EXCLUSIVE: WHAT WENT WRONG WITH TERMINATOR SALVATION?
This article, while about an alternate version of Terminator Salvation, does contain spoilers for the version in theaters now.
The
Terminator Salvation you saw on movie screens this weekend was not always the
Terminator Salvation that was meant to be. Like in the franchise itself, history has been changed, and the original script for
Terminator Salvation ended up getting gutted. You can still see the outlines of that script in the current film (a form of deja vu, as similar vestigial script elements can be seen in this summer's blockbuster hit
Star Trek), but the specifics that might have made
Terminator Salvation if not better at least more interesting are gone.
What caused these massive changes? And what were they? The biggest change came when McG flew to the UK to talk to Christian Bale about starring in the fourth
Terminator movie. The director wanted the Batman star to play Marcus Wright, the cyborg protagonist of the script. But Bale focused on another part: John Connor. The only problem is that John Connor had about three minutes of screen time in the entire film; most of Connor's moments were played offscreen. In the original script John Connor was the secretive leader of the Resistance. He lived on the HQ sub, and almost no one saw his face, so as to keep him hidden from the robots. Connor made radio addresses and existed as a legend for the fighting men and women of the Resistance, but in the original script Connor didn't show up onscreen until the last minutes of the movie.
You may remember in late 2007 when the rumor that Bale was signing on to
Terminator 4 surfaced there were two competing reports: while Aint It Cool had Bale tipped to play Connor, we had him tipped to play a Terminator. As you can see both are correct; for a little while people involved in the film were assuming that Bale was going to let go of the Connor idea and move over to the Marcus role, but he had something else up his sleeve: massive rewrites to beef up the John Connor role.
Watching
Terminator Salvation as it exists in theaters it's easy to see that this was a bad idea. The script that ended up getting shot never quite finds anything for John Connor to do. If you were to remove Connor from the film, relegating him once again to radio voice over, almost none of the film's plot would be changed. It's likely that the new Connor scenes were the work of Jonathan Nolan, who did do a lot of writing on the film, but who was denied credit by the WGA. The reason would be that all of the work Nolan did was cosmetic - adding Connor scenes that had no bearing on the film's structure or plot.
Bale's desire to star as John Connor was probably the most fatal blow to the film; it completely distorted the shape of the story as it existed. But the other fatal blow came from the internet. When the original ending of the script leaked - John Connor is killed by a Terminator and has his skin grafted onto Marcus Wright, who takes up the shadowy leader's place as the leader of the Resistance - many people went crazy. On the surface it seemed like a major slap in the face of the franchise, and doubly so on paper: John Connor, the guy who the entire franchise is ostensibly about, shows up for two and a half pages, gets killed and has his face transplanted onto a robot (in the original script it's actually just the face that gets slapped on Marcus).
There are differing reports as to how far that ending made it. McG has gone on the record again and again saying that was never the ending he wanted (he came on to the project after the script we're talking about here was written), but there's a lot of contrary evidence, including on-set reports that have 'Connor becomes robot' written on production calendars. The entire finished film itself feels like evidence that the original ending was always the intended ending. The movie seems to be inexorably building towards the 'Connor dies' finale, including elements like endless scenes featuring Sarah Connor's tapes, obviously intended to give Marcus/Connor a primer on John Connor's life and destiny. In fact, when John Connor got a pole through the chest I was excited - had McG been lying to us all along and kept the original ending?
Of course he wasn't. The film's biggest weakness comes in the final minutes, which feel almost completely slapped on, as the character we've been following makes a sudden and boring sacrifice. The air just explodes out of the movie as John Connor's rescue feels utterly unearned, and the ending of the movie is so final that you walk out of the theater not caring whether or not the future war is ever again revisited.
So what might have been? Before the Bale rewrites and before the internet kiboshed the original ending?
With John Connor relegated to the shadows for most of the film, the original
Terminator Salvation focused more on the relationship between Kyle and Marcus. Star was always there, and was essentially always just as useless, but without the constant cutaways to pointless Connor scenes the film was able to delve more into Kyle/Marcus. The script spent time examining what it was like living in a post-apocalyptic world, and was more definitively R-rated. At the gas station Marcus saves Kyle and Star from a group of cannibals, throwing one of them into an open fire (intended as a callback to the biker on the stove in
T2. It's important to note that the original script by extraordinary hacks Brancato and Ferris - the guys who wrote
The Net,
Catwoman and
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - is not some discarded gem. It's got plenty of problems of its own).
But again, with Connor out of the script the relationship between Kyle and Marcus gets to grow, which gives Marcus' later quest to rescue Kyle more weight. And the early scenes where Kyle can't drive are paid off in this script, first with a sequence where Marcus teaches him to drive and later, in the third act, where Kyle gets the final heroic beat he's missing in the finished film.
As in the final film Kyle and Star are captured by Skynet and transported to Skynet City, but with one major change: Skynet has no idea who Kyle Reese is. This is a point that bothers many viewers of the final film; I'm not radically concerned, as Kyle Reese's time traveling shenanigans are public record enough that it's believable Skynet would have found out about him while taking over the world's computer networks. But by having Skynet not know who Kyle is the original script removes the machines' idiotic plan to bring John Connor to Skynet City instead of simply killing his dad. This feels like the kind of change that was made to give John Connor more to do, since the whole sequence where Connor convinces the Resistance forces to step down doesn't occur in this script (and why would it? He's Michael Ironsides in this movie).
Marcus' adventures with Blair are slightly different. In the original script he saves Blair from a pack of rabid wolves as opposed to horny rapists. This scene was important because it gives Marcus his first awareness that he's much faster and stronger than he used to be, something he couldn't quite prove against humans in a PG-13 movie (although could you wreck a group of wolves in a PG-13 movie?). In the finished film Blair and Marcus have a tender moment; the original script takes things very, very differently: Blair offers Marcus a STAF. That's Sit Tight And Fuck, a phrase in common use in the Resistance. See, it's a horrible, miserable future and the humans of the time have gotten over their petty prudery. If the only joy they can get is fucking, why not take it? Life is cheap and they may not live to see the next night, so tap whatever ass you can.
The next big change comes when Marcus is captured by the Resistance. John Connor remains offscreen and he interrogates Marcus via com-link. But Connor is thinking like the John Connor who has become used to temporal assassination attempts, and he believes that Marcus has been sent from an even more advanced future to kill him. Meanwhile, we have more cutaways to Kyle Reese being transported to Skynet City; this script really forwards Reese in a way that the finished movie fails to do.
Marcus escapes the Resistance more or less as seen in the finished and heads to Skynet City. And it's here that the major changes really come into play.
In the original script the title
Terminator Salvation actually meant something. Watching the finished film it's hard to figure out why it has that name - is it because Marcus saves Connor's life in the last minute? In the original script Serena has a bigger role than a quick cameo, and she explains the salvation element.
Originally Posted by Atropos
