This is too big to reduce to a mere newsbite. ComingSoon.net reports that Warner Brothers has released the following synopsis for Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, which began shooting a couple weeks ago:
In the highly anticipated new installment of “The Terminator” film franchise, set in post-apocalyptic 2018, Christian Bale stars as John Connor, the man fated to lead the human resistance against Skynet and its army of Terminators. But the future Connor was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past. As Skynet prepares its final onslaught, Connor and Marcus both embark on an odyssey that takes them into the heart of Skynet’s operations, where they uncover the terrible secret behind the possible annihilation of mankind.
And so the plot thickens. But wait, wasn’t the future that John was raised to believe in already changed by the events of the second movie? Didn’t those events fundamentally alter the timeline in such a way that the events of the third movie caught John off-guard? And wouldn’t that mean that any further sequels would have to take place in a world that was very different from the world John was raised to believe in — even if it has some obvious similarities?
The press release also mentions that Charlotte Gainsbourg has taken over the part of John’s wife Kate, a pre-marital version of whom was played by Claire Danes in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003); that bit of casting may or may not have been mentioned elsewhere before now, but it’s news to me, at least.
I have to admit that I’ve never cared for this particular character, largely because the film that introduced her also introduced far, far too many coincidences around her. Kate’s dad develops Skynet, and Kate happens to be an old school chum of John’s who kissed him the day before the T-1000 came looking for him, and the veterinary hospital that John breaks into many years later just happens to be Kate’s, and he just happens to do this on the very same day that a T-X has come back in time to kill Kate, and so on, and so on. One of the things I love about the TV series is that it completely ignores the third movie … but the new movies have to accept the third movie as canon, so I hope they can do a better job with this character than the movie that invented her did.
And speaking of the TV series, IGN.com reports that the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is coming to DVD and Blu-ray on August 19, not too long before the second season begins. I’d definitely like to take another look at those episodes, with the commentaries and everything.
MAY 23 UPDATE: As of today, the new film has a production blog, so I have replaced the photo at the top of this post with the concept art that was posted there today. (The photo that used to be at the top of this post has decorated a few of my previous Terminator entries, and I was getting tired of it.)
In his introductory blog post, director McG doesn’t say much about the film that we don’t already know, though he does reveal that principal photography began with “a sequence at Griffith Observatory” — which is where Arnold Schwarzenegger made his very first appearance as the evil Terminator in the original film way, way back in 1984. Could be a nice homage.
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