Terminator Salvation

McG’s 2009 film sits on the front line of the war with the machines: John Connor is inside the resistance without commanding it, and Marcus Wright, who does not know what he is, walks in. The emotional weight sits on Marcus, invented for this instalment, rather than on Connor, whose main function is to broadcast over the radio. The colour is drained on purpose: Technicolor’s Oz partial silver retention process pushes the image towards grey until machine and dust read as one texture. A script leaked in 2008. In that version John Connor died and his skin was grafted onto Marcus’s endoskeleton; after the backlash the third act was rewritten, and the release ends with Marcus giving up his heart, closing the film on a rescue. Bale was offered Marcus first and chose Connor, whose part then grew through rewrites. Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, so the T-800 on screen was built digitally from the body cast taken for the first film. The 1991 and 2003 entries carried an R rating while this one went out PG-13. A good fit if you want a Terminator set on the battlefield rather than around time travel, centred on Marcus. Not for anyone chasing the bloody R rated violence of the earlier films, since the blows here land mostly on metal skeletons.