Terminator Salvation (2009) – What Happened to This Movie?

After the still entertaining but undeniably sillier Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the Terminator franchise was ready for salvation. But what would be the next step? Arnold was fully engulfed in his political career; James Cameron would rather remake Piranha 2 than return; and per the usual for this franchise….no one even knows who owns the rights! This is What the F*ck Happened to Terminator Salvation.

A bit after Terminator 3’s release, both Nick Stahl and Claire Danes were recast to return as John Connor and Kate Brewster in the next installment of the franchise. Jonathan Mostow (director of Terminator 3) was also involved and helping with the script but a retread of Terminator 3 sounded dreadful. On top of that, the rights situation was once again a mess…. After months of fighting, lawsuits, and distribution hassles…. the rights to the franchise were again sold. This time, to the Halycon Company. Who, stop me if you’ve heard this one, planned to make a new trilogy of films. And so, it was out with the old. In with McG. 

McG at the time had directed music videos for everyone from Korn to Sugar Ray. As well as both of the first two Charlie’s Angels films, and tear-jerking true story We Are Marshall. All things that scream Terminator, I know. McG would be working with a script that survived the previous regime, penned by Terminator 3 writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris. While these two are listed as the sole writers for the project, legend has it the script was actually touched up by a bevy of other talents. Including but not limited to Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), Shawn Ryan (The Shield), and Christopher Nolan’s brother, Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight). The latter of which, McG himself considered, “the lead writer of the film”, because of the constant rewrites he did on set. Nolan joined the project after the casting of Christian Bale and ended up creating most of John Connor’s arc. The final script ended up so different from the original that novelization writer, Alan Dean Foster, had to completely rewrite his book on the film.

The original ending of Terminator Salvation featured John Connor being killed, then having his face grafted over the character of Marcus to keep the resistance alive. This, only to have Marcus then murder Kate, Barnes, Kyle, and even Star, while donning Connor’s trusted image. While the theme song would have gone extra hard as the credits rolled after such a bleak ending, it was a little too dark for some fans when the ending leaked online. And too dark for Warner Bros as well, who decided it should then be changed. 

In the story we received, a character named Marcus is on death row pre-Judgement Day and signs his body over to Helena Bonham Carter and science. Fast forward to post Judgment Day and he is resurrected, unknowingly a cybernetic organism for Skynet meant to infiltrate the Resistance. All the while, we see John Connor on the cusp of becoming the man, the myth, the legend we’ve heard of….but he doesn’t quite have the leadership’s support yet. So, he’s fighting two wars at once. He also learns that Skynet has a kill list with both his and (his younger father) Kyle Reese’s name on it. He tries to find Reese and keep him safe while also searching for a signal that can stop Skynet for good. In the process, however, he ends up in a trap set by Skynet and an unknowing Marcus. 

There, Marcus and John team up against a strange-looking version of Arnold’s T-800, blowing up the Skynet facility in the process. John is critically injured in his heart during the fight, but Marcus offers his own heart to save John. In doing so Marcus finally achieves his….wait for it….Salvation! We then leave off with John Connor reminding us that the battle has been won, but the war rages on.

The character of Marcus was meant to be the lead character in the film, with a Jesus to Ben-Hur type thing going on between him and John’s character. But when you cast Christian Bale, fresh off The Dark Knight (and we know this because he still sounded like The Dark Knight throughout the film) you give him a little more screen time. Marcus still carried much of the load, which was given to actor Sam Worthington in his biggest role to date. Ironically, Worthington would star in James Cameron’s Avatar that very same year. I think this in itself threw fans off when watching Salvation. Having an all-time actor like Christian Bale in the role of John Connor after the weird choices made with the character in Rise of the Machines was a Godsend. It was a strange feeling to not have him be at the forefront for its entirety. This cast was insanely huge, however. And there was only so much screen time to go around.

The talented late actor Anton Yelchin was cast as the hopeful and innocent heart of the film in a young Kyle Reese. It’s a great bit of casting and for my money, the best Kyle Reese in the franchise save for Michael Biehn. One can’t help but wonder how amazing it would have been to have Yelchin continue this role at some point later in his career. John Connor’s wife was cast as Dallas Bryce Howard in an interesting role: Often off to the side of the action, but with a major impact on John’s choices. You get the sense the franchise had far bigger plans for her character in the future. The cast also featured everyone from Moon Bloodgood, to Common, and “guy built to be a character in a Terminator movie”, Michael Ironside, all as Chess pieces in the future war. 

Special FX-wise, McG spared no expense in keeping the desolate post-apocalyptic action scenes realistic. For the most part, I would say he succeeded. The action in Salvation is dark and gritty in a way that brings the franchise back down to its roots from Terminator 3’s entertaining but Hollywood atmosphere. Thanks in part to the help of (once again) Industrial Lights and Magic who darkened their CGI palettes to match the cinematography of a nuclear wasteland. 

The new technology Salvation brought forth was also inspired and included both giant, awe-inspiring, robot a**holes, and motorcycle Skynet hybrids worked on by actual Ducati designers. Not to mention the hydro-terminators, which put to rest any thoughts of just hiding from Skynet in the ocean. Many of the ideas were brought to life by Martin Laing, who had worked with Cameron on Titanic in yet another tie-in with the creator of the franchise.

McG, who was inspired by films such as Mad Max and Children of Men, said it best himself, saying, “I say with respect, I didn’t want that Star Wars experience of everything’s a blue screen, tennis balls, and go for it. I had Stan Winston build all the machines. We built all the sets, the explosive power, the explosive power so you feel that wind and that percussion and that heat blowing your eyebrows off. And with that, you get a couple bumps and bruises on the way, but you get it in an integrity and a realism that hopefully echoes Apocalypse Now.” Terminator Salvation would be one of the last that legend Stan Winston would work on before he sadly passed in 2008. The film was dedicated to him in the credits. 

From the darkened robots to the painstaking research on the effects of nuclear winter on robotic elements, Salvation is at times a work of special effects art. That realism doesn’t come easy, though. In this case, it came to the tune of a 200 million dollar budget. The most they’d ever spent on a film in the franchise. It also almost came at a physical price, with a Special Effects technician almost losing his leg during a scene when a manhole is exploded into the air. Lucky for him it was only “partially severed” which doesn’t sound like a goddamn tea party, either. Between injuries and writers’ strikes alone, Terminator Salvation was a Herculean effort to accomplish. Most Terminator films are. But Salvation had a special challenge of its own when the film went viral….for all the wrong reasons.

While filming an intense scene, the Director of Photography, Shane Hurlbut, walked into Bale’s eyeline for a second time and distracted him. Bale proceeded to go on a minutes-long rant for the ages. The audio of Bale manically screaming at Hurlbut was recorded by someone on the set and leaked to the press. If you were there, you likely remember. It became one of the most talked about news stories of the year. The audio spread like wildfire. Bale’s star had never been higher due to the heater of hits he was in the midst of and this was a bad look. Everyone, everywhere was either making jokes or furious at Bale for treating a coworker with such disrespect. Bale would later admit he had been trying to channel the crazy side of his character’s mother, Sarah Connor, and that it went horribly wrong. To his credit, so many coworkers both from the set of Salvation and those who had previously worked with Bale came to his defense. Person after person went on record praising his professionalism and chalked it up to the many stresses of working on a movie set fueled by this level of intensity. Bale also gave radio station KROQ 106.7 a lengthy and heartfelt apology for his behavior on the set that day, taking full responsibility. 

The marketing train moved on regardless. Terminator Salvation made promos of everything from 7/11 tie-ins to its very own ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Adjacent content was created at a maximum effort pace with a novelization, multiple video games, comic books, and even an animated series being created around the Salvation storyline. The soundtrack featured Danny Elfman doing Danny Elfman things and Alice in Chains ‘Rooster’, so prominently featured in the movie. Everything was in place for a monster hit at the box office. So, how did it do?

The 200 million dollar production of Terminator Salvation opened up number two at the box office to Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. It was the first film in the franchise to not open up in first place domestically and came in 50% below major pundit predictions. The film did open up at #1 overseas and ended up gathering more than $370 million in total. Things weren’t great. But they weren’t John Carter bad.

 Critically, Salvation took a beating. Not just from the critics themselves but from franchise alma matters. James Cameron tried to be congenial but also remarked on not returning because “frankly, the soup’s already been pissed in by other filmmakers”. Schwarzenegger would later call it “awful”, “not that they didn’t try”, and Linda Hamilton would remark that there will always be “those who try and milk the cow.” Hamilton would star in Terminator: Dark Fate a few years later. 

Some will argue that part of what went wrong was the choice to make it the first PG-13 entry in the franchise. McG would argue that he merely took out a screwdriver stabbing and a topless shot of Moon Bloodgood to achieve the rating. Something he thought was a good trade-off for allowing younger fans to experience the film. He later admitted, however, that he has a darker cut he thinks may have worked better. 

Terminator Salvation may have ended the hopes for a new trilogy and been involved in bankruptcies and franchise rights auctions (more on that in our WTF Happened to Terminator Genisys video), sure. But today, Terminator Salvation has developed a cult following and overall appreciation that didn’t exist before. Perhaps it was that the two following sequels failed to resonate as well. Perhaps it was just a classic case of Salvation being ahead of its time. Either way, many Terminator fans you ask these days call Salvation underrated and wrongly judged. How apropos for a film in the Terminator franchise that its future would determine its worth? And that, is what happened to Terminator Salvation.

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