Standing next to a moving model of a Terminator, shouting things like “Roll it!” and at one point even (apparently) leaving a voicemail on Christian Bale’s phone, an exuberant McG presented a world-exclusive sneak preview of Terminator Salvation last night. Just seven minutes. Not finished. But enough to get a taste of what’s to come next summer.
Which is? A rubbly, deserty, post-apocalyptic world that owes huge amounts to Mad Max 2; no less than 10 new kinds of Terminator, including motorbike Terminators, gigantic Terminators that fire rockets and kidnap humans a bit like in War Of The Worlds, and tiny squid-like Terminators; hardman Christian Bale trying his gravelly Dark Knight voice again; and someone who says, “Come with me if you want to live…”
No question, every penny of the budget is going to be up on the screen when the film hits cinemas. Even with animatics and greenscreen still visible in this super-early sizzle-reel, it’s clear that McG is going for a huge action film.
But will Terminator Salvation be anything more than another huge action film? Much of the action – as exciting and spectacular as it was – seemed borrowed from elsewhere in the genre. Whether the movie can create its own unique world, it’s own unique ‘patina’ as McG referred to it, remains to be seen. McG also admitted that his ILM special-effects teams have yet to come up with what he promised he’d deliver to fans: something that will match the groundbreaking dazzle of James Cameron’s liquid-metal T-1000 back in 1991.
Much rests of the shoulders of the screenwriter. Luckily, that man is Jonathan Nolan. Or ‘Jonah’, as McG refers to him. The brainbox brother of director Christopher and scripter of The Prestige and The Dark Knight, Nolan has written a script which focuses on ‘where humanity ends and technology begins’. He persuaded Bale to do the film by delivering a screenplay which, at Bale’s request, could be acted out in a black-box theatre. Intriguingly, the story pivots on stem cell research, as the Terminators extract stem cells from humans in order to build the T-800 we see in the first movie.
Then comes, Avatar star Sam Worthington, who seemed to occupy as much of the screen as Christian Bale. The Aussie former bricklayer looks immense: charismatic, physically bigger than even Bale and a crucial part of Nolan’s story. Is he part man, part machine? McG isn’t saying. Nor is he saying whether Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face will be mapped on to a digital synthesis of a cyborg creation. In fact, it sounds like that’s what’s keeping ILM up all night…
All of which is well and good. Fingers crossed that McG and Bale can match the emotional intensity of Cameron’s first two Terminators. Both those films carried a beating heart inside their violent metal exoskeletons. Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese and young John Connor were all frightened, tear-streaked, desperate and oh-so-human that Cameron even had us caring about a lump of metal by the end of T2.
Maybe that’s what McG’s Terminator needs. It needs iron-man Bale to start crying. Can he do it?
