The adaptation of the Jules Verne novel has previously had both Bill Marsilii and Justin Marks aboard for scripting duties, and it looks like the project has now turned to a veteran of the action-epic genre for a little inspiration. The tone that the film is aiming for is an action-adventure, presumably in the vein of the Pirates movies. Wallace, who also wrote and directed the not-terrible The Man In The Iron Mask and We Were Soldiers, woul definitely bring a different pedigree to the screenplay, especially considering how Marks’ Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li turned out.

On the one hand, it’s interesting to see how the new title does suggest that the creative team is pushing for this to be a character-driven movie. I imagine Disney’s trying to reproduce the success they had with Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. It is a bit worrying though that they may be trying to take a template of what worked for one franchise and applying it to another. We’ll see what Wallace can bring to the table. Even though he hasn’t really knocked one out of the park since Braveheart, it’s at least a step in a more positive direction.

Check out the full Hollywood Reporter story here.

It’s hard to judge Terminator Salvation on its own merits, to not compare it to James Camerons’ now-canonical first two installments of the franchise he thought he had ended back in 1992. I enjoyed T3 despite its flaws, and was excited by the early footage for Terminator Salvation; but in reality, these are films that have no need to exist, films that seek to bring something new to the table when it’s already crowded by the mighty heft of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This doesn’t excuse T3 and T4 from criticism, mind you, but they bear the uneviable burden of being scrutinized against Cameron’s initial efforts. And when they make unpopular decisions, it’s far too easy to damn them for destroying a franchise and to curse them for ruining a legacy when really, we’re just griping because they didn’t make the movie we wanted to see, the one we had imagined for ourselves after Judgment Day back in 1992. It’s hard to live up to our own imaginations, so let me judge this film based not on how it compares to the first two Terminator films, but on how it performed as its own movie.

Terminator Salvation is a good movie. It’s not great. But it’s good. McG and his crew have crafted a richly desolate post-apocalyptic landscape and filled it with a believable imagining of what a human resistance against a near-absolute machine takeover would look like. The action set pieces are choreographed beautifully and the film has plenty of thrills for summer moviegoing audiences.

Our entry point into this film is Marcus Wright, played superbly by Sam Worthington, a natural star and an actor who’s sure to become a household name by this time next year. He gives us a sympathetic antihero to root for, an outsider to the film’s world, serving the same role Arnold did in T2 and, to a lesser extent, T3. The opening scene with him is a little flat, a little cheesy, but Worthington’s performance is convincing enough to carry us through it. He’s by far the most interesting character of the film, and this in turn sows a seed that proves to be one of the two main problems of the film. But more on that later.

Most of the other faces we meet are familiar, characters we’ve been introduced to before — Kate Connor, nee Brewster, wife to John Connor (played by an criminally underused Bryce Dallas Howard); Kyle Reese, future father of John Connor (played wonderfully by Anton Yelchin — I’m hoping his role is much expanded in T5); and of course John Connor himself. This movie really shot to the top of peoples’ radars when it was announced that Christian Bale had been cast as Connor, and so it’s surprising that Bale is in fact one of the weaker aspects of the film. It’s not that he gives a bad performance — his intensity, his despair, the weight of his burden and how haunted he is are all strongly conveyed. But it’s all so one-note. We don’t get very many sides of John Connor and that is one of the more disappointing elements of the film, and a product of the film’s second and biggest flaw — the lack of layers, the lack of drama.

The action, the battles, the effects work are all dazzling. But a lot of the drama is poorly crafted. For example, the second scene of the film has us following a Resistance strike force attacking a SkyNet base, but we’re dropped into the middle of the action without any setup or sense of the stakes involved. Instead, the film relies too heavily on the work done by the previous films, revealing John Connor in a kind of hero’s pose. We get the sense that this is supposed to be a grand moment, but a lot of that sentiment is lost because we’re not invested in this incarnation of Connor yet. That is the recurring problem of the film — it builds enough on the story and the characters so audiences know they’re supposed to care, but that attachment is entirely manufactured, based entirely on the fraudulent and unearned notion that if these characters do not succeed, the world — and indeed the future — is over. In turn, the emotional beats of the film suffer and fall just below the bounds of authenticity. We worry about the fate of the characters, but only kind of half-heartedly from a sense of obligation.

Which leads us back to our first problem. Marcus is a great character. Connor, though written somewhat poorly, is still also a great character. The movie, however, can’t decide which one of them is the main character. We struggle to fully invest in either of them because we don’t get to spend enough time with them. We’re never fully immersed in their struggle, always having to jump back from one to the other, disrupting the flow of the film and the development of each character. This seems to go along with reports that Marcus was originally intended as the main protagonist, but that Connor’s role was re-written and expanded once Bale signed on. I can’t blame everything on this identity crisis of sorts, but it’s a major problem of the film, and one I wish they could have sorted out during pre-production.

Still, the real problem is McG’s failure to convincingly build tension and develop some good old fashioned drama. I know I’m judging this film on its own merits, but that’s what Cameron got right and what McG didn’t — Cameron made us truly care about the characters, McG treats them more as emoting puppets. There’s a sense of impatience to the dramatic scenes, a hurried intensity that leaves them feeling rushed and empty. But despite being denied a true connection to the lead characters, the film is still just entertaining enough, just compelling enough, just richly-realized enough to keep us entertained and engaged. Its flaws, though problematic, aren’t enough to prevent the film from being good. It just came so close to being so much more that it’s frustrating it didn’t reach the apex of its potential. For now, we’ll have to be satisfied with T4, a perfectly acceptable — if somewhat unfulfilling — film.

Terminator Salvation is still a couple of weeks away from release, but with a fifth Terminator film being greenlit way back in December, director McG is already thinking about where we’ll be going next. He has previously hinted that the ending to Salvation will not be a tidy one, and may in fact divide fans, but now McG is giving us our first clues of where that ending will lead us as we segue into the next movie. The director caught up with Film Journal, and here’s what he had to say:

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

It looks like McG has some pretty cohesive ideas mapped out for this planned trilogy. There’s going to be a minefield of continuity issues he’ll have to look out for as he delves back into time travel, though, so he better have everything planned out to a tee. Hopefully Salvation will be as epic as it’s looked thus far and we can all look forward to McG’s next Terminator film, because boy would it be awkward for all parties involved if Salvation turns out to be a shitshow. I suspect it won’t though, so despite how close the original Terminator films are to my heart, I’m looking forward to how this new era of the universe develops.

Head on over to Film Journal for the rest of the interview, which actually has a lot more info on the upcoming flick, such as how it came to be, how McG approached its creation, and what we can expect when it hits theaters on May 21st.

Head on over to IGN for a bigger version. For those keeping count, only two more months until Terminator Salvation hits theaters!

Hamilton had said she was waiting to read the script before making a decision, and it looks like she liked what she read. Allegedly, she not only did the voice work, but it’s already been cut into the opening of the movie. This is fantastic news for Terminator fans, as hearing Hamilton’s voice narrating the opening sequence could serve as a wonderful bridge from the last Terminator film she and Cameron had a hand in (in which her voice over closed out the movie).

First, a couple new posters (click for larger versions):

So apparently Sam Worthington has moved up to second billing. Good for him. Also, Yahoo has a bunch of stills up, a few of which are posted below, but the rest you can catch here:

And finally, ET will be premiering the Terminator Salvation trailer that will be rolling out in front of Watchmen, but you can catch a sneak peek of it below. There’s some new footage, including a T-800 whooping butt, John Connor smooching Kate, and even a quick PG cut of what might be Moon Bloodgood’s topless rain scene that was at the center of McG’s WonderCon revelation regarding his on-going battle with the studio to keep the movie R-rated [via /film]:

Personally, I’m reaching my breaking point with Terminator Salvation footage. Pretty soon, I’m going to shut down from viewing all this marketing material, lest it all grow stale by the time the movie actually comes out on May 21, 2009.

The book’s publishers, as well as the THR article, are hyping this as a reinvention of the spy genre, calling it a mixture of Jason Bourne and John Le Carre (though THR saying it’ll have the “wittiness” of Le Carre is a statement that still puzzles me). Le Carre is the well-known author behind more complex and nuanced spy thrillers, such as the classic “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “The Constant Gardener” (both of which have well-received film versions). I’m not entirely sure how this can be dubbed a reinvention, at least in terms of the film. The Bourne franchise seemed to already cover some Le Carre-esque themes, but I guess this new franchise will dive even further into the ambiguities of the spy trade?

In either case, I like the talent involved enough not to bemoan the launch of yet another spy movie trying to ape the success of the Bourne franchise. Let’s see if all the pieces can come together on this one.

McG had hinted that one option for Hamilton’s return would be for her to do the opening voiceover for the film, and it looks like that’s the route they went. I’m all for her reprising her iconic turn as Connor, and I’ll bet fans of the series will get a pretty big kick out of it, too. How do you guys feel about it?

We heard yesterday that Justin Marks had been hired to be a “world builder” as he re-tooled McG’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea adaptation, and now Men In Black writer Ed Solomon has been tapped to adapt The Hardy Boys for Shawn Levy.

Bill Marsilii (Deja Vu) wrote the original draft for 20,000 Leagues, but there were some alleged major plot holes and heavy-handed plot devices (over-abuse of montages and voice-overs?) reported when his version made the rounds on the Internet a while back. Let’s see what Marks (geeks will know him as the scribe behind the upcoming Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li movie and currently-in-development Voltron and Masters of the Universe) will be able to bring to the mix.

The Hardy Boys will be a comic take on the crime-solving brothers, which still has Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise attached to star. The adaptation would revolve around “the reunion of the estranged, grown-up brothers, who work together to solve a new mystery.” Solomon’s next project to hit theaters will be Eddie Murphy’s family-comedy Imagine That. Hardy Boys has been in development for over a decade, with Mr. and Mrs. Smith scribe Simon Kinberg the last screenwriter to take a crack at it.

The photos highlight resistance members Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood), who is a battle-hardened soldier dealing with survivor’s guilt that brings Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) to the Resistance base; and Barnes (played by Common), who is another soldier and one of John Connor’s closest friends.

Check out two of the photos below, and click through to the Screenweek article to see the rest:

Always cool to see more photos of the cast revealed, but when are we gonna get a better look at some of the Terminators? And can we please stop calling this the “other big robot movie” next to Transformers 2? When done right, the Terminator series has always been about the people more than the robots.

IESB has got the scoop on one of Bill Marsilii’s drafts for the upcoming 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo, and from the sound of it, we can only hope it’s not the final draft. Apparently, the screenplay more or less butchers Jules Verne’s original story, and is cluttered with confusing plot elements and sloppy character development. However, the version IESB read was labeled as a second draft and dated on May 24, 2008. That’s a good amount of time before we heard anything about McG’s involvement, so hopefully his coming on board means the script has been improveed into something with potential. Otherwise, this could very quickly turn into the film that sunk McG’s burgeoning career.

In other news, Bloody-Disgusting caught up with Len Wiseman at the premiere of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which he produced. Wiseman, who’s adapting the very successful “Gears of War” video game franchise for the big screen, talked a bit about the adaptation:

It’s going to be much more [on the] science fiction side of it than the creature side of it. I’ve always been much more of a sci-fi action fan than a horror fan…The hope is that we’re wanting to do three movies and really cover the bases on everything. Basically a harder edged Lord Of The Rings.

Wiseman’s currently working on the script with Wanted scribe Chris Morgan. I’m not completely sold on Wiseman yet, but he was able to turn Live Free or Die Hard into quite an entertaining ride, and the first two Underworld films flirted with occasional flashes of greatness. Let’s hope he’s able to do the rich universe of the series some justice and bring us a truly bad-ass movie.

Some more behind-the-scene rumblings for today. First up, at the Terminator Salvation Roadshow, Latino Review chatted up McG and found out that the director, whose next project has already been announced as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, has none other than Will Smith atop his wish list of actors to portray Captain Nemo. McG views Nemo as more of a villain, and Will has only ever played good guys, so I’m sure there’s always a chance that if Nemo doesn’t work out, he could play the protagonist of the movie instead, sailor Ned Land. We’ll try to get more information as McG brings his Roadshow over to the West Coast in the coming days.

And John August told us that Shazam!, or at least his version of it, was dead, and it appears that it is only his version of it that died. Producer Michael Uslan talked to MTV Splash Page and gave the noncommital response of, “I will only say one thing — and all I will do is quote Samuel Clemens to you. This is direct from Captain Marvel himself: ‘The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’” No telling if this means a full length feature is still in the works, or if it’ll come to life in another medium, but don’t give up on Captain Marvel just yet!

Latino Review was at the Terminator Salvation Roadshow in New York City and scored a 20 minute preview of the new film as well as a big batch of concept art photos. They’ve posted their coverage of the footage that was shown, and their reaction seems to indicate that if you were still doubting McG after the trailer premiered, the clips shown at the Roadshow should put your fears firmly to rest. There are spoilers involved, so don’t read the clip summaries if you don’t want any plot details divulged, but do click through to see some beautiful (albeit blurry) paintings of concept art.

Terminator Salvation has a lot to live up to. Its predecessors (at least the first two) were groundbreaking in so many ways, one of which was their contribution to the annals of film music. Brad Fiedel’s original score for the Terminator films is an iconic part of cinematic history (c’mon, who doesn’t know this song?). So when it comes to the score of Terminator Salvation, fans can be understandably jittery. Well, some of those jitters can be allayed now, as Danny Elfman has been hired to compose the score for McG’s relaunch of the franchise. MTV Splash Page got exclusive word from the man himself, and even if the score doesn’t use the popular refrain from Fiedel’s score (though I’d still wager that it will), at least we’ll still get a piece of work from one of the film industry’s best.

MTV Splash Page also ran this story, though I feel like they might be extrapolating a bit. Yes, it’s another Batman 3 rumor, and I’m sure we’ll be stuck with plenty of these for the next three or four years. MTV chatted with The Dark Knight producer Chuck Roven, who asides from giving us a non-update update (to be fair, I’m sure he’s harassed about this all the time) on the status of Batman 3 (Nolan and Goyer are “talking and thinking” about it. Big surprise there), also mentions how he feels we need to separate the actor from the character when we look at the Joker. Does this mean we may see Joker recast in later Batman films? MTV seems to think its a possibility. I think we need to take a 12 month break and NOT talk about Batman 3 anymore and just let the very capable people working on it do their jobs in peace. Then after that, you can give me a REAL Batman 3 update.