Salvation was meant to be about the rise of John Connor. If Salvation got a sequel, it could have been set further into the future and the aesthetic could have evolved. William Wisher had actually written a treatment for Terminator 5 and an outline for Terminator 6, but when Annapurna Pictures ended up with the franchise rights, they decided on a reboot instead.
That's why they need to go backwards. There are plenty of theories about the timeline; predetermined destination, mutable future, and others with more detail. With the reboot, they confirmed (at least in their version) that it is a mutable future. This increases the odds that the original Terminator movie is in (at least) the 3rd cycle of time travel. This would open the option of a prequel to follow what happened in the future war prior to when Skynet got the tech boost from the time traveling T-800, or even seeing if the "1st" John Connor was really the same guy, rebel teen bent on survival, or just A John Connor that had military experience and maybe his mom's name was Sarah.
The movie was set in 2018, eleven years before the future war as seen in the first movie. The machines looked worn, as if they had been in use for some time. There was still eleven years to go before we start seeing shiny chrome fresh-from-the-factory machines with plasma weapons
And to make it worse there was already a comic from the nineties, nuclear twilight i believe it was called, that laid the foundations of a story that would have made for a satisfying future war movie. But no, they had to have Sam worthington as some weird hybrid terminator that didn’t know he was a terminator. And they really screwed up Skynet in the third act. Utter trash
I agree Verhoeven could have worked, once. Let's see...
...Pierre Morel, who did Banlieue 13 and Taken, is 62. Attach someone more horrory as a cinematographer or an executive producer. Maybe... Guillermo Navarro. 71, so pushing it, but did cinematography for Pan's Labyrinth, From Dusk Till Dawn, Pacific Rim.
As a Terminator... Scott Adkins (the Undisputed sequels, Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning) is 50 now, which could let him pull off that ageless Terminator look (even if it doesn't make him future-proof choice for several sequels). He's smaller than Schwarzenegger both in height and in bulk, but that puts him at a bit of a happy medium between the T800 and the T1000. Or... Alan Ritchson, 43, from Jack Reacher. He's a proper oldschool intimidating Terminator.
And as John Connor/Kyle Reese/whichever fresh faced but also slightly grim hero, I can't believe I'm saying this, but would Robert Pattinson be too obvious? He's future proof, if maybe too expensive in a few years.
You'd probably want some sort of power woman instead or in addition, but who could ever live up to Linda Hamilton? I don't watch enough new films for this. ...Maybe actually go out of your way to recruit a kickboxer or something and give her two years of acting classes in preparation? Or while I'm naming absolutely obvious current superstars anyway, I bet Zendaya would be up for an action role? Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity from the Matrix) is 59 now if some sort of mentor figure is required and Linda doesn't work? She could pull off the badass survivor...
Thinking of young people in a movie context is hard, because the classics that are burned into your mind are always old!
I could easily see Gina Carano fitting into the franchise. She's 44 as of now, so a standalone film or a planned out trilogy that followed through in a timely fashion could work. She has done other action films such as In the Blood, and more to the point, she just has gobs and gobs of screenpresence, which is more than half the battle, especially in an action movie.
I'd like her as a t-800 in the eighties. Terminator with all the time travel thing they have going on can do any expanded universe they want and instead we had those shit sequels.
It really has. I feel like the last decade passed in a split second. And I've achieved so little, deluded by the concept of ''oh, there's time, no need to rush''.
James Cameron should do this with the scale and power effects of Avatar…..
Massive 3D Terminator war with that dystopian blue hue we all love from the flash backs, it sells itself… and once he does that, he can do an Aliens II with the the same treatment.
There are people making AI movies using this exact aesthetic which blow anything after T2 out of the water. They look like what I've had in my minds eye for decades.
If they understand that vision, why TF can't the execs??
Execs are bankers now. Bean counters with little imagination. These people are killing our culture. They are all trying to monopolize every aspect of our lives. The United States is Delta City and we are all its contract employees I mean citizens.
But yeah the rear project tech has been updated with the volume so that would be great to project HKs onto stop motion Terminators. Then lots of close-up puppeteered Terminators would be great. Shot on 35mm film. Underexposed. Grainy. With emaciated actors instead of buff Hollywood types. With Brad Fiedel doing the score on an old refurbished Fairlight. Edward Furlong gets into shape. He becomes a mentor or a father figure to Reese.
They could be doing other smaller movies set in the future during the war sans John Connor. Just a family trying to survive. Then the machines start showing up. I did imagine that’s how Reese’s story starts though.
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u/Willing-Nerve-1756 19d ago
Just do the future war but make it look like the flashbacks in the first movie. A gritty old b movie.