Speculative fiction is full of stories about people who've lost their identity – AMC just gave us a dreamlike remake of The Prisoner in which Number Six forgets who he really is, and Dollhouse returns Friday with more mind-erasing fun. But it's weird to see the trope of "fighting for selfhood" merged with that action-movie staple, the entertaining killing spree.

Recently, I was re-watching chunks of X-Men: Origins: Wolverine and thinking about that movie's insane body-count — both before and after Logan starts trying to regain his elusive humanity. In Wolverine, the mutant known as Logan is caught between his bestial nature and his dignity as an individual. For a hundred-odd years, he is a slaughter machine for the military, and then he joins a super-secret mutant taskforce. But in mid-atrocity, he suddenly starts questioning orders, and then he goes… rogue. (No, he doesn't bleach part of his hair and start talking in a Southern-girl voice. He just wanders off the reservation.)

The point is, Wolverine is just as much of a killing machine after he starts asserting that he's not just part of the machine, or not just an animal. He never makes the connection between the sacredness of his own personhood, and the sacredness of human life in general. I get that you have to fight for your freedom sometimes, but the movie makes a big point of showing Wolverine killing when he could just as easily disable his opponents — one of the movie's few great fuck-yeah moments involves cold-blooded murder. (Sure, he's killing scumbags. But he was just as much of a scumbag twenty minutes earlier.)

Likewise, Terminator Salvation (newly on DVD) gives us Sam Worthington's tormented cyborg Marcus, who discovers that he's basically a reanimated corpse with metal parts — and he makes the choice to be human, slaughtering several of John Connor's men in the process. (During his heroic escape from the resistance compound.) But it's okay, because Marcus' emergent selfhood is more important than any sense of self all of those dead people might have possessed. (Actually, I might need to — shudder — rewatch this sequence. I know a bunch of the rebels die, but some of them die due to hydrobots that attack afterwards. Does Marcus actually kill anybody directly, or just cause their deaths by tearing apart their security?)

And then, of course, there's District 9, in which Wikus also fights to regain his humanity — by putting on a battlesuit and shredding people with alien weapons. This film at least subverts this trope a bit, by having Wikus use alien weaponry that he's only able to use because he's losing his humanity — and the film doesn't exactly reward Wikus for his mass murder.

This odd combination — the hero who devalues human life in the process of exalting his own — has been around for ages, but seems to be on the rise. RoboCop and the Universal Soldier movies give us cyborg heroes who struggle to re-humanize while killing lots of other humans. Michael Bay (surprise!) gave us The Island, in which a clone grown as an organ donor kills his "original" self, along with a number of other people, on the way to becoming a full-fledged person.

For almost as long as there have been action movies, there's been the high body count: watching a Rambo movie in the 1980s, you don't stop and think that everyone of these bodies flopping to the ground is another person who won't come home to his/her family. It's one of the conventions of action movies that we accept that this carnage isn't really happening – even as the movie expects us to suspend our disbelief about a guy falling out of a helicopter on fire and surviving, it asks us to maintain full disbelief that mass murder is taking place in front of us.

On some level, too, we stop thinking that those people dying in front of us are really people – especially in a movie with tons of bad CG (like Wolverine). We can watch the corpses piling up because we know they're not human.

But the action-movie body count and the "search for identity" plot are great separately — I love a good John Woo bloodbath — but they sit uneasily together. The more people we see your cyborg or mutant kill — and the more casually they're killed — the less we can identify with our hero's quest for selfhood. The whole thing starts to feel more like a first-person shooter, and the main character more like a video-game avatar, rather than an individual who Deserves Human Rights and all that stuff.

If life is so cheap, then who really cares about Logan's quest for self? Not to pick on Wolverine, but these questions keep coming back as you watch the movie, as if they have a mutant healing factor.

How do you square the contrast, between the hero's inalienable uniqueness and everyone else's disposability? Maybe it's because Our Hero is a Nietzschean ubermensh, whose will to power makes his individuality more precious than everyone else's? What do you think?

So now that you've seen it, what do you think? Worth creating a huge public apocalypse and humiliating poor Moon Bloodgood over? I didn't think so either.

To refresh your memory, back in February, McG made Bloodgood stand up (fully clothed) in front of a crowd of Wondercon fans and shouted, "Who wants to see Moon's boobs?" until the crowd roared. McG explained that the studio wanted to cut Bloodgood's topless scene, to keep the movie PG-13. In the roundtables afterwards, they talked up the scene and how great it was:

Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

Did you get all of that from the above clip? No? Then you're obviously an ingrate, who cannot appreciate the subtleties of McG's film-making process. In any case, I'm probably the last person who would object to a little gratuitious nudity or extra trashiness — especially in an already cheesy apocalyptic film, where it mixes in with the shouting and the ridiculous stunts and the nonsensical dialogue. In fact, if Christian Bale had spent the entire movie nude, it might have been the one thing that would have salvaged his performance. But especially after having seen the rest of the film, the auteur-ish temper tantrums over this brief snippet of "Moon's boobs," and the grandiose boob exegeses seem a bit overplayed. Just a tad.

Here's a list of all the movies with production budgets of $170 million and over, for the past ten years. (We chose the threshold of $170 million because there were a ton of movies clustered around the $150 million-$160 million mark.) Movies that failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office are underlined.

2009:

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: $250 million

Avatar: $237 million (according to AP)

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: $225 million (according to NY Post)

Terminator Salvation: $200 million

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA: $175 million

Up: $175 million

2008:

Quantum Of Solace: $230.6 million

Prince Caspian: $225.6 million

Iron Man: 186.5 million

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull: $185.5 million

The Dark Knight: $185.5 million

Wall-E: $180.5 million

2007:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End: $317.4 million

Spider-Man 3: $272.9 million

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials: $213.4 million

Rush Hour 3: $187.4 million

2006:

Superman Returns: $295.3 million

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $223.1 million

X-Men: The Last Stand: $209.3 million

Poseidon: $171.3 million

2005:

King Kong: $232.5 million

Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe: $197.6 million

Sahara: $176.8 million

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: $150 million (2005 dollars)

2004:

Spider-Man 2: $232.2 million

Troy: $199.9 million

Van Helsing: $182.8 million

The Polar Express: $186.6 million

Alexander: $175.4 million

2003:

Terminator 3: $238.4 million

The Matrix: Reloaded: $176.7 million

Master And Commander: $175.6 million

The Matrix: Revolutions: $175.6 million

2000:

The Perfect Storm: $175.6 million

1999:

Wild Wild West: $221 million

The World Is Not Enough: $173.3 million

The 13th Warrior: $206.8 million

Notes: All figures are in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation. These figures are just production budgets, and are based on the most accurate figures we could find. They don't include marketing budgets. And of course, many of the films which failed to break even at the U.S. box office did make a profit when you factor in international box office.

Conclusions:

There hasn't been a movie as expensive as Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End since 2007, so you could argue that, over all, movies are not getting more expensive. However, after a few years where there were four mega-budgeted movies per year, the last two years have each seen six movies with budgets over $170 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars.) And as we mentioned above, this year had the most movies costing $200 million or more of any year, with next year likely to see even more films over $200 million.

And the listing above doesn't reflect this fact, but we also found a steep rise in the number of movies costing around $150 million every year — this seems to be the safe point for a film that is expected to do well, but may not be a blockbuster. Films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Batman Begins, Star Trek and many others all have production budgets in the magic $150 million zone.

At the same time, Hollywood seems slightly better at picking winners lately. We haven't had a year where most of the hugely expensive movies failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office since 2004, when two historical epics, The Polar Expressand Van Helsing all bombed. Or 2003, when one of two Matrix sequels underperformed, along with Terminator 3 and Master And Commander.

One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing around $120 million each (in non-adjusted dollars.)

Why would this be? Well, look at the three big-budget movies from 1999. Notice anything the three of them have in common? Hmmm... Other mega-expensive bombs in the late 1990s include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lethal Weapon 4 and, of course, Waterworld. The only mega-budget movies to make money in the latter half of the 1990s were Armageddon and Titanic.

Sources: Know Your Money, Forbes.com, Listphobia, The Numbers, IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia, and other sources as cited.

You've probably already heard about the lawsuit and the bankruptcy filing — but we've read the legal filings, and we have some more info about the tangled web below. The most important question for movie-lovers, however, is: Does this mean Terminator 5 (and 6) are doomed? Will the legal battles and money disputes keep the movie rights tied up indefinitely?

People familiar with the lawsuits tell io9 that Terminator 5 will definitely still happen — although different sources disagree about how long it'll take. But sources seem to agree that Terminator Salvation made too much money ($371 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo) for anyone to stand in the way of a fifth outing.

"Terminator 4 was a big hit, and everybody who was connected with that movie was pretty happy with it, and the're looking forward to a Terminator 5 and a Terminator 6 down the road," says a source familiar with Halcyon. All that needs to happen is for Halcyon to get rid of some liens that its financing company put on its assets (see below) and the company will move forward. (The holding company only filed for Chapter 11, or restructuring, bankruptcy.) Even though Terminator Salvation was more expensive than anticipated — something Halcyon blames on Pacificor — it still made a healthy profit.

Another source familiar with the case agrees, but says that the courts may have to get involved in the question of who owns the Terminator movie rights, and that may take some time. At the end of the day, someone will emerge holding those rights, and that someone will be highly motivated to put together another installment — but it may or may not be Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson.

So how did we reach this apocalyptic legal scenario?

The Terminator movie rights are at the center of a massive power struggle between the producers of Terminator 4 and their financial backers, and the allegations are already flying like a squad of Hunter-Killers. We read the filings that Halcyon Co. put forth in their lawsuit against their financing company (Pacificor) and one exec in particular, Kurt Benjamin, and it reads like a thriller, with deception, double-crosses, deadly plane crashes and ticking clocks.

In a nutshell, Halcyon got wind of an opportunity to buy the Terminator franchise in 2006, but to do this they needed to raise cash in a hurry. Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson met up with Kurt Benjamin, who helped raise money from Pacificor. But in their lawsuit, Halcyon claims that Benjamin never revealed that he was an employee of Pacificor. So Halcyon allegedly gave inside information to Benjamin — including the fact that they were desperate to raise money in time to buy the Terminator rights — and then Benjamin turned around and gave that info to Pacificor. That inside info allegedly allowed Pacificor to strong-arm Halcyon into agreeing to tougher loan terms.

Later, Benjamin allegedly used his inside info about Halcyon to extort a salary out of the company, driving it deeper into debt and forcing it to seek a second loan from Pacificor at tougher terms. After Pacificor's founder died in a plane crash, Halcyon allegedly became even more dependent on Benjamin to negotiate continuing finance from Pacificor, because Benjamin claimed nobody else at Pacificor even knew about the Terminator deal. Halcyon claims it was left with no choice but to pay up Benjamin's alleged "blackmail," which added to its debt load — at one point, Halcyon claims that it worried it would run out of money a scant few months before T4 was due to come out.

The upshot of all this is that Halcyon is apparently deeper in debt to Pacificor than the Terminator producers had bargained on. And according to their legal filings, Pacificor put a lien on all their assets "in a deliberate and desperate attempt to seize control and ownership of the Halcyon entities and the [Terminator] franchise," and to keep Halcyon from paying off its creditors. "As a result of the Lien, Halcyon has been unable to obtain financing that would enable [it] to meet its obligations, which could potentially result in Halcyon's loss of the [Terminator] Franchise."

A spokesperson for Halcyon declined to comment on pending litigation.

But Benjamin, the main defendant in one of Halcyon's two legal actions, tells io9 "everything that's alleged in their lawsuit, every allegation, is a lie." He adds: "This is just salacious creative writing, and I highly recomend that they and their lawyers work more on writing science fiction."

Both the Halcyon co-founders and their attorney knew all along that Benjamin worked for Pacificor, he claims. And far from acting as a go-between in the lending negotiations between Pacificor and Halcyon, Benjamin says he had no part in the discussions once he introduced the two parties. And after Pacificor's founder was killed in that plane crash, Anderson and Kubicek "coerced me to work with them," says Benjamin. Benjamin claims he wasn't even drawing a salary from Pacificor — he was just paid on commission for any deals he set up, which means his first paycheck didn't even materialize until January 2008.

And the reason why Terminator Salvation wound up costing more than expected, according to Benjamin? Producers Anderson and Kubicek wasted the money on personal expenses. "They're known in most Hollywood circles as the glitter twins," claims Benjamin. "The minute these guys got the funding, they went on wild spending sprees."

Titan Books, which published the book version of Terminator Salvation, kindly sent out a half dozen copies to some of io9's writers as well as some of our most prolific commenters and occasional posters. So how did the story of Marcus Wright's cyborg angst and John Connor's struggle with tourettes translate into book form? Here's what they thought.

The participants:

Annalee Newitz, io9 editor

Chris Hsiang aka Grey Area, frequent commenter and regular book reviewer.

Hank Hu aka CrashedPC, regular commenter.

Josh Wimmer aka Moff, regular commenter and "Jive Tarkin" columnist

Alexis Brown aka EvlSushi, regular commenter, current intern and regular poster.

Charlie Jane Anders, io9 news editor and occasional leaver of the house.

So in order to maximize the value to you, the readers, we'll try and divide this review up into a few sections.

Does the novel make sense?

It definitely makes more sense than the movie, is the consensus. Maybe because Foster was working from a script that included a lot of scenes that were cut, or trimmed, for the final movie, there's a lot more explanation of what the heck is going on.

As in the movie, it's 2018, and the self-aware computer system Skynet has all but wiped out the human race. John Connor leads the last remnants of humanity in the fight against the machines, while struggling to save his own father, Kyle Reese. And meanwhile, a man named Marcus Wright wakes up years after being executed, and begins to suspect that he may no longer be human.

Says Hank, "The novel, even while reading like a grade-school primer for action movies, had a modicrum of sense. Being able to read someone's internal thought process is extremely satisfying. Connor is not a shouty loud madman like what I've heard about the movie, but he's just too damn emo at times."

The novel includes a lot more conversations between John Connor and his wife, Kate, about how the timeline may have changed. Connor has actual smart discussions about the supposed "off switch" and whether it's likely that Skynet would really have left such an easy backdoor in its systems. And the Connors talk a lot more about Kate's pregnancy and John's doubts about his ability to save people in this new altered timeline.

As Chris points out, Foster spends a lot of time explaining how Skynet's stronghold in San Francisco is so poorly guarded. "Foster tried to fill in as many plot holes as he could. His explanations for why there was very little security in San Francisco and why the HKs didn't bother Connor's base almost work."

And after the Connors encounter Marcus, there's a much more in-depth discussion of exactly who he might be, and what he represents. At one point, Kate explains exactly how that cyborg infrastructure works, and how it's all wired. This is a huge improvement over the movie, where they just sort of look at Marcus and grunt.

And yet, there are still some plot holes.

Grey Area observes:

The batshit insane sequence where Connor hacks a moto-terminator and rides it to San Francisco across the ruined Golden Gate Bridge was kinda cool but totally batshit insane. That wasn't actually in the movie was it?

Hank wonders:

I still don't understand why Marcus is like, the most advanced 'bot of them all. From what I can tell, he donated his body to science after being punished, capitally. If his brain is still the original organic one, why is he the most advanced one? Shouldn't he be like the beta stage prototype garbage bot that can barely formulate sentences. Instead he's the Incredible Hulk that can formulate complex sentences, albeit broody ones.

Adds Alexis:

And why is John Connor so flippin' special anyway? We have yet to see him do much of anything to justify how important he is to the timeline. The machines seeme to have ultimate control of everything, right? And humans are scattered and living like rats. So, how is this a war and not a complete massacre?

Josh zeroes in on the ultimate plot hole:

And why is saving Kyle Reese so important? So that John Connor can send him back in time so that he gets born? Is he going to disappear Back to the Future–style if Kyle dies? Because I wasn't feeling the impending doom.

At the end of the book, there's no heart transplant. Instead, the characters just escape intact. (You can read the adaptation of the movie's actual ending on the Titan books website.) And then Foster throws in a weird hint that Star, the cute little orphan with the funny hat — may actually be a Terminator. Her eye glints redly... or is it just a trick of the light? We may never know.

How about the characters? Are they more fleshed out?

Definitely. Marcus Wright, in particular, benefits from the novel's ability to flesh out his inner life and give him a stronger story arc. As Alexis points out, the early scene where Marcus meets Serena Kogan and agrees to donate his body to her experiments is much stronger. The kiss between the two of them is described lovingly, although it's made clear it's not a loving kiss — it's a last act of violence from a violent man. And we get an running monologue summarizing Marcus' thoughts and his final struggles as the lethal injection wipes him out. His last thought is about the kiss with Serena, and how he could have done it better. As Alexis says, it's nice stuff.

Grey Area liked the way the novel reveals

the humanity of Marcus, and the whole deterministic fate thingy. A vicious thug becomes more human and sympathetic after becoming cyborged. It's as if Skynet, that notorious softie with its keen insight into human emotion, re-programs Marcus with a better soul. Neat idea, but as I stated before I cannot buy that the cold emotionless Skynet is occasionally Dr. Phil.

Adds Hank,

Honestly, I thought Marcus Wright was pretty cool. Never mind the fact that he knew himself that he was executed and now he's walking around, shrugging off attacks and saving children. He was much more of a sympathetic character than most of the Resistance. Or even surviving nomads. Perhaps he was meant to be the real star of the show?

Even more, Grey Area approves of the way the novel gives us

Connor's realization that he is as programmed as the machines he fights.He's been told since birth that he will become this great leader. He really has no choice and doesn't even seem to have any actual leadership qualities. Hell, his people follow him just because they've been told to.

Hank notes:

One part I did like in particular: Marcus escaping the silo. The Resistance fighters just acted so dense, so naively, that I felt no sympathy for them. It does them no favors when Marcus was described so heroically and positively prior, and then now Barnes is taking potshots at him when he's strung up. I know they hate the machines and all, but jeez, it's like they didn't even bother trying to figure out how such a perfect melding of human and machine came about. "IT'S A TRAP" is essentially all they kept shrieking.

On the minus side, everybody hates Star the cute orphan, in the book as much as in the movie. And one character who gets fleshed out to ill effect is Virginia, the white-haired lady who takes Star under her wing in the movie. In the book, we learn way more about Virginia than we ever wanted, as she tells Star bedtime stories and sings lullabies to her.

How tongue-in-cheek is it?

The novel features some of the purplest, silliest prose Alan Dean Foster has ever committed to paper. You can't help but wonder if Foster, who's a great writer when he wants to be, wasn't mocking the whole story, or at least trying to lighten up the intentionally humorless film.

Grey Area picks out the following choice lines:

pg. 16 "Wright rose from the cot. Standing, he looked a lot taller, a lot bigger."

pg 35 " 'Jericho, come in!', Olsen's fingers tightened on his communicator.
Jericho didn't come in. The communicator's locked frequency was as silent as the grave. A bad simile, the general thought, especially considering his present subterranean location."

pg. 139 "She did not really know him yet, and she did not want him to see the unbridled gratitude that she knew must be suffusing her face."

And, from the very ending:

"How long?"
She tried to shrug but was unable to lift her shoulder.
"Any moment. His heart can't take it." Her eyes met the sergeant's, and she continued. "The Terminators have beat him up and history has worn him down."
Barnes tried to think of something to say. Of the right thing to say.
"It's going to be okay."

Hank's favorite line:

This resulted in even more bits and pieces flying off of the machine. This resulted in a termination of the pursuit.

Annalee picks out a few choice lines as well:

* * * When Dr. Serena Kogan (later to be the Face Of Skynet) first meets Marcus before he's killed, and turns into Bill Cosby:

"How are you?" she finally murmured.

In the troglodytic confines of the cell the query was at least as funny as the paramount punchline of a highly paid stand-up comedian.

* * * When Williams fights off would-be rapists, right before Marcus steps in to help:

That was just enough time for Williams to dart forward and slam the knucles of her closed fist into his throat . . . He dropped like the sack of shit he was.

* * * After Marcus escapes from the resistance camp, John Connor shows off his powers of perception:

He had barely made back into the woods when shapes rose sharply from bush to confront him and he found himself staring down the barrels of three rifles.

"Halt and identify yourself!" the noncom in charge barked.

"John Connor." What a pity, he mused halfheartedly, that he could not be someone else.

But he knew he was John Connor.

* * Marcus hooks up with Skynet in the machine complex - and we do mean "hooks up."

Revealed to his probing gaze was an intricate maze of glowing wiring, silent chips, and busy processing units. He stared at the lambent display, memorizing all that he could.

Finally he gave up and shoved his hands deeply into the electronic wonderland.

The initial contact caused him to spasm . . .

After reading through all these quotes, I can't help but feel that Foster was trying to lighten the tone a bit. And maybe sending up the story, just a tad.

The bottom line:

The consensus seems to be: The novel is held back by having to be an adaptation of such a nonsensical movie, but it's clear Alan Dean Foster was having fun writing it. And as a result, it's a pretty fun read. And if you've been sitting around wrestling with all the dozens of things that didn't make sense in the movie — and wondering exactly what was going through these people's heads as they were running around from action sequence to mopey slow-mo — then this novel may be of great value to you.

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization [Amazon.com]

The writers' strike has caused incalculable damage to genre television, including helping to kill great shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But it's also inflicted maximum damage on this summer's movies. We detailed all the ways the strike impacted movies like Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe a while back — it's probably no coincidence that the one movie whose script was in perfect shape before the strike hit, Star Trek, was also the only really watchable genre film in months.

(I think part of the reason I'm so over-the-moon about Trek is because I'm grading on a curve. Put it next to Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and it might not score quite so well. I was also thinking the other day that if The Incredible Hulk had come out in 2009, we might have appreciated it a bit more.)

So how about the movies coming this fall and winter, and even into next year? Did the strike hurt them as well? I did some digging, and here's what I found out about the crop of upcoming Hollywood movies:

District 9. (August 14) Not really a Hollywood movie, this Peter Jackson-produced alien imprisonment saga was filmed in South Africa and produced by QED Films. And reading between the lines of this Variety story from November 2007, it sounds as though director Neill Blomkamp and his partner Terri Tatchell had already written the script before the film was greenlit.

Pandorum. (September 4) This Dennis Quaid-Ben Foster space-horror film was greenlit in May 2008, a few months after the strike ended, and written by newcomer Travis Milloy. Which means it was a spec script, and unless it required major rewrites, it should be fine. The film only started shooting in August 2008, which means there should have been time to make rewrites, if any were needed.

Gamer. (September 4) This Gerard Butler-starring epic about prisoners who are forced to become video-game avatars for rich kids was actually filmed during the writer's strike, so its script was long since done. It's been on ice for quite some time — rumor has it test screenings in October 2008 produced almost entirely negative responses. The movie's gone through several titles, including Game and Citizen Game. So it may not be great... but that won't be the writers' strike's fault.

Splice. (September 18, limited release). Vincenzo Natali's genetic manipulation film stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as researchers who mess with the human genome... and get burned. And there was a script in November 2007, when the writer's strike started. Or at least, producer Guillermo del Toro was able to say in a statement:

Vincenzo is taking Splice to really edgy places. The moment I cringed while reading the script, I knew I wanted to help him realize his vision.

And a still from the movie came out in February 2008, while the strike was still going on. (The movie's complex visual effects have required a long time to complete.)

The Surrogates. (September 25). This one's a bit unclear. Disney bought the rights to the robot-avatar graphic novel back in March 2007. They hired the writers of Terminators 3 and 4, Michael Ferris and John Brancato, to write the screenplay. The following November, Bruce Willis signed up to star, and T3 director Jonathan Mostow was announced as director. The film was supposed to start filming in February, but the rest of the cast wasn't announced until the following April, a few months after the strike ended. So it's entirely possible the script needed some rewrites. And got them. So it may be fine. Except that it's from the writers and director of Terminator 3.

Zombieland. (October 9) This zombie buddy comedy didn't even snag star Woody Harrelson until late August 2008, a good six months after the strike ended. And co-star Jesse Eisenberg was "in talks" to appear in the film in October 2008. So I'm guessing there was plenty of time to get a script together at some point.

The Road. (October 16) This bleak Cormac McCarthy adaptation was filmed in Western Pennsylvania early in 2008, and has been on ice for a year — it was originally supposed to open in 2008. Now all we have to worry about is that producer Harvey Weinstein forced some unwise edits on the film in the interim.

The Wolfman. (November 6) This is another one that's been sitting on ice for ages — Benicio Del Toro signed up for the lead role in March 2006 (!) and there was a script review in August 2006. (If anything, looking at this crop of movies, I'm starting to wonder why so many were delayed for so long.) Del Toro got a costar, Emily Blunt, in January 2008, and it looks like the film was filmed soon after.

2012. (Nov. 13) We covered this in our rundown of the writer's strike and summer movies — because it was originally supposed to come out this summer. (Yes, another delayed film.) But the strike didn't actually impact this film much at all, because the script was bought right after the strike ended.

Avatar. (December 18) James Cameron has been working on this film since before you were born. And yes, I don't care how old you are, it's still true. In any case, chances are he's had plenty of opportunities to tinker with the script. Here he is, talking it up in 2006.

The Book Of Eli. (January 15). The Hughes Brothers (From Hell) signed up to direct this post-apocalyptic bibliophile samurai pic back in May 2007, and they were trying to rush it into production in the fall of 2007 "before a possible strike." Obviously, this didn't work out — the film's star, Denzel Washington, wasn't even announced until September 2008, and filming didn't happen until earlier this year. So count this as another film that was delayed — maybe due to the strike.

And I think from there on out, you're looking at movies that were greenlit after the strike, so you're probably all good. Looking at the crop of movies coming up this fall and winter, the main thing that's jumping out at me is that a lot of them were delayed for various reasons — probably not all to do with the strike. There are a lot of movies coming out from August to January, which were originally supposed to come out much earlier, but they were kept in the freezer. Make of that what you will.

Why do the studios decide that scenes are strong enough to make it into movie trailers, but not strong enough to show up in the finished product? It's a mystery, but it shows how much last-minute editing and tweaking goes into movies nowadays. We're not the only ones to notice this — when I was almost done writing this post, I came across this discussion over at Cinematical.

Here are some examples from giant films of the past decade or so:

Incredible Hulk:

Star and co-writer Edward Norton famously clashed with Marvel over how long this movie should be, and a couple of scenes were featured prominently in the trailers but didn't make it into the theatrical release. There's this fireside chat between Bruce Banner and "Doc" Samson:

And then there's the whole opening sequence where Banner goes to Antarctica to try and kill himself, which supposedly includes a glimpse of Captain America's frozen body:

And also, the same trailer includes a bit where Bruce Banner argues with General Ross, saying there's only one thing that can fight the Abomination and "it's in me."

Terminator Salvation:

There seems to be a lot of stuff that was cut from the final print of the movie, where John Connor obsesses about how the future has been altered by all the time traveling in previous installments. "This is not the future my other warned me about," he says in one trailer.

In another trailer, his wife Kate says, "If you saved us in another future, you can save us in this one," or words to that effect. I get the impression all of Kate's stuff got cut out of the final print of the movie. That scene is included in this four-minute trailer:

Also, I can't remember Connor actually saying, "Win or lose, this war ends tonight" in the actual movie. Did he say that, and I just missed it?

We're also pretty sure that Connor putting his hand on his wife's pregnant stomach wasn't in the movie. (In fact her pregnancy hardly comes up at all.)

And there's a glimpse of a naked figure (or at least barelegged) reaching down and grabbing a Terminator's arm gun to blast the hell out of someone or something. Could that have been a rejected sequence featuring Arnie's T-800? I bet they shot a lot of stuff with Roland Kickinger, the bodybuilder whose naked body stood in for Arnie's:

Star Trek:

We know they filmed a decent amount of stuff for this movie, including some more of Kirk's childhood and the reasons he decided to trash that Corvette. But the main thing that shows up in the trailers is the birth of baby Spock:

There's also a sequence where Nero says "The wait is over," which is in a bunch of the trailers but not in the movie. I think this is right after he busts out of the Klingon prison.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Actually, this doesn't seem like it would have been such a great scene, but one trailer includes a sequence where we meet Storm as a kid:

Wanted:

A poster at Cinematical says the whole great scene where James McAvoy asks Angelina Jolie "Are we gonna bond now?" and she says, "Would you like to?" isn't in the movie. I don't have the movie on DVD, and can't remember off-hand if they're right:

Armageddon:

As a commenter at Cinematical pointed out, the trailer for this film includes a whole inspirational speech from Bruce Willis, which never turns up in the movie:

I Am Legend:

This IMAX trailer (and some of the other trailers, I think) include some snippets of the film's original ending, which was replaced at the last minute. It's the bit where the plague mutant hisses right next to Will Smith's face, at around 2:20 in this video:

2046:

Another one the Cinematical commenters noticed. Apparently this film's trailers include a ton of futuristic scenes that aren't in the movie, including Maggie Cheung as a robot:

Reign Of Fire:

Annalee has been annoyed for years that this movie's trailer featured dragons fighting helicopters, but it didn't really happen in the movie:

True Lies:

And finally, reaching back quite a bit further, here's a trailer for True Lies that includes a number of scenes that aren't in the movie, or even in the DVD:

Oh, and this rant has spoilers, although I'll try to keep the Terminator Salvation spoilers as vague as possible. If you haven't watched all of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and want to stay unspoiled, now's a good time to stop reading.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had an admittedly uneven run over one and a half seasons, but its last six episodes were among the strongest hours of television I've ever watched. The show ended so strongly, it elevated everything that had come before. Most of all, T:SCC made a powerful argument that after 25 years, Terminator still had plenty of compelling stories to tell, and fascinating places to go. It might have been based on a couple of chase movies about time traveling killer robots, but T:SCC crafted a narrative that's stuck in my head since the show ended.

By contrast, Terminator Salvation was making a strong statement that the Terminator franchise is played out, and there are no new stories to tell about it. You can have more killer robots, and bigger killer robots — much, much bigger killer robots, in fact — but you can't really tell a different story, or reveal more about why John Connor is the chosen leader of the Resistance and what those killer robots are really about.

But I'm not going to spend a lot of time trashing T4 — I've already done that plenty, and it only makes me feel depressed. Instead, here are some reasons why I miss Sarah Connor Chronicles more than ever, after watching Terminator Salvation.

First of all, I missed Sarah Connor Chronicles' smart portrayal of artificial intelligence, and whether a machine that passes the Turing Test is actually human, or something different. The basic premise of Terminator, after all, is that Skynet has to create robots that can pass for human, so that they can infiltrate the Resistance and kill targets like Sarah and John Connor. But because the robots are sophisticated enough to pass for human, they're also capable of learning and taking on some human characteristics — and Terminator 2 delves into this, as John Connor changes the T-800's chip from read-only to writeable, so the T-800 can start learning to be "less of a dork."

In Sarah Connor Chronicles, we drill down into this idea a lot more deeply, as Summer Glau's Terminator, Cameron, tries to learn to imitate a human as John Connor's bodyguard — and becomes a bit of a seductress, experimenting with nail polish and kicky leopard-print tops... and even trying to seduce John Connor on a couple occasions. The scene in the final episode, where she gets John Connor to lay on top of her, so he can help her open up her insides and do a self-test, is incredibly creepy and sexual and mindblowing. And then there's John Henry, the baby A.I. that's learning by leaps and bounds, becoming obsessed with Bionicles action figures and then learning to play Dungeons and Dragons. In the season finale, John Henry escapes to the future, after Skynet apparently tries to destroy him. I would have loved to see the childlike John Henry wandering around the post-apocalyptic landscape, surveying his "brother's" handiwork and taking in all the scope of human suffering for the first time.

Even more than asking if a robot could be human, or if a person with metal parts could still be human, Sarah Connor Chronicles had the guts to ask other questions, like whether machines that could pass for human might still have their own type of intelligence. Their own kinds of emotions, and even their own kinds of secrets.

I also miss Sarah Connor's take on the future apocalypse. It's a war, but it's also an organized atrocity and a descent into hell. The show didn't have the budget to show us endless scenes of people blowing up machines, so instead it creeped us out with tons of images of torture and weirdness, including the house where everyone was dragged, one by one, into the basement with the weird piano music. Or the weird tortures Charlie Fischer imposed on Derek Reese, or the torments that Cameron committed against the human she was based on, Alison from Palmdale.

Whenever we meet someone from the future, they always seem haunted — almost literally — by horrendous spectres. I just rewatched "Ourselves Alone," the final episode featuring Riley, the girl from the future, and there's a great bit where she picks up a tube of floor-bleach and stares at its warning label: "Deadly To Humans And Animals," and you can just tell she's thinking about mass-produced horrors and things that we've built but which then turn out to kill us. Most of all, Brian Austin Green is just haunting to watch as Derek Reese, John Connor's uncle from the future. He puts so much into every line of dialog, and every random facial expression, that he's like a big-budget splodefest by himself.

Which brings me to the third thing I really miss about Sarah Connor Chronicles: the performances. I came away from Terminator Salvation with a renewed appreciation for the deep characterization that T:SCC served up every week. Besides Green, Summer Glau and Garret Dillahunt managed to bring an amazing range of expression to their robotic characters, without ever becoming too human or leaving behind the original Schwarzenegger impassiveness. Lena Headey was utterly compulsive as the "is she really crazy," hard-assed, sarcastic Sarah Connor — rewatch her scenes when she's in jail and the FBI agent is baiting her, from the season finale: she's just totally in control of herself, and yet at the same time not at all in control of herself. She doesn't give the predatory FBI agent the slightest opening, even as she's revealing all sorts of flashes of vulnerability and humor and doubt to us, the viewers. Even Thomas Dekker's John Connor, who took a long time to grow on me, was selling me on his future-resistance-leader persona by the end.

These were real, complicated, messed up people, making mistakes but also being brave and generous, in the face of the probably inevitable end of the world. You couldn't help but root for them.

And then the last thing I find myself missing a lot about Sarah Connor Chronicles is the complexity. The show kept the basic Skynet=evil premise, but added a million grey areas and crazy twists on top of that. You had the other faction of A.I.s, represented by Shirley Manson's Catherine Weaver, who seemed to be at odds with Skynet, or at least to have their own agenda. You had the whole quesion of whether the future version of John Connor has become too dependent on machines to do his fighting for him, and whether he's been compromised as a result. (Or whether Connor is really even Connor any more.) You also had the constant question of how far our heroes will go to win — will they kill other humans? Will they betray people? How machine-like will the resistance against the machines become?

Terminator Salvation was never going to be as deep as the television series: that's just the nature of a movie. Movies get two hours, give or take, to pose a single scenario and play it out, with a definite ending. At the same time, Terminator 2 managed to take the premise of the first movie and expand it outwards, like an aerial camera panning back, to show us the bigger picture. It took us inside the head of the Terminator and also explained more about how Skynet came about and why it ends everything. And it got a lot deeper into the character of Sarah Connor and her relationship with her son. So it's definitely possible for a two-hour-ish movie to go to some interesting places.

Of the Terminator iterations that have come about since T2, only Sarah Connor Chronicles picked up the metal robotic gauntlet that T2 threw down, and ran with it. Only the television show justified its existence as a followup to that classic sequel, by taking its ideas further and delving deeper into its world. If, as seems pretty likely, the Terminator franchise goes back into deep freeze for a long time until we get some new remake or reboot a dozen years from now, the only thing I'll miss is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

So in case you've been living in a bunker, waiting for the nuclear bombardment to begin, the Terminator franchise is about a super-computer named Skynet, which decides to eliminate the threat of humanity with yummy, cleansing nuclear fire. But a few humans survive, and they fight back against Skynet's robotic rule over the planet. The humans' leader is John Connor, a badass resistance fighter. Skynet discovers time travel and sends robots back in time to kill John Connor's mother, Sarah, before he can be born, and later to kill the young John Connor. But Skynet's time-traveling robots always fail, and John Connor lives to fight the robots in the future. Okay? Okay. Also, the person who gets sent back in time to protect the young Sarah Connor is Kyle Reese, who becomes John Connor's father.

To get ramped up for Terminator Salvation, you can read all about the making of the film. You can look at some fantastic concept art here and here and here. And you can read about the construction of the Hydrobots, the underwater Terminators. You can watch some clips. You can even read a synopsis.

But if you really want to go deeper into the whys — and more importantly, the whens — of the Terminator universe, you can read our obsessive-compulsive effort to catalog every timeline in the movies and the television show. Every time someone travels through time, you get a different version of reality. (And the future in Terminator Salvation is the product of many, many trips through time, as John Connor says in the trailers: "This isn't the future my mother warned me about." Too bad that scene doesn't appear in the movie.) If our own timeline catalog wasn't OCD enough, you can also admire one fan's all-consuming whiteboard.

You can also read my essay about why this is the best year to be a Terminator fanatic, back when Terminator: The Sarah connor Chronicles was still on the air and I was still pumped for Terminator Salvation. Ah, those giddy, innocent days back in April.

And then you can read our review of Terminator Salvation, which talks about how it all goes south.

So after you see Terminator Salvation, you may wonder what the heck happened to make this movie such a mess. Our past coverage provides some clues: for one thing, Christian Bale explains that John Connor only had a small role in the film, until he put his foot down — and you can see in the film how Connor's storyline doesn't really warrant quite so much screen time. Moon Bloodgood talks about a key scene between herself and star Sam Worthington, which had to be hacked up because she showed her breasts in it. (You can tell — it's raining, and then suddenly, it's not.) The whole film leads up to a dark, super-weird ending, which McG explains here — and which had to be scrapped after it was leaked online.

And then, once you're fully briefed on Terminator Salvation, you can look back and read up on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the show that brought a level of psychological intensity and thought-provoking storytelling to the franchise that we'll probably never see again. Here's our complete primer on the show, written before the final episode but still pretty helpful. Want to know more about the philosophy behind the show? We interviewed creator Josh Friedman twice, here and here. And here's our chat with Shirley Manson and Summer Glau about playing killer robots, from Wondercon.

Terminator Salvation clearly thinks it has a story to tell: It lays the groundwork for that story, with some arresting visuals and scene-setting. At the end of Terminator 3, Skynet launched its nuclear strike on the human race, and the aftermath is gray and washed out looking, with the wreckage of civilization all around. Skynet's machines are everywhere: in the air, in the water, and on every kind of terrain. McG has an eye for cool visual details, and it serves him well here. For example, the film both begins and ends with close-ups of intravenous tubes pumping liquid into star Sam Worthington, signaling that Worthington's body is becoming the battleground for the battle to redeem humanity as a whole.

It's over this post-apocalyptic wasteland that Connor's voice rings out, delivering those inspirational speeches you've heard in the trailers. Connor speaks to the last survivors of humanity over the radio, providing concrete robot-fighting advice, but also uplifting talk about the future. In turn, John listens to amazingly well-preserved audio cassettes of his mom, Sarah Connor, telling him about his destiny from beyond the grave. Stories, the movie seems to be saying, are how we survive.

And if you think about it, stories are the crucial element in Skynet's constant efforts to impersonate humans. "I'm a friend of Sarah Connor's." "It's your foster-mom." Etc. This time around, Marcus Wright (Worthington) is the main cyborg figure in the movie, and his story is also the most elaborate: He was executed in 2003, and suddenly woke up in 2018, naked except for some strategically placed mud. Marcus has to figure out who he is, and along the way, he becomes a crucial ally for John Connor in his battle to save Kyle Reese, so Reese can travel back in time and become Connor's dad.

So far, so good. But then, it all falls apart. I've seen very few movies that fail at the basic mechanics of telling a story quite as badly as this one does. The movie feels so jerky and disconnected, it seems to be making a case for determinism. That is, stuff happens because it's supposed to happen, not because anybody makes any choices. It's odd for a franchise whose motto is "No fate but what we make" to create a movie that feels so predetermined. Apart from a few blindingly amazing action sequences (mostly in the first half), the film feels like a choppy mess. In the preview showing I went to, a bunch of people started laughing during the serious parts towards the end.

I went into Terminator Salvation with high hopes: I'd bought into McG's grand statements about his film's ambitious themes of what it meant to be human. I was pumped for a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, and a gritty war movie. I liked the ashen deathscape he'd managed to create out of a stretch of New Mexico, and the fact that he was using practical effects and real killer machines as much as possible. I actually thought it might give Star Trek a run for its money. And because I went into it with high hopes, I wound up being more disappointed than I was, say, by Wolverine or Dragonball.

So to some extent my goal, in this review, is to lower your expectations. I probably won't be able to talk too many people out of seeing this movie, but I can prepare you for suckitude, so you won't suffer the same crushing disappointment I did. In a way, I'm the opposite of DJ John Connor: he gets on the airwaves to tell people they can do it, and humans will one day triumph against overwhelming odds. I'm here to tell you it's hopeless, and prepare you for the worst. If you go into this film with low expectations, you'll probably enjoy it somewhat.

The frustrating thing about Terminator Salvation is, it wants to ask some huge questions, but it loses its voice. The story of Marcus Wright, in particular, is bursting with potential: He's a convicted murderer, who believes he deserves to die. And then suddenly he's reawoken in a trashed landscape, where he's one of the last people alive - and he's become superhuman. He wants to believe in his own humanity, but runs into more and more evidence that he's mostly a machine now. He's not quite a Terminator, because he has free will. But he's not quite a free human, either, because his upgrade comes with strings attached.

Unfortunately, we never pause long enough to consider Marcus' situation in any meaningful way. In fact, every time one of the characters has a conversation with another character, it feels as though it's taking place in shorthand, and the film is just trying to maneuver us past a plot point as fast as possible. Seriously, the people in this movie all act as though they've undergone severe head trauma a few times too many. Christian Bale, as John Connor, seems to be trying to imitate Timmy from South Park - he runs around, bellowing his own name at the top of his lungs, in almost every scene. "John Connor! JOHN CONNOR!!" I half-expected him to become the front man in a terrible punk band.

In the drastic post-holocaust future, we can't afford verbs. Or nouns, really. Take the scene where John Connor goes to the Resistance HQ. In the IDW comics adaptation, it's actually kind of a cool scene that tells us a lot about Connor and moves the plot forward:

And then here's that same scene in the actual movie:

Actually, I think there's slightly more to that scene, on screen, than in the above clip. John Connor says, "What did we find down there?" and Ironsides says "We won't tell you." And Connor says "My men died for that information. Tell me!" And Ironsides says, "Okay, we'll tell you." In any case, my jaw dropped when I watched that scene in the movie - I've literally never seen a movie where the comic-book adaptation felt more fully realized and fleshed out. Usually, the comic book is like the Cliffs Notes version of the movie, but this almost felt like the other way around.

I apologize if that sounds nitpicky, but literally every moment in the film where two people have a conversation is the same way. Like we're seeing the shorthand version of a conversation. Later on, the Resistance captures Marcus Wright and realizes he's a cyborg. Then Blair (Moon Bloodgood) helps Marcus escape, but she gets caught. John Connor visits Blair in her cell and they have a conversation that goes like: "Why?" "Because." "Okay." I'm dying to see the DVD version of this movie, to see what ended up on the cutting-room floor: it's entirely possible that the dialogue all feels choppy because it got chopped up. The whole film feels like that. Like, for example, this crucial scene between Connor and the Resistance brass later in the film:


I've watched that scene a few times now, including in context, and I still have no clue what Connor is saying. "It's his fate." "No, it's OUR fate! JOHN CONNOR!!!!" This is really the first movie I've ever seen Bale in where he seemed so clearly bored and annoyed.

So at this point, you're probably rolling your eyes and saying: So it has weak dialogue and all of that talk about deep philosophical questions was just McG's come-on. So what? It's a summer action movie! Stuff blows up, right?

And yes, it's true. Stuff does blow up. As I mentioned, there are a couple of real stand-out action sequences early on, and some fun stuff later on. In fact, the action sequences are pleasingly free of jump-cuts. You have one sequence, where John Connor climbs out of an underground base just as it blows up, then he gets in a helicopter, and the helicopter gets smashed, and he crashes it upside down, which is all one continous take. And it's a really nice-looking sequence. The action towards the end of the movie is less impressive, but there are still some nice bits. As a pure action film, it's... okay.

The main problem with Terminator Salvation, as an action film, is that it's kind of lacking in urgency. You never really feel like the characters are in that much danger. Sure, there are a bunch of these nasty robots around, but they're mostly allergic to a bit of pluck. (Connor even explains early on that the primitive T-600 robots have a weak spot in the back of their neck, that you can jam a knife or something into.) The action sequences are infinitely more real-feeling than Transformers, but they have the same kind of theme-park attitude.

Sometimes, turning on a boombox is enough to attract the attention of all Skynet's minions; at others, though, you can light a big bonfire and Skynet won't see it. As Gizmodo pointed out, Skynet HQ all seems to be optimized for humans to use, including touchpads. And Skynet only seems to have a couple of Terminators to guard its entire HQ, although we see a whole bunch of them being put together in the Terminator factory. Seriously, you can see in this clip that Skynet HQ is weirdly deserted, and there's just one kind of sad Terminator to chase Connor and friends around. Skynet spent all its money on touchpads.

That's the other thing: The movie's ending is all kinds of underwhelming. John Connor and Marcus Wright finally converge at Skynet HQ, where Marcus gets treated to heaping plateloads of exposition, akin to the Neo-meets-Colonel-Sanders scene in Matrix Reloaded. It all collapses under the weight of its own self-importance.

For all that, though, you have to give Terminator Salvation some credit for being an ambitious failure, and at least it's still better than Wolverine, which came out a few weeks ago. Here's the difference between Terminator Salvation and Wolverine: If you don't understand any English at all, and you see Terminator Salvation without any subtitles, you'll think it's a pretty good movie. But even if you didn't understand a word they were saying in Wolverine, you'd probably still think it was idiotic.

That's really the frustrating thing. There's a good, maybe even great, movie here, and you catch glimpses of it from time to time. Maybe it'll be on the DVD, maybe it won't ever exist.

And maybe what I'm seeing as a failure of storytelling is actually a commentary on the nature of life in an A.I.-dominated world. Maybe everything in John Connor's bleak future is actually masterminded by Skynet, even down to the tense conversations among the humans. In any case, even with all of the film's shortcomings, I found myself wanting to spend more time in its horrific wasteland. Maybe if McG manages to take better control over the film's narrative mechanisms, Terminator 5 will deliver on this film's lost promise.

Terminator Salvation:

The film includes four separate sequences featuring characters out in a heavy rain, with fires burning around them, in a drama-inducing technique known as "fire and rain." When we first meet Moon Bloodgood's pilot character, she takes off her helmet to reveal three feet of flowing black hair, in a slow-mo sequence. [Film.com]

John Connor doesn't really have a defining moment in the film, and doesn't actually prove himself worthy to be leader of the Resistance. He starts the film as an angry guy who wants to lead the Resistance, and ends it the same way. [Hitfix]

McG says there's a moment that explains how Kyle Reese learns to put a strap on his shotgun so you can't take it away from him easily. And a moment where Marcus teaches Kyle that pain can be controlled. [Cinematical]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Michael Bay posted a new image of new Transformer Sideways... who looks sorta like a giant robot. [Michael Bay via IESB]

Surrogates:

Someone saw an early screening of this Blade Runner-esque film, and provided a review: In the future, people don't leave their homes - instead, they interact with the outside world through surrogates, better looking versions of themselves. Greer (Bruce Willis) is a detective whose surrogate looks 20 years younger than he does, and he uses it to investigate the murder of other surrogates. But then the unthinkable happens: someone kills a surrogate, and manages to liquefy the brain of the human operating it. And the victim is apparently someone close to the inventor of the surrogates (James Cromwell). Willis and his partner (Radha Mitchell) have to go investigate. The surrogates have amazing abilities and can leap and do stunts, not unlike Neo in the Matrix. During a huge chase scene, Greer's surrogate gets fried. So he has to go out in person for the first time in forever. Greer is looking for the BD gun, a weapon which fries surrogates and their operators. Clues are laid out early on as to the identity of the villain. Meanwhile, Greer is married to a woman (Rosamind Pike) who never unplugs from her surrogate and makes a living as a surrogate stylist - but their marriage is on the rocks, and he desperately tries to salvage it. And Ving Rhames plays The Prophet, leader of an anti-surrogate movement. [Latino Review]

Green Lantern:

Sol Romero, wife of director Martin Campbell, believes she'll have a role in this movie. And it sounds like Hal Jordan's daddy issues, which cause him to try and outdo his father and become a jet pilot, will loom large in the movie version. [Sci Fi Wire]

New Moon:

A few new plot details about the second Twilight movie. Apparently it'll differ quite a bit from the book version in a few particulars. Bella will take more of a "daredevil approach," tempting fate in order to force the absent Edward to appear. And instead of being a disembodied voice, when Edward does appear to Bella, he'll be a visible presence, like Obi-Wan. (Robert Pattinson says he'd rather just be a voice, so it has more impact when he shows up at the end.) And there's an action scene where Laurent fights back against the werewolves who destroy him in the book. Finally, in the book, Edward tells Bella he'll turn her into a vampire only if they get married. But in the movie, he issues a different ultimatum. [Perez Hilton]

Fringe:

So how does the shock ending of season one lead into season two? Roberto Orci explains:

You have a gigantic clue to what has been a potential organizing principle or source of the Pattern and what these weird events are. In some way, two worlds are colliding, so that sets up the potential for a wonderful exploration of how these things interact, who William Bell is, is he good or bad, and is Nina [Blair Brown] friend or foe? You are going to see the Fringe division come under more intense scrutiny and therefore have to operate more clandestinely. You are going to see Peter become more engaged as he discovers some of the things the audience has found out.

Also, we'll be dealing with what Walter did to Olivia "geologically... in the near future," says Alex Kurtzman. (No, I have no clue what that means either.) And Walter will slowly regain his memory, with setbacks. Also, the Observer's role will be explored more, without giving everything away. [Sci Fi Wire]

Also, here's a new casting call. Could this be Charlie's replacement?

KATHERINE: MID TO LATE TWENTIES. FBI AGENT SHE IS ATTRACTIVE, BRASH, OUTSPOKEN,QUICK-WITTED AND CAPABLE. CATHERINE HAS A STRONG PERSONAL CENTER THAT COMES FROM A DEEP CORE BELIEF IN THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE. (RECURRING WITH POSSIBLE OPTION FOR SR) PLEASE SUBMIT ALL ETHNICITIES

[SpoilerTV ]

Chuck:

So how exactly will the budget cuts affect this show's format? Some episodes, Chuck's mission may be such that we don't get to visit the Buy More at all, says producer Josh Schwartz. But Anna (Julia Ling) will definitely be back, and so hopefully will the rest of the ensemble cast. The good news is, Chuck, Sarah and Casey will still appear in every episode. Schwartz hasn't yet worked out the details of the Subway product placement (which he calls the "Subway integration") but it will be significant, and may be something like Sarah working at a Subway. The new season will definitely deal with the ramifications of the end of season two, but fear not - Chuck will still be an Everyman/accidental hero. And Chuck having the Intersect in his head will definitely complicate the Chuck/Sarah relationship. [EW]

Heroes:

We may already have mentioned this, but the show is seeking a 12-15 year old Japanese boy to play Young Hiro. (So Hiro's time travel will once again involve meeting himself as a child. Oh yay.) [SpoilerTV]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Terminator Salvation:

Another day, another review of this film. So Serena Kogan (Helen Bonham Carter) is the last face Marcus sees as he dies. John hears that his dad, Kyle Reese, has been captured and is en route to Skynet HQ, and realizes he must save Kyle — but without telling Kyle that John is his son. At one point, John looks at Marcus and asks, "Who are you?" And Marcus replies, "I'm the only hope you have." [Los Angeles Times]

Meanwhile, McG says that even though this film doesn't talk about the fact that Kate Connor is pregnant, it's a plot point that will be explored in Terminators 5 and 6 (if any.) The fate of that child will become a super important plot strand. Also in the fifth movie, McG wants to explore the coming of time travel, the genesis of Marcus, and the fate of John Connor — including the mooted trip back to a pre-Judgment Day era. [MTV]

And here are a couple more short clips, showing Connor's squad attacking a Skynet holding facility where the first experiments to create the T-800 are taking place, and Marcus' first clue that he might not be all human. [MTV]

G.I. Joe:

Marlon Wayons says that his character, Ripcord, has a romantic interest: "Scarlett" O'Hara (Rachel Nichols). [Black Voices]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Actor Tony Todd (who played the CIA director in Chuck and a dictator in 24, will be voicing at least one of the Transformers in this film. [TLAMB]

Michael Bay posted a few new set pics, which aren't that exciting but do show off the military hardware, the Middle-East setting, and Shia LaBoeuf. [MichaelBay via IESB]

Dollhouse:

"Now we really get to have some fun," Eliza Dushku says of season two. Also, it sounds like she does have a significant role in the unaired episode, "Epitaph One," even though it supposedly features a totally different cast. So how will Echo be different in season two? She'll be more self-aware from the get-go, says Dushku:

It will give the audience a chance to connect with Echo more, because she's not just that blank slate. There's something behind her eyes creeping out. That's the center of the show - can you really erase someone's identity? The answer seems to be no.

[TV Guide]

Lost:

More speculation than spoilers, I guess: EW's Doc Jensen has a theory that everyone whom Jacob touched during his journey through Lostory will remember the "original" timeline after the timeline is changed by the hydrogen bomb going off. Which means Sawyer, Jin, Jack, Kate, Locke and Hurley will remember, but for everyone else, the original timeline was "always" the new version. He guesses there'll be a scene where Sawyer visits Juliet, pre-Island, and realizes she doesn't remember their time together. Cue hankies. [EW]

Michael Emerson doesn't think Ben will change much in the final season — but he's not sure how much longer Ben will survive, given that people are going to start dying more. [Onion AV Club via DocArzt]

Green Lantern: First Flight:

Who does Juliet Landau (Drusilla from Buffy and Angel) play in this new animated DVD? According to Warner Bros., "Landau offers a Cajun-style vocal performance for Labella, a mistress of the seedier side of the universe in which the Green Lantern Corps patrol." A Cajun alien? Okay. And in these stills, she tries to dissuade Sinestro from pursuing additional, potentially deadly interrogation. And she fears the power of the purple sphere, and what Sinestro aims to do with it. [Warner Bros.]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Terminator Salvation:

A few more early reviews are out, including some details. When Serena Kogan visits Marcus Wright on death row, she's wearing a head scarf to cover her baldness. She wants to turn Marcus into a cyborg, and he agrees in exchange for a kiss. "So that's what death tastes like," he says, which is not what I'd want to hear after kissing someone.

Kate Connor's pregnancy is not even mentioned in the film, even though she's visibly pregnant. Her interactions with her husband are boiled down to just a couple of scenes where she tells him to be careful.

Kyle Reese serves up a delicacy, two-day-old coyote. ("Better than three-day-old coyote," he quips.) Everybody wears snazzy camo pants and vests. Somehow a giant Harvester robot manages to sneak up on a group of people in a gas station despite the fact that it moves slowly and thunderously. Also, the bleak original ending was replaced with a "milquetoast crowd pleaser."
[Emmanuel Levy and Newsarama and BoxOffice.com]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Here are a couple new images. (More at the link.) [Cinematical]

Gamer:

Allison Lohman explains her character in this film:

I play Trace. She's part of the resistance. I try to get Gerard Butler back to his family. It's this dystopian future where humans are playing humans on a global scale through video games.

And she says the evil future is "debaucherous" and the film is more serious than the Crank films, from the same directors. [Sci Fi Wire]

Land Of The Lost:

A couple new TV spots. (Not 100 percent sure about the second one, but I think there's some new stuff in there.)

Also, Anna Friel says her character isn't just the standard wimpy movie chick: she's strong and ballsy and a Cambridge graduate. Friel is already signed up for the sequel. [Sci Fi Wire]

Spider-Man 4:

The fourth picture will delve into Peter Parker as a human being more deeply than the first three. It'll bring the character to life with a level of detail you haven't seen before, says Sam Raimi. [Sci Fi Wire and L.A. Times]

Planet 51:

Justin Long says he plays an alien who's the Henry Thomas character in this reverse version of E.T.: He takes in Dwayne Johnson's astronaut, who visits his planet. [Sci Fi Wire]

Thor:

Here's the casting call for the ultra-important supporting character, Volstagg:

Male. Early to mid 30s. 6'2" or taller. Obese but agile, fun, good-hearted, a warrior but prefers eating over fighting...SUPPORTING; OPEN TO ALL ETHNICITIES.

[Movies-Spoilers]

Lost:

Elizabeth Mitchell will be a regular on the V reboot, so don't expect Juliet to be a regular on Lost as well. However, she will be in an unspecified number of Lost episodes next year, so it's possible she really did survive the bomb going off in her face. [EW]

Human Target:

Just how vapid will this comic-book adaptation be? Behold four new clips. [Target419.com]

And here are some promo pics. Shiny! [SpoilerTV]

Additional research by Alasdair Wilkins.

Worthington plays Marcus Wright, a mysterious character who gets executed in the 1990s and then wakes up — naked — in the scary warzone of 2018. And yes, if you've seen the recent trailers and clips that have been released, you'll already know that Wright, himself, is an experimental cyborg. We asked him about playing a half-man, half-machine, all-badass character.

What was the toughest thing filming for Terminator

Because it is so physical and it is action orientated, I think the toughest thing is trying to find a sense of grit and gravity and weight in your performance, that actually isn't just kind of being overshadowed by all the explosions and the action. You've got to bring out — for want of a better word — the heart of this character. I think the hardest thing was making sure that I was on the right track and that it wasn't melodramatic.

Was there a lot of makeup or CG going on with your look?

It's been, depending on how un-repaired we were. Anywhere from four to six hours where they do the outline and then paint you blue so you look like a Cirque du Soleil Terminator. But that wasn't a hard one. You're sitting there for six hours. I would pity the poor guys doing it. They're the ones having to work for six hours. I just have to sit there, and they make you look good.

Are you worried Marcus [your character] won't be back for the next movie?

Well, we only made one movie, and we set out to make Terminator Salvation. You're not really thinking of five and six and seven and eight and nine, so you're just trying to make the best movie you can at that time.

Are you signed on for the next movie?

Me? No.

Do you think Marcus should, or could, come back?

Well, I've got an idea. I dunno. They don't know it yet. I'll tell McG during this junket. In my head, it's crazy, it's unbelievable. We'll figure it out. The good thing is we've got the luxury of time travel, which was introduced in the first and the second one, so who knows? It depends if people want Marcus to come back. That's the other thing.

How many different endings did you shoot?

We discussed about three or four, I think, depending on the day and what sat well with all the actors and the people involved, depending on which one we went with. But I know we discussed a hell of a lot of endings.

Have you met Arnold yet?

I haven't met him yet. Hopefully I'll meet him this week (at the junket).

What's your favorite Arnold movie?

Pumping Iron, I love. I think he's in top form in that isn't he? Lou Ferrigno fucking turns him up, doesn't he? Don't want to bring that up though, do I?

This is a very intense movie with lots physical stunts. Were you ever scared?

No. It's making movies, you just dive into the world. I'm pretty lucky, you do things that you don't normally get to do, like kiss beautiful women and jump off an exploding building. And you try to do as much as you can because that's part of the fun.

Were the action sequences in Terminator more organic than in Avatar?

They are more tangible on Terminator, you've got things blowing up around you. With motion capture, you try to get as much as you can but you're not going to get full-on explosions that fill the place with water. That sense of putting us in that gritty visual world helps the story along. You see us going through it so you think, "man these people are really in this war zone." Oh man they blow shit up all around us on Terminator, it's not hard to run faster. You get the hell out of there when things are gong bang, bang, bang.

Go see Worthington, the man who fears no robot, in Terminator Salvation on May 21st.

Terminator Salvation:

The first reviews of this film are in, including a few new spoilers. The movie references The Great Escape a few times. Marcus Wright's existential dilemma, after realizing he's a cyborg, comes fairly late in the movie, and so does his determination to "find out who did this to me." The only funny bits are the callbacks to earlier movies, like when people say "I'll be back" and "Come with me if you want to live." [Variety and Hollywood Reporter]

Also, G4 had an hour-long behind-the-scenes special on the making of this film, and here's the whole thing:

So what would happen in Terminator 5? According to McG, it would be "more of a Skynet story, more of a John Connor story," and look more into the genesis of Marcus Wright and the machine hardware. [Access Hollywood]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

The details about the movie's storyline which we ran the other day came from two junior novelizations. Now, the same source has read the grown-up (sort of) novelization, and has a new batch. The story starts with a giant robot startling a group of hunters who are chasing a big jungle cat — they worship it as a god, even after it tosses one of them around.

In the Shanghai confrontation, the ice cream truck has a bumper sticker that says "Decepticons suck my popsickle." Arcee and the Twins chase Sideswipe down an alley, but only Arcee catches up with him. Meanwhile, Optimus jumps out of a C-17 to tackle Demolishor, who warns "This is not your planet to rule — the Fallen is coming back!" with his dying breath.

NEST's headquarters is on Diego Garcia Island. Soundwave merges with a military satellite. Galloway, the NSA rep, asks Optimus if the Autobots would leave if requested — since the Decepticons seem to be attacking because of the Autobots' presence. Optimus says sure, but what if Galloway's wrong about the Decepticons' intent?

When Sam gets to college, his mom accidentally eats a brownie with "extra sugar" and gets high, after which hijinks ensue. Sam loses track of time at the frat party and stands up Mikaela on their first "webcam date." (Insert snarky comments here.) Meanwhile, The Fallen promises to make the resurrected Megatron a Prime once they succeed — and he says the Allspark can never be destroyed, only transformed, which is why it went into Sam's mind.

After Sam escapes the Decepticons, Soundwave calls Sam's mom, who's vacation in Paris, demanding to know where Sam is. Judy hangs up on Soundwave.

When Sam and friends get to Egypt, they're attacked by a Decepticon who becomes a WWI biplane. (Why?) And there are lots of weird clues to the location of the super-powerful Matrix, like "when Dawn alights the Dagger's Tip, three kings will lead the way."

During the final showdown, Skids gets sucked into "Devastator's open mouth," but then blasts out of Devastator's right eye. Skorponok wounds Jetfire really badly, but Jetfire manages to dispose of Skorponok. And then Jetfire sacrifices the last of his parts to help repair Optimus and enable him to fly. Also, Optimus tells Megatron that Primes are born, not made, and the Fallen lied when he promised to make Megatron a prime. "You were betrayed." So Megatron doesn't help the Fallen when Optimus wails on him.

And here's how the adult novelization ends:

Optimus Considered. "I know one thing. Whatever it may hold, it is a future we'll meet together. Our Planets, our races, united by a history long forgotten, yet to be discovered." Tilting back his head, he peered up at the sky and through it, to the stars beyond.

More grown-up details at the link. [TFW2005]

Also, toy spoilers! Here's our best look, so far, at Optimus and Jetfire combined, from the end of the movie. [Transformers Movie Chronicles]

Iron Man 3:

Faran Tahir once again expresses his desire to have his character from the first movie come back in the third, having evolved into Iron Man's arch-nemesis, the Mandarin. His fate, he stresses, was left up in the air. [Movies-Spoilers]

Doctor Who:

Not only is Billie Piper back for a cameo in David Tennant's final episodes, so is her on-screen mom, Camille Coduri. The two filmed a scene where they walk through the Powell Estate, and they're having a bit of an argument. Then they hug and make up. Jackie tells Rose happy new year and tries to tell her not to stay out all night. "Try and stop me," Rose replies. Then she comes around the corner and runs into the Doctor, who's staggering and convulsed with pain, clutching the wall. He asks her what year it is, and she says 2005. (So Rose hasn't actually met the Doctor yet.) He tells her he's sure she'll have a fantastic year. Then he has a startling confrontation with Ood Sigma, whom he also meets in this fall's "Waters Of Mars." The Daily Mail article also repeats the earlier, somewhat suspect, claim that Claire Bloom is playing "the Doctor's mother." (Some of the pics showing Tennant and Piper laughing are from between takes.) Some photos are by Katiespbrennan, StarshipTrooper and BilliePiperFan [Daily Mail and Planet Gallifrey]

Lost:

The Dharma Initiative's connection to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan will play a huge role in the show's sixth and final season, say the producers. [USA Today via SpoilersLost]

So is John Locke really dead? Yes, says actor Terry O'Quinn, who explains what he'll be doing in season six:

As for his character, O'Quinn says he's really gone. Locke's dead body was rolled out of a metal box toward the end of the two-hour episode, baffling islanders who had been following a Locke imposter. Exactly who is now occupying Locke's body wasn't revealed. O'Quinn said it would be "a good guess" to assume it's a man seen with the infamous Jacob in the beginning of the episode.

"I think, unfortunately, I think it's ended for Locke. But I'm still there, as far as I know," O'Quinn said. "I don't know how it's going to end for this other guy. I'm sad. I miss John Locke, poor guy. He was a pawn."

O'Quinn is gearing up to play a new character when the sixth season begins next year. As for the rest of the story line, he swears he has no idea.

"Your guess is honestly as good as mine is," he said. "There's going to be some confrontation that will somehow, I'm guessing, have to do with Jack or Locke or something like that. I think these guys are just setting up good and evil. It's the way Locke said in the very beginning of the show: One is light and one is dark. Two sides. I think that's what we've got."

[GoUpstate via SpoilersLost]

Smallville:

Is Davis Bloome really dead? All signs point to yes, says Sam Witwer. Although he makes a joke about them stuffing Davis' body in a closet to deal with later. Also, he says Alison Mack is aware that Chloe is the last character who needs to be disposed of to bring the show in line with the Superman mythos. [TV Guide]

Reaper:

If this show comes back in first-run syndication, Nina the demon won't be around full-time, but she will show up, says actor Jenny Wade. In tomorrow night's episode, she tries to help Sam break his deal with the Devil, but also hooks up Sock with one of her demon pals. And if Sam does succeed in getting out of his Satanic bargain, his relationship with Andi will play a huge role in what happens next. [Sci Fi Wire]

Terminator Salvation:

In the post-apocalyptic future, John Connor is viewed as both a prophet and a nuisance by the Resistance leaders. Dr. Serena Korgan (Helena Bonham Carter) actually works with Connor and helps him find a way to stop the machines. (She does?) But that all changes when his colleague Blair (Moon Bloodgood) finds Marcus Wright. Connor's change of heart towards the end of the movie (choosing to trust Marcus, I guess) feels kind of random. The movie's "final surprise villain" (Korgan again?) doesn't have much impact. But the "guerilla" camerawork is stunning, including great, sweeping long shots as our heroes duck and weave through debris and robots to reach a destination. [College Times]

Also, Sam Worthington doesn't sound very optimistic that Marcus Wright could come back in Terminator 5. He says anything's possible with time travel, but he's not signed on for another movie. [Sci Fi Wire]

John Connor has a big fight with a T-800. Also, Connor and Wright only have three scenes together, but they're intense, like two runaway freight trains colliding. Whoom! And here are a few new pics. (What is McG doing to poor Moon Bloodgood?) [Entertainment Weekly]

And here's a TV spot:

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Here's a TV spot, which I don't think we've shown you before.

Iron Man 2:

The cyborg superhero sequel was filming a scene at Edwards Airforce Base, and according to one source it involved Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a new combat drone he's testing out. (Because, I guess, Hammer is moving into the military hardware game now that Tony Stark has bailed out?) [Corona Coming Attractions]

Doctor Who:

We haven't had any batshit crazy Doctor Who rumors in a while, so here goes. Timothy Dalton, easily one of the half dozen best James Bonds, is set to star in one of David Tennant's final episodes as a villain. (And there was a rumor among fans a while back that Dalton would be playing the Master opposite new Doctor Matt Smith.) This is according to the Sun, easily one of the twenty or thirty most credible tabloids in England. [The Sun]

Not enough crazy rumors for you? Then how about this? The villains in Tennant's final two-parter will include the Sontarans, but also the Tractators - yes, the gravity-causing, human-mutilating villains last (and only) seen in 1984's "Frontios." Also, there's a rumor that the Master will be back, because the version of him that we saw die was actually a half-human clone, not unlike the half-human copy of the Doctor who got dumped in an alternate universe with Rose. Remember, you read it on the Internet, so it must be true. [Doctor Who Forum]

Lost:

So Elizabeth Mitchell will definitely be appearing in season six, but does that mean Juliet somehow survived? We'll have to wait nine months to find out... [E! Online]

Stargate Universe:

Web fan show The Jace Hall Show visited the set of this new TV series, and here's the result. Sorry about the annoying ad. [Gateworld]

Green Lantern: First Flight:

Director Lauren Montgomery says the new direct-to-DVD animated film won't focus too much on Hal's origin, because New Frontier already dealt with that. So it'll just be a brief scene at the start of the movie, and then we'll see Hal going off on his first adventure. And here are a bunch of pics from the DVD, including Sinestro (voiced by Sidney Bristow's dad, Victor Garber!). [Warner Bros.]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Oh, and there are spoilers in this write-up, although I'll try to keep them as vague as possible.

As with Watchmen, Titan Books has put out a couple of coffee-table books connected with Terminator Salvation. There's the "Art Of" book I just mentioned, plus Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion. Both books give you a sense of just how deep the people involved in this movie went in trying to imagine a horrific robot-dominated future for us. Plus, if you're the sort of person who actually owns a coffee table, these books will look cool on it.

(Digression: I'm now trying to imagine someone who owns a coffee table and has people over for fancy dinner parties, and who loves the Terminator movies and bitchin skeletons on fire. I can actually picture it: You could make a decent case, as you swirl the sherry around your mouth and chew bits of stilton on pears, that some of these paintings of future desolation and anti-robot warfare really are art that belongs on the same nice Ikea table as your giant-size book of Hogarth woodcuts. For one thing, they're a lot more relevant to the technological era we live in, and they present a vision of the future that we should pay heed to. Okay, I'm convinced — pass the sherry.)

So yes, as seems to be par for the course, Terminator Salvation has spawned art that's easily as memorable and eye-catching as anything you'll see on screen, and looking through the film's storyboards and concept art puts me in mind of a really intense European graphic novel.

The Art Of Terminator Salvation, in particular, showcases just how brilliant Martin Laing's concept art is and how sweeping the movie's visuals are going to be. It makes a strong case that Terminator 4 will be a horror movie as well as a war movie, thanks to all of the weird experiments Skynet is doing on the last survivors of humanity. At least, if all of the imagery from the book makes it into the film, you'll be seeing lots of images of half-starved humans who are carved up and turned into miserable cyborgs, with weird metallic pieces sticking into their flesh.

Martin Laing first blew our minds with his incredible design work on the vastly underrated subterranean adventure City Of Ember. He created an entire city that felt like a lived-in place, with a real history that stretched back centuries, and a believable geography. And then he created some great set pieces, including the ending where the hydo-power station starts to blow up as the river leading out of Ember is revealed. But his work for Terminator Salvation is even more impressive, maybe because the film had a huge budget to play with.

Here are a few of our favorite images, out of the hundreds of gorgeous pics in the book:

You get some amazing, kinetic storyboards, like the helicopter-on-Terminator assault we showcased a while back. You can see how Laing and company created actual blueprints for the different models of the Terminators in the film, to deliver to Stan Winston studios, which created "puppet" Terminators for some sequences. We see how the nice, shiny T-1 from Terminator 3 got dirtied up and turned into a grey, dingy killing machine for the new movie. The T-600s look more disturbing and inhuman every time I see them, and this book has some incredible images of them. The Aerostats are like huge evil flying spiders, searching for humans to harvest. And then there are the Hunter-Killers, which have never looked so dark, massive or predatory.

And the good news is, Terminator Salvation appears to have some pretty striking action sequences that we haven't already seen a million times in the trailers. In particular, if the film manages to pull off a bit involving Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) and a falling jet engine, then I'll be astounded. There are some great images of soldiers rappelling down into Skynet's underground facility in the movie's first big action sequence. There's John Connor descending into the Resistance's undersea base. And then there's the ruins of San Francisco, a flaming slag heap where Skynet has set up its base, which we see in an incredibly panoramic painting.

There are definitely a few ideas that we're glad didn't make it onto screen. For example, at one point, the designers thought that since Eddie Furlong wears tiger stripes in Terminator 2, Christian Bale's version of John Connor should have a tiger-stripe motif on his pants. (As if John Connor wakes up in the middle of a post-apocalyptic landscape and thinks, "I have to lead humanity to victory over the machines. But first, I must find several yards of tiger-print fabric to make my new uniform!") And then there's the original design for the moto-Terminators, which our sister site Gizmodo already mocked:

And if you like religious art, there are tons of intense paintings, drawings and photos of Sam Worthington in a crucified pose. Apparently he spends the whole movie being crucified in one way or another, and the designers admit they didn't see quite how blatant the symbolism is until afterwards. (Don't they realize there's only one character in the film whose initials are J.C.?) More than any other Terminator movie, this film deals with what it means to be part machine and part human, and it ventures into extreme body horror in the process.

All in all, The Art Of Terminator Salvation is a book you could easily spend hours poring over — it'll whet your anticipation for the film, and it'll probably be awesome to look through after you've already seen it, to see some of those stark, violent, disturbing images in a new light. It's an art book you can actually show to your friends.

I would say the Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion is maybe a bit less essential than the art book, just because it's a little less heavy on the gorgeous art. There's a lot more of the film's actors and McG talking about their ideas for the film, which you've probably already read plenty of. But there are still some amazing images, like close-up stills of a man's boot stepping on a human skull, and tons and tons of set pics of Christian Bale going through post-apocalyptic Hell in slow motion. He is constantly in agony and/or setting his jaw with determination. There are more storyboards and concept art, some of which are also in the art book. But there are also some fantastic "making of" pics, showing the explosions and robotic dogfights coming together. And lots and lots of shots of Terminator skulls and skeletons being mass-produced for the film's robot-heavy Skynet sequences.

Here are a handful of the images we love the most in this book, which is jam-packed with equally great ones.

The Official Movie Companion also includes a lot more about the movie's creative process generally, including all of the rewrites the script went through and how McG conceptualized the film as a war movie. And what the word "Salvation" in the film's title means to McG. (Surprise: it's Biblical.) There's also a whole section on the scene where a Harvester attacks a 7-Eleven and then gets into a huge chase with a truck and Moto-Terminators, and you can see how wire work and practical effects merged with CG for the sequence. There are a lot of pretty amazing photos of explosions being filmed and actors (especially Worthington) being tossed around like confetti.

In the end, I'd say these books are possibly even more impressive than the similar books for Watchmen. The Watchmen books were all about translating a great work of graphic art to the screen, and they focused on capturing Dave Gibbons' vision and converting it into a new medium, which was no small achievement. But in these books, especially the art book, you get a real sense of how much creativity and imagination went into creating a whole new post-apocalyptic world, extrapolating a lot from the future glimpses we saw in the first three films. The end result is pretty thrilling, and worth reading through more than once, to appreciate the wholesale artistry of armageddon. Oh, and then you should totally paint some of these images on your van.

The Art Of Terminator Salvation and Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion at Amazon.

Terminator Salvation:

Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright) says he wanted to show a cyborg who felt pain, not just physically but also emotionally. And there was a scene in the script where he teaches Kyle Reese about rope and they bond over lame gags, and he thought it was crap, so he and Anton Yelchin reworked it. (But it's not clear which version of the scene made it into the final movie.) [Comic Book Resources]

Iron Man 2:

It's the Batman crossover you've been waiting for! At least, the new movie is casting a seasoned, experienced French detective, aged 40 to 60, who's upscale and sophisticated. Who could it be but Henri Ducard? [SpoilerTV-Movies]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Glenn Morshower played Col. Sharp, who died in the first movie. But Michael Bay wanted him to come back, so they wrote him in as a new character named — wait for it — General Morshower. [IGN]

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan:

Grace Park drops a few hints for this TV movie, which show's the series' events from the Cylon point of view. Apparently there will be a lot of scenes we've already seen, but we'll see them anew:

What we did was we took scenes that we already shot, that you're going to recognize, and then either add another angle, or add some dialogue. So if someone whispered something in someone's ear, which you never heard, we're actually adding that dialogue. So it's going to inform things on so many different levels. So it's tricky.

And it sounds like the movie only covers events in seasons one and two. We're going to see Boomer's beginnings, when she was still innocent and her heart was an open book. And we'll see a specific prop that's the mechanism to allow her to go into and out of sleeper-agent mode. [Sci Fi Wire]

Caprica:

Alessandra Torressani, who plays Zoe, says there will be a lot of flashback scenes of Zoe in the new episodes, but she'll also be "miming" as the cylon version of Zoe. (Sort of like motion capture? Hard to say.) So she'll be the "real" Zoe in flashbacks, the "Avatar" Zoe in the virtual world, and then the Cylon Zoe. And there will be multiple Zoes in the virtual nightclub, maybe including one with pink hair. [Sci Fi Wire]

V:

Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell and Alan "Alpha" Tudyk play Homeland Security agents investigating a terrorist sleeper cell in New York. Morris Chestnut is a businessman whose shady past plays into the aliens' arrival. Joel Gertsch is a priest who struggles with his faith in the wake of an alien encounter, and then he's thrust into a conspiracy when a dying man comes into his church and gives him info on the aliens. And Morena Baccarin is the leader of the aliens. The whole thing is played very seriously and shot in a very J.J. Abrams style. [AICN]

Flash Forward:

After everybody blacks out for two minutes and 17 seconds, and sees a glimpse of six months into the future, the pilot script includes a devastating scene showing the effects of this blackout on the L.A. freeway. Our FBI-agent heroes use the Internet to collect people's stories of what they saw during the event. But there's a bit of a cheat: one FBI agent, during the "flash forward," saw himself looking at an investigation board showing the leads that had panned out over the next six months. So he already knows what avenues of investigation to follow. And as you might have heard, John Cho's FBI agent character just sees blackness during the flash forward. The show struggles with the question of whether the future is set in stone, or malleable. [Airlock Alpha]

Smallville:

Chloe has the most traumatic end to a traumatic season, says producer Kelly Souders. "That character has really been put through the ringer this season and been torn and conflicted, and unfortunately those issues are not going to go away in the finale." Jimmy, meanwhile, shows off his heroic side in the finale. Oh, and more hints that a familiar face from the show's past is likely to return, and also show up during season nine. Maybe cousin Kara? In any case, Clark's decisions push him in a new direction, that will propel the show's umpteenth season. [TV Guide Magazine]

In tonight's season finale, Clark finally has to make decision whether to "shit or get off the pot." Or maybe he fakes everybody out and does both. [IGN]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.