Terminator 5 Will Shred All Of The Franchise's Most Sacred Rules, McG Promises

We still don't know what Terminator Salvation's controversial ending will be. But it can't possibly be as controversial as McG's batshit-crazy plans for Terminator 5. Spoilers (sort of) below. Plus a few new pics.

Talking to Film Journal, McG explained what he thinks will happen in his second Terminator film:

I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011. John Connor is going to travel back in time and he's going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They've figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than [just] one naked entity. So you're going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be fucking awesome. I also think he's going to meet a scientist that's going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves

All I can say, is whoa. I don't even know where to start.

Actually, I do know where to start: throwing out the Terminator series' most iconic rule for time travel — that only living tissue can travel, and anything covering it gets shredded — seems like a really weird notion. If you can send a Hunter-Killer back in time, what can't you send back? At what point do you shred the space-time continuum so much that nothing makes sense any more? Also, according to Terminator 3, Judgment Day happens in 2004. So what moves it forward seven years?

I'm also wondering what happens to make Skynet so desperate, it's willing to invade the past in such a dramatic fashion. I could be wrong, but isn't one of the cornerstones of the series that Skynet treads somewhat carefully about tampering with the past, lest it undo its own rise to power? There could be a clue to the ending of Terminator Salvation in there somewhere — maybe John Connor does something that puts Skynet in a no-win situation?

Or maybe McG's just yanking our chains?

Meanwhile, here are some pics from Yahoo that I don't think we've posted before: