Post by rossbondreturns on Dec 11, 2008 2:25:40 GMT -5
www.slashfilm.com/2008/12/10/terminator-salvation-set-visit-preview/
Slashfilm Text
On July 2nd, 2008, I was lucky enough to visit the set of McG’s Terminator Salvation. Is this James Cameron’s Terminator? No. And it isn’t trying to be. Terminator Salvation is very different animal, far different from the traditional Terminator chase story. In a sense it is a futuristic war film.
When I think of Terminator Salvation, I am reminded of the line in Star Wars - A New Hope when Obi-wan tells Luke about how he served beside his father in the clone wars. Star Wars fans obsessed over that one throw away line for over two decades before George Lucas finally decided to bring The Clone Wars to the big screen. And as we all know, the result was extremely disappointing. Its funny how one line can conjure a better vision than four films and a computer animated television show combined. I am reminded of this because the same thing could easily happen to the Terminator series .
Judgement Day, the future war between man and machines — Cameron teased us with this in the first two films, and I don’t think anyone ever believed they would eventually see it on the big screen. As crappy as Terminator 3 was, the end twist got me excited for the possibility. And I understand that the name McG doesn’t instill confidence. Those of you who visit the site frequently have probably noticed how much I have been sticking up for the film, even before a second of footage was previewed to the public. The reason is that I saw everything up close and personal. I went to Albuquerque New Mexico very skeptical, and came back convinced that McG was the right man for the job, and that the result would be a fun action film, deserving of the Terminator name.
Our group was given unprecedented access to the production which was shooting on all 8 stages of the newly built Albuquerque Studios. Before we did anything, we were brought into a huge room filled wall to wall with concept after and models. The unit publicist gave us a tour of the first two thirds of the film. I’ve been on a bunch of sets where fear of spoiler leaks prevents the studio from providing embargoed journalists with plot information. This is the first set that I was given the all access pass, which allowed me to better connect the dots when we toured the many stages on the studio lot. I was able to look at the locations and sets through the larger perspective of the overall film.
So what Did I see? Since this is a preview piece, I can’t go into much detail. We were able to walk through Skynet’s testing center while it was being constructed. We saw John Connor’s underground bunker, drove by the destroyed 7-11 that is seen in the trailer, and stood in the Silo where John Connor and Marcus Wright go face to face (also seen in the trailer). But the majority of our visit focused on watching first unit photography in a power plant that had been converted into a Terminator assembly factory. You can see John Conner entering the factory in the photo at the top of this story. We got to watch them shoot some intense action sequences, one which involved Connor getting his signature facial scar — how cool is that? More on that later.
But the coolest moment for me was getting a tour of the Stan Winston Studios trailer, which was filled with all sorts of remote controlled endoskeletons and insane prosthetics. Having grown up on the “movie magic” specials of the 1980’s, I could have easily spent all day just in that trailer alone. One thing was immediately clear — the word practical was being thrown around a lot. Almost overused. Sure, this film will have computer effects (you’ve seen the Harvester in the trailer) but a surprising amount of the effects are being shot on the set, in camera or using a combination of tightly intertwined cg enhancements.
We spoke with Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese), Moon Bloodgood (Blair Williams), and Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright). McG was overly outgoing, giving an enthusiastic pitch as to why we should give him a chance. And while McG exudes an indescribable energy, his pitch is not just enthusiasm and caffeine. He knows what he’s talking about, and says all the right things, referencing screenwriter Jonah Nolan (who was rewriting the script as we spoke) and the post apocalyptic novel The Road. While he launches into an interesting observation the cyborg technology of today, you wonder how this could be the same guy who directed Charlie’s Angeles 2 Full Throttle.
He brought us into his streamline trailer and showed us an 8-minute sizzle reel of the film. People haven’t seen anything yet. And for those who believe this film will definitely be PG-13, think again. We saw a piece of footage that showed Moon Bloodgood topless in the rain, which certainly gave me the impression that the rating has yet to be decided.
Back on the set.
Sparks fly from the ceiling, steam rises from the floor, and balls of fire launch into the air as an assembly line of T-800 endoskeletons move along a conveyor track above my head. I’m standing in a factory where Skynet manufactures Terminators. John Connor falls to the wet pavement, dirty, bruised and beaten. He lifts a big ass gun into the air and fires. A large explosion comes from the factory’s second floor. But whatever John hit, its still coming. John pulls himself along the floor, unable to get himself to his feet. Not that his feet would help at this point, as he appears fairly injured. He grabs for a smaller gun and shoots. A cloud of liquid nitrogen steam fills the air as Connor collapses.
Is John Connor dead? Are the internet rumors true? To be continued…
chud.com/articles/articles/17364/1/SET-VISIT-PREVIEW-TERMINATOR-SALVATION/Page1.html
CHUD
A nightmare guards the perimeter.
Almost seven feet tall, it lumbers back and forth, clutching a huge gun. Behind it huge turbines roar to life and massive fireballs explode from pipes. In the distance is an old power plant, eerie blue lights pouring from broken windows. Red eyes blaze from the figure's sallow, unearthly face, which looks like something from a Bernie Wrightson fever dream. Looking closer it becomes obvious that this is no human being, and that face is an ill-fitting rubber mask stretched over a metallic skull. It's a T600, standing on the edge of what was once San Francisco but is now Skynet City.
In the shadows crouches a figure, beaten and battered. His leather jacket is stained with blood and torn to pieces. A blast of fire illuminates his face and shines off the metal of his skull, half-exposed beneath shredded flesh. When the T600 turns away to continue its rounds the figure darts out of hiding, into the destroyed remains of an old church. Adobe walls are all that stand; pews and bones sit exposed to the night sky. There are hundreds of skulls littering the ground. Maybe this was a place where terrified people sought refuge on Judgment Day.
The figure carefully makes his way through the ruins, aware that the robotic senses of the T600 can pick up the slightest sound and movement. As he comes into the chapel it seems like he has made it past this obstacle... and then a huge, heavily armored and armed earth-mover crashes through one of the walls, just feet from him, sending him sprawling in a crowd of debris and dust.
And it's all done in one take.
This is the set of McG's Terminator Salvation on a summery night in the deserts of New Mexico. I've been on set a long time - it's well past midnight and we got there when the sun was still high in the sky - but it was worth the wait. McG and his crew have spent hours working out this exceptionally complicated shot. There's a camera on a huge crane and an operator with a Steadicam, a series of explosions, a stunt involving a leading actor and a vehicle, and a heavy and uncomfortable T600 suit to all be wrangled and directed and made to work together so that the entire sequence could play out without a cut. After rehearsing it again and again and again, McG orders a filmed run-through without the earth-mover, one with the earth-mover busting through the wall and one more without the mover but with the hole in the wall. It's that second take when things get really tense - you frak that up and you have to wait for a new wall to be built.
But despite the huge amount of pressure, despite the crushing logistics, McG is smiling and chatty. He's joking with his crew and with the gaggle of reporters he insisted stand behind his director's chair so that we could get the best look at the action in person and on the monitor. There's a dozen of us hovering over him but he couldn't be happier, and it soon becomes obvious that the crew kind of blames us for how long this is taking; McG just can't help talking with us.
This is the culmination of a long day that brought us through the entire film in painting, storyboard and model form; that brought us to a room filled with concept art for more kinds of Terminators and killer robots than anyone had imagined existed; that sat us down with the whole cast (except for the elusive Christian Bale); and that had us eating dinner with McG before going to his trailer and seeing ten minutes of ass-kicking footage (much of which ended up at Comic Con, and some of which looked to be really pushing the boundaries of modern PG-13, especially a shot of Moon Bloodgood topless). It was a long day that completely and totally changed my opinion on Terminator Salvation.
I have to be honest: walking onto that set I had little hope for the movie. Along with Aint It Cool, we had broken some stories about the plot of the film that infuriated fans and that pointed to a movie that might be on the exact wrong path. McG had come out and denied everything, but after just a couple of minutes in the art department I knew that his denials didn't hold a lot of water; many of the things that we had reported remained irrefutably true. The identity of that figure sneaking around the T600, for instance, and how he ends up with the human resistance. The characters in the movie and their roles in the plot. But there had been changes, and as I looked over the storyboards and concept art I saw a movie that had been subtly altered from the pre-strike script I knew. Subtly altered in what looked like all the right ways.
There were some things being hidden from us... or maybe there were some things that were still in flux. It was no secret that Jonathan Nolan was rewriting the script for McG, and some elements - like the highly controversial ending - seemed up in the air. But what was there was epic in scope and dense in action. This is a film that is constantly moving the action forward, as it should be with this franchise, but it's also an entry in the franchise that is staking its own place and going places at which Jim Cameron only hinted. Fans disappointed by Terminator 3's endlessly bright and sunny scenes will be happy that this dystopia is a dark one, with many of the key scenes set at night. Since the future that we saw in Terminator and T2 was changed when Judgment Day didn't happen in 1997, McG and Nolan are free to play with our expectations in interesting ways. And they do.
I'll be bringing you interviews and some more detailed impressions of what I saw at a later date. In the meantime, allow yourselves to get excited (although the cool new trailer probably already helped with that).
www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=62751
Sci-Fi Wire (Sci-Fi.com)
Set Report: Terminator Salvation
It's night. We're in the New Mexico desert, the heat of the day dissipating rapidly as the full moon rises. And we're witness to horror: A massive machine crushes skulls in a ruined church as the towers of Skynet rise behind us.
SCI FI Wire was among a group of reporters on the set of McG's upcoming prequel film Terminator Salvation last June, and what we saw was a key scene in the movie, featuring star Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright as he evades the machines while trying to infiltrate the heart of Skynet, represented by an old power plant in Algodones, N.M., in the desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
McG explains the movie, which is set in the years after Judgment Day and centers on an adult John Connor (Christian Bale) and Marcus, a mysterious figure who finds himself in a strange land.
"This picture is post-Judgment Day, as opposed to the first three pictures are all present day," McG says before showing us his work. "The Terminators [are] coming back to the future. We don't have time travel yet in this picture; we just tease the idea of it coming. And that's that. And you see how the whole movie is just designed to be a thinly veiled cautionary tale of if we don't get our act together, this is the world that we're headed towards."
Australian actor Worthington is coy about his character, a new addition to the Terminator mythos. "I play a guy who kind of wakes up in this world, and he's trying to figure out who he is and what the hell the world is about," Worthington says. "So he's a searcher. He's Alice in Wonderland, basically."
This story continues below the video window.
The shot this night is at the full Skynet plant set, an exterior built around the old power plant. It's a huge industrial building, fronted by three smokestacks, and has been enhanced with faux structures for big cooling towers, spinning fans and large pipe conduits. The crumbling walls of a ruined church stand a bit further ahead. Inside are piles of fake skeletons, some in pews.
Beside the church is a gigantic dirty yellow Caterpillar bulldozer on treads, ready to smash one of the church's walls for the scene.
In the background, we can hear the loud ratatat report of a machine gun being fired: It's co-star Bryce Dallas Howard (Kate Brewster) getting her early weapons training.
In the shot, Worthington is in his ruined leather jacket, black T shirt, black pants.
Off to the side, an actor is dressed as a T-600--an early model of the familiar Terminator exoskeleton. He's lumbering, wearing 8-inch soles and a rubber mask with glowing red eyes, raggedy clothes and wearing a backpack and carrying a large machine gun in each hand.
The shot, a long tracking shot: The camera begins on the facade of the Skynet building, strobing flashes of white light in the windows. Pans down, spinning fans in background a la Blade Runner. Sam crouches behind a wall as the T-600 patrols. He pauses as the T-600 turns his way, then proceeds again. The camera tracks Sam as he creeps through the ruined church, looking at the skeletons and the pews. Behind him, balls of flamer erupt periodically from the cooling tower, seen through the church's empty windows. There's a rumbling noise. The bulldozer approaches from behind, bright light through the big window, Sam reacts and runs off to the right, the bulldozer crashes through the wall, bringing it down and proceeds, the camera tracking it as it moves to the right, the treads crushing the skeletons and skulls beneath it, an echo of the first Terminator movie.
Earlier, McG took us in groups into his custom Airstream trailer to show us early footage from the movie, even though he was only about halfway through principal photography: quick cuts of live action and on-set effects with no visual effects yet.
Cuts of desert landscapes, Christian Bale creeping through a dark water-filled tunnel with his men, flashlight on his rifle; an armored truck racing through the desert; a massive T-600 robot firing bullets outside the factory set at a fleeing Anton Yelchin (as Kyle Reese) and Worthington, advancing on them and stepping on a human skull; Anton drawing down on Sam, who grabs the shotgun out of Anton's hand, a la Terminator 3; the truck pulling into a ruined gas station; a quick shot of a white haired Jane Alexander as one of the human survivors; a car being blown up and flying through the air into the ruins of the gas station (which we saw out the bus windows as we were driving to set); the T-600 hanging upside down, firing at Sam and Anton; a crane shot of the holding pen for humans, one guy trying to climb the fence to escape and the T-600 firing at him; other humans herded into the factory pens; a jeep chase shot from above, as from a pursuing Transporter vehicle; Sam on a motorcycle leaping over a fence, a la Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
Terminator Salvation opens May 22, 2009. --Patrick Lee, News Editor
Read...be amazed...discuss.
Slashfilm Text
On July 2nd, 2008, I was lucky enough to visit the set of McG’s Terminator Salvation. Is this James Cameron’s Terminator? No. And it isn’t trying to be. Terminator Salvation is very different animal, far different from the traditional Terminator chase story. In a sense it is a futuristic war film.
When I think of Terminator Salvation, I am reminded of the line in Star Wars - A New Hope when Obi-wan tells Luke about how he served beside his father in the clone wars. Star Wars fans obsessed over that one throw away line for over two decades before George Lucas finally decided to bring The Clone Wars to the big screen. And as we all know, the result was extremely disappointing. Its funny how one line can conjure a better vision than four films and a computer animated television show combined. I am reminded of this because the same thing could easily happen to the Terminator series .
Judgement Day, the future war between man and machines — Cameron teased us with this in the first two films, and I don’t think anyone ever believed they would eventually see it on the big screen. As crappy as Terminator 3 was, the end twist got me excited for the possibility. And I understand that the name McG doesn’t instill confidence. Those of you who visit the site frequently have probably noticed how much I have been sticking up for the film, even before a second of footage was previewed to the public. The reason is that I saw everything up close and personal. I went to Albuquerque New Mexico very skeptical, and came back convinced that McG was the right man for the job, and that the result would be a fun action film, deserving of the Terminator name.
Our group was given unprecedented access to the production which was shooting on all 8 stages of the newly built Albuquerque Studios. Before we did anything, we were brought into a huge room filled wall to wall with concept after and models. The unit publicist gave us a tour of the first two thirds of the film. I’ve been on a bunch of sets where fear of spoiler leaks prevents the studio from providing embargoed journalists with plot information. This is the first set that I was given the all access pass, which allowed me to better connect the dots when we toured the many stages on the studio lot. I was able to look at the locations and sets through the larger perspective of the overall film.
So what Did I see? Since this is a preview piece, I can’t go into much detail. We were able to walk through Skynet’s testing center while it was being constructed. We saw John Connor’s underground bunker, drove by the destroyed 7-11 that is seen in the trailer, and stood in the Silo where John Connor and Marcus Wright go face to face (also seen in the trailer). But the majority of our visit focused on watching first unit photography in a power plant that had been converted into a Terminator assembly factory. You can see John Conner entering the factory in the photo at the top of this story. We got to watch them shoot some intense action sequences, one which involved Connor getting his signature facial scar — how cool is that? More on that later.
But the coolest moment for me was getting a tour of the Stan Winston Studios trailer, which was filled with all sorts of remote controlled endoskeletons and insane prosthetics. Having grown up on the “movie magic” specials of the 1980’s, I could have easily spent all day just in that trailer alone. One thing was immediately clear — the word practical was being thrown around a lot. Almost overused. Sure, this film will have computer effects (you’ve seen the Harvester in the trailer) but a surprising amount of the effects are being shot on the set, in camera or using a combination of tightly intertwined cg enhancements.
We spoke with Anton Yelchin (Kyle Reese), Moon Bloodgood (Blair Williams), and Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright). McG was overly outgoing, giving an enthusiastic pitch as to why we should give him a chance. And while McG exudes an indescribable energy, his pitch is not just enthusiasm and caffeine. He knows what he’s talking about, and says all the right things, referencing screenwriter Jonah Nolan (who was rewriting the script as we spoke) and the post apocalyptic novel The Road. While he launches into an interesting observation the cyborg technology of today, you wonder how this could be the same guy who directed Charlie’s Angeles 2 Full Throttle.
He brought us into his streamline trailer and showed us an 8-minute sizzle reel of the film. People haven’t seen anything yet. And for those who believe this film will definitely be PG-13, think again. We saw a piece of footage that showed Moon Bloodgood topless in the rain, which certainly gave me the impression that the rating has yet to be decided.
Back on the set.
Sparks fly from the ceiling, steam rises from the floor, and balls of fire launch into the air as an assembly line of T-800 endoskeletons move along a conveyor track above my head. I’m standing in a factory where Skynet manufactures Terminators. John Connor falls to the wet pavement, dirty, bruised and beaten. He lifts a big ass gun into the air and fires. A large explosion comes from the factory’s second floor. But whatever John hit, its still coming. John pulls himself along the floor, unable to get himself to his feet. Not that his feet would help at this point, as he appears fairly injured. He grabs for a smaller gun and shoots. A cloud of liquid nitrogen steam fills the air as Connor collapses.
Is John Connor dead? Are the internet rumors true? To be continued…
chud.com/articles/articles/17364/1/SET-VISIT-PREVIEW-TERMINATOR-SALVATION/Page1.html
CHUD
A nightmare guards the perimeter.
Almost seven feet tall, it lumbers back and forth, clutching a huge gun. Behind it huge turbines roar to life and massive fireballs explode from pipes. In the distance is an old power plant, eerie blue lights pouring from broken windows. Red eyes blaze from the figure's sallow, unearthly face, which looks like something from a Bernie Wrightson fever dream. Looking closer it becomes obvious that this is no human being, and that face is an ill-fitting rubber mask stretched over a metallic skull. It's a T600, standing on the edge of what was once San Francisco but is now Skynet City.
In the shadows crouches a figure, beaten and battered. His leather jacket is stained with blood and torn to pieces. A blast of fire illuminates his face and shines off the metal of his skull, half-exposed beneath shredded flesh. When the T600 turns away to continue its rounds the figure darts out of hiding, into the destroyed remains of an old church. Adobe walls are all that stand; pews and bones sit exposed to the night sky. There are hundreds of skulls littering the ground. Maybe this was a place where terrified people sought refuge on Judgment Day.
The figure carefully makes his way through the ruins, aware that the robotic senses of the T600 can pick up the slightest sound and movement. As he comes into the chapel it seems like he has made it past this obstacle... and then a huge, heavily armored and armed earth-mover crashes through one of the walls, just feet from him, sending him sprawling in a crowd of debris and dust.
And it's all done in one take.
This is the set of McG's Terminator Salvation on a summery night in the deserts of New Mexico. I've been on set a long time - it's well past midnight and we got there when the sun was still high in the sky - but it was worth the wait. McG and his crew have spent hours working out this exceptionally complicated shot. There's a camera on a huge crane and an operator with a Steadicam, a series of explosions, a stunt involving a leading actor and a vehicle, and a heavy and uncomfortable T600 suit to all be wrangled and directed and made to work together so that the entire sequence could play out without a cut. After rehearsing it again and again and again, McG orders a filmed run-through without the earth-mover, one with the earth-mover busting through the wall and one more without the mover but with the hole in the wall. It's that second take when things get really tense - you frak that up and you have to wait for a new wall to be built.
But despite the huge amount of pressure, despite the crushing logistics, McG is smiling and chatty. He's joking with his crew and with the gaggle of reporters he insisted stand behind his director's chair so that we could get the best look at the action in person and on the monitor. There's a dozen of us hovering over him but he couldn't be happier, and it soon becomes obvious that the crew kind of blames us for how long this is taking; McG just can't help talking with us.
This is the culmination of a long day that brought us through the entire film in painting, storyboard and model form; that brought us to a room filled with concept art for more kinds of Terminators and killer robots than anyone had imagined existed; that sat us down with the whole cast (except for the elusive Christian Bale); and that had us eating dinner with McG before going to his trailer and seeing ten minutes of ass-kicking footage (much of which ended up at Comic Con, and some of which looked to be really pushing the boundaries of modern PG-13, especially a shot of Moon Bloodgood topless). It was a long day that completely and totally changed my opinion on Terminator Salvation.
I have to be honest: walking onto that set I had little hope for the movie. Along with Aint It Cool, we had broken some stories about the plot of the film that infuriated fans and that pointed to a movie that might be on the exact wrong path. McG had come out and denied everything, but after just a couple of minutes in the art department I knew that his denials didn't hold a lot of water; many of the things that we had reported remained irrefutably true. The identity of that figure sneaking around the T600, for instance, and how he ends up with the human resistance. The characters in the movie and their roles in the plot. But there had been changes, and as I looked over the storyboards and concept art I saw a movie that had been subtly altered from the pre-strike script I knew. Subtly altered in what looked like all the right ways.
There were some things being hidden from us... or maybe there were some things that were still in flux. It was no secret that Jonathan Nolan was rewriting the script for McG, and some elements - like the highly controversial ending - seemed up in the air. But what was there was epic in scope and dense in action. This is a film that is constantly moving the action forward, as it should be with this franchise, but it's also an entry in the franchise that is staking its own place and going places at which Jim Cameron only hinted. Fans disappointed by Terminator 3's endlessly bright and sunny scenes will be happy that this dystopia is a dark one, with many of the key scenes set at night. Since the future that we saw in Terminator and T2 was changed when Judgment Day didn't happen in 1997, McG and Nolan are free to play with our expectations in interesting ways. And they do.
I'll be bringing you interviews and some more detailed impressions of what I saw at a later date. In the meantime, allow yourselves to get excited (although the cool new trailer probably already helped with that).
www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=62751
Sci-Fi Wire (Sci-Fi.com)
Set Report: Terminator Salvation
It's night. We're in the New Mexico desert, the heat of the day dissipating rapidly as the full moon rises. And we're witness to horror: A massive machine crushes skulls in a ruined church as the towers of Skynet rise behind us.
SCI FI Wire was among a group of reporters on the set of McG's upcoming prequel film Terminator Salvation last June, and what we saw was a key scene in the movie, featuring star Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright as he evades the machines while trying to infiltrate the heart of Skynet, represented by an old power plant in Algodones, N.M., in the desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
McG explains the movie, which is set in the years after Judgment Day and centers on an adult John Connor (Christian Bale) and Marcus, a mysterious figure who finds himself in a strange land.
"This picture is post-Judgment Day, as opposed to the first three pictures are all present day," McG says before showing us his work. "The Terminators [are] coming back to the future. We don't have time travel yet in this picture; we just tease the idea of it coming. And that's that. And you see how the whole movie is just designed to be a thinly veiled cautionary tale of if we don't get our act together, this is the world that we're headed towards."
Australian actor Worthington is coy about his character, a new addition to the Terminator mythos. "I play a guy who kind of wakes up in this world, and he's trying to figure out who he is and what the hell the world is about," Worthington says. "So he's a searcher. He's Alice in Wonderland, basically."
This story continues below the video window.
The shot this night is at the full Skynet plant set, an exterior built around the old power plant. It's a huge industrial building, fronted by three smokestacks, and has been enhanced with faux structures for big cooling towers, spinning fans and large pipe conduits. The crumbling walls of a ruined church stand a bit further ahead. Inside are piles of fake skeletons, some in pews.
Beside the church is a gigantic dirty yellow Caterpillar bulldozer on treads, ready to smash one of the church's walls for the scene.
In the background, we can hear the loud ratatat report of a machine gun being fired: It's co-star Bryce Dallas Howard (Kate Brewster) getting her early weapons training.
In the shot, Worthington is in his ruined leather jacket, black T shirt, black pants.
Off to the side, an actor is dressed as a T-600--an early model of the familiar Terminator exoskeleton. He's lumbering, wearing 8-inch soles and a rubber mask with glowing red eyes, raggedy clothes and wearing a backpack and carrying a large machine gun in each hand.
The shot, a long tracking shot: The camera begins on the facade of the Skynet building, strobing flashes of white light in the windows. Pans down, spinning fans in background a la Blade Runner. Sam crouches behind a wall as the T-600 patrols. He pauses as the T-600 turns his way, then proceeds again. The camera tracks Sam as he creeps through the ruined church, looking at the skeletons and the pews. Behind him, balls of flamer erupt periodically from the cooling tower, seen through the church's empty windows. There's a rumbling noise. The bulldozer approaches from behind, bright light through the big window, Sam reacts and runs off to the right, the bulldozer crashes through the wall, bringing it down and proceeds, the camera tracking it as it moves to the right, the treads crushing the skeletons and skulls beneath it, an echo of the first Terminator movie.
Earlier, McG took us in groups into his custom Airstream trailer to show us early footage from the movie, even though he was only about halfway through principal photography: quick cuts of live action and on-set effects with no visual effects yet.
Cuts of desert landscapes, Christian Bale creeping through a dark water-filled tunnel with his men, flashlight on his rifle; an armored truck racing through the desert; a massive T-600 robot firing bullets outside the factory set at a fleeing Anton Yelchin (as Kyle Reese) and Worthington, advancing on them and stepping on a human skull; Anton drawing down on Sam, who grabs the shotgun out of Anton's hand, a la Terminator 3; the truck pulling into a ruined gas station; a quick shot of a white haired Jane Alexander as one of the human survivors; a car being blown up and flying through the air into the ruins of the gas station (which we saw out the bus windows as we were driving to set); the T-600 hanging upside down, firing at Sam and Anton; a crane shot of the holding pen for humans, one guy trying to climb the fence to escape and the T-600 firing at him; other humans herded into the factory pens; a jeep chase shot from above, as from a pursuing Transporter vehicle; Sam on a motorcycle leaping over a fence, a la Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
Terminator Salvation opens May 22, 2009. --Patrick Lee, News Editor
Read...be amazed...discuss.
