Terminator, salvation, apocalypse.

Two new items on Terminator Salvation, both courtesy of the MTV Movies Blog. First, director McG discusses the movie’s title:

Broadly, of course, the title makes sense the same way “Judgment Day” made sense for the second film: on a worldwide scale — Judgment Day being shorthand for the apocalypse, etc, etc. So after the Judgment comes the salvation, the redemption from the sins of our collective past. Man created the robots, the robots destroyed man, and now man needs to be saved from his own creations. Got it.

“Even though we may sin, ultimately we deserve a second chance,” McG echoed.

But just as “Judgment Day” also alluded to the choice a Terminator must ultimately make, “Salvation” similarly alludes to the actions of one specific character, McG said.

“Sometimes life is worth living when you make sacrifices so others may benefit,” he teased.

The question is, though: which one? Is it John Connor? A Terminator? Kyle Reese? Kate Connor? Marcus Wright?

Second, McG discusses the reading material that he gave to the cast, to get them in the right mood:

“I gave all the actors ‘The Road’ to read to get their heads right bout this sort of existential detachment that living in a post apocalyptic world would bring,” McG revealed. “We’re in a very large post apocalyptic environment. The bombs have gone off and there’s very little left. People are wandering through lonely landscapes. We want to capture that by way of David Lean photographic expanses, so you think you’re looking at ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ So far, so good.”

Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” follows a father and son journeying together through an ash covered landscape, some years after a worldwide disaster killed nearly every living thing on the planet. It’s bleak, haunting, and despite what may be construed as a somewhat happy ending, endlessly heartbreaking. It’s also, of course, some kind of brilliant, a treatise on fear, and despair, and death, and a future from which there is no escape.

McG thinks John Connor could sympathize. Actually, he’s insisting on it.

“I think the first two pictures took those ideas so seriously,” McG said of the themes of inescapable destiny and dread. “We wanted to make sure we did that [as well].”

The funny thing about this latter item is that the most recent movie to be based on a Cormac McCarthy novel was No Country for Old Men (2007), and a few critics, as I recall, said there was something “Terminator-esque” about Anton Chigurh, the relentless killer played by Javier Bardem in that film.