The teaser for Terminator Salvation went online today, and while it doesn’t give you a chance to look at anything very clearly or for very long, the QuickTime format thankfully allows you to go through it almost frame-by-frame, if you so choose.
So, first of all, the teaser gives us our first good look at Christian Bale as John Connor — and for what it’s worth, I have added the image above to my John Connor gallery so that Bale can take his place alongside Dalton Abbott, John DeVito, Edward Furlong, Thomas Dekker, Nick Stahl and Michael Edwards, all of whom have played Connor at some point in his life or other.
Second, I have isolated some of the brief glimpses that this teaser gives us of the machines against which our heroes will do battle. These apparently include a giant claw that punches through a wall so that it can pick someone up off the ground …
… and a somewhat ungainly robot that looks rather like the big wheeled things that attacked our heroes in the third movie …
… and, of course, at least one red-eyed biped:
I do appreciate the fact that Connor, in the voice-over that begins the teaser, acknowledges the fact that the war he is now fighting is not the war that his mother warned him about. This is a whole different future, thanks to the choices that were made during the second film — choices that sent the timeline going in a whole different direction.
So with any luck, the filmmakers will explore the fact that Connor really doesn’t have a destiny any more — his destiny was on that other timeline that no longer exists — and he therefore ought to be asking himself some serious questions in the new films. Does he need to do this? Is he necessarily the best man for the job any more? And so on, and so on.
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