After years in studio arbitration, the franchise rights have changed hands from the original producers to “Halcyon Co.”, a privately-funded production company. That’s right, even though Cameron wasn’t involved in T3, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar (the producers of T2) were. This is no longer the case. The franchise has been sold lock stock and barrel, and Halcyon is putting it in the hands of McG, a music video director with such award-winning classics as “Charlie’s Angels” and, naturally, “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” under his belt. This is a man so undeservingly pretentious that he goes by a three-letter nickname. His real name is Joseph McGinty Nichol, and apparently he’s big in the music video world.
The T4 script comes to us from the same writers as T3, so it may have some merit, although none of the original actors are currently in talks to be featured in it. It will reportedly take place, as one might imagine, some time in the future as humanity begins its resistance against the machines. Further rumors have suggested that it may not even tie in with the upcoming television series “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”. I’ve seen the pilot for the show and I don’t really know whether it’ll pan out, but I’ll give it a chance. I think the thing I remember most about the pilot was that the very cute female cyborg protagonist (Summer Glau) has a brief nude scene. Anyway, my fear isn’t so much that the story or characters will be lacking so much as the idea that the film’s style will be that of a very long music video for the attention-deficit disorder MTV generation, a la Charlie’s Angels. I’m going to say a little prayer every day in the hopes that the writer’s strike will force McG to move on to another project and/or creative differences will lead to a change in directors. Fuck almighty, if you really must have a music video director-turned-filmmaker, go make David Fincher an offer.
I had my reservations about Mostow taking the reins from Cameron, but I liked T3. So what, it wasn’t a Cameron film. As a huge fan of the series, I think it really held its own and I liked the fact that it had a different style and direction. It did a good job ratcheting the story forward and delivering a great twist at the end with Stahl’s reluctant Connor finally fulfilling the destiny he tried so hard to escape from. Where some films lose steam as they go on, T3 did a good job of escalating the story quickly and bridging the gap between the present and future timelines. I’m not about to fanwank the film’s characters or nitpick details; it’s impossible to not compare it to T1’s guerrilla-filmmaking-on-a-budget style or T2’s timelessly slick execution, but I must give it credit where credit is due. It was a different film and I still liked it, in much the same way that Alien3 was different but I still liked it. My fear now is that the Terminator franchise’s fourth entry will end up just like the Alien franchise’s fourth entry, which was abysmal. I’ll have to reserve judgment of T4 until I see the finished product, of course, but as it stands I am weeping for the “future” right now …
I actually liked the Charlie’s Angels movies. They weren’t supposed to be taken seriously, and they were a good bit of light, sexy fun, like the Danger Girl comic book series. However, I thought Terminator 3 was a piece of crap.
McG is producing two of my favorite shows - Supernatural and Chuck - and when the Winchester boys went to Hollywood in season two, there was a good deal of self irony involved as McG played himself. He also produced OC. If you check out this bio, I don’t think there’s such a need to sneer at him.
McG is not a terrible director or producer. He gets all the crap he gets solely because he actually uses “McG” as a screen name and thinks it’s cool. It’s not, it just makes him sound like a tool.
But I thought Terminator 3 was awesome, The Sarah Connor Chronicles looks like it could be fun and the fact that T4 is even getting made has me giddy with excitement. The Future War, finally!
I’ll wait to see the first trailer before I start worrying or not. Right now, it’s all smiles.
River Tam as a robotic terminator who could possibly have a nude scene? So… what’s the down side, and why isn’t this post about how awesome the new terminator TV series will be?
And on that same note, there was a Terminator 1? I was under the impression that there was only one film (and the only film that’s even really needed)- Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
No no, not “possibly have”. “Does have”. And it’s a nude fighting scene, at that. And the Lord said “It is good”. Shame all you get to see is a full dorsal though (as opposed to full frontal), but you won’t hear me complaining. It’s a very pleasant view. In my taste, she makes for a cuter cyborg than Kristanna Loken.
I think the folks who are critical of T3 will have nothing to gain from watching the new show though. Like I said, I admired T3’s change of pace and style, but the premise of the pilot reminds me of the old Dark Horse Terminator comics in a way, in the sense that it doesn’t really carry Cameron’s message and tries for an alternate take on the universe. I have this feeling that the show and the new films are going to end up being two very different things, with neither really sticking to the canon. Cameron’s themes were universal and self-contained (the first being that your significance in the grand scheme of things can be important no matter who you are, and the second perhaps being summed up by Sarah the best: “if a machine can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too”) and didn’t really need to be fleshed out and expanded upon. But alas, Hollywood demands cash, and cyborgs from the future are a great way to get it. Now that CG is so affordable, it’s also a great return on investment.
So T4 will probably be basically a 2 hour version of the future-war flashback that Reese has in part 1, and the scene T2 opens with?
That’d be the basis for a cool action flick.
However, I have almost no confidence in any modern action flick to be any good. The directing/camera work/etc is always so deliberately horrible. The “let’s shake the camera a lot and use weird perspectives both because it gives the impression of being more actiony and it means we don’t actually have to choreograph good action scenes” school of film making has taken over.
I predict that the TV series will be Battlestar Galactica (The Next Generation) ala Dr. Who in the 21st. Century. Filmed at some BC location, of course.
T3 is a movie that gets better every time I watch it. If anything, it had a great sense of humor. Cameron is good, but he can be pretentious as hell. I liked how T3 poked fun at itself without going into camp territory. Plus it had a great ending.
The original Terminator story finished with the second movie. You should accept the rest for what it is - big budget fan fiction.
When I saw Children of Men I kept thinking, wow, I can actually see the action, this is so cool!