I think the TV show has it set in
2011, so just mark your calendars there, okay?) In the world of Salvation,
Skynet is still rising in power, the T-800 has yet to exist, and the
clunky T-600 models are fallible — and therefore fun to fight. They’ve
invented exciting new evil machines with names like Harvesters and
Hydrobots, and they studied Chernobyl to get the nuclear-winter
landscape right. And don’t believe everything you hear about the
plot — McG says the studio’s happily releasing misinformation.
Salvation’s multiethnic cast — including Bryce Dallas Howard as
John’s wife, Kate; Moon Bloodgood as a resistance pilot; and rapper
Common as John’s right hand man — is chock full of acting chops, but they
also serve the movie’s new message. While "no fate but what we make" is
still in effect, McG is bound and determined to make a point about the
way differences don't matter in the future, just the ability to come
together to survive. "If the world would get its head out of its ass,"
he said, "we wouldn’t have to wait for a nuclear holocaust to get to
that point." Despite that warm and fuzzy ethos, there will be probably
very little hugging and/or growing in the new film. As Worthington put
it, this thing's "not for pansies."
Oh, one last thing: Asked if Schwarzenegger would be back, McG was
curiously vague. "The T-800 model is indeed a part of the mythology of Terminator," he said, with a glint in his eye. He fielded questions from audience members dressed as T:2-era
Linda Hamilton and Robert Patrick (the latter brilliantly holding up a
picture of Edward Furlong and asking, "Excuse me, have any of you seen
this boy?"), and invited a guy named Tim up on stage because he'd asked
his question in a decent Govuhnator accent. Then he hollered at the
room to freak the flip out if they wanted to see the trailer again,
which they did. Guh-guh-guh guhguh.
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