The Terminator series marches into the future with a new film hoping to reboot the robots. T4's cast and creators talk to Michele Manelis
He may be the latest Aussie taking Hollywood by storm but a few years ago Sam Worthington wasn't getting anywhere.
"I couldn't get a job in this country because Orlando Bloom and all those pretty boys had the roles. But [director Joseph McGinty Nichol] McG said he was looking for a guy who you could hit in the head with a shovel and wouldn't go down," Worthington says. "I just happen to be lucky that the trend at this moment is for guys who are physical and who can bring emotional complexity inside a hard-nut case."
Which, when you see him unleashed in Terminator Salvation, is an especially apt description of his role as Marcus Wright, a man seemingly brought back from the dead to 2018, 14 years after "judgment day" to find the world has been nuked and taken over by machines.
Soon, he heads out of Los Angeles on a mission to find John Connor, who is not yet leader of the resistance - as has been prophesied throughout the three previous movies and one television series of the 25-year-old Terminator franchise - but he is sure showing signs he's up for the job.
He, too, has someone to find - Kyle Reese, his father, who he must eventually send back in time to start the first Terminator film. And, of course, get it on with Sarah Connor.
In T4, the iconic role of Connor is played by Christian Bale, who was initially reluctant to join another blockbuster franchise.
"When I first got approached with this, I didn't feel like it was really being reinvented in a good enough fashion, so I said no to it a number of times."
"The bar has definitely been raised by the likes of Chris Nolan with the Batman movies, you know, what is possible within these so-called action, sci-fi and comic book movies. You can have a great fantastic intelligent human story in the midst of it without compromising anything.
"Terminator is more a guttural movie, it always has been, versus Chris Nolan's world of Batman. And I think, hey, appropriately so let's stick to that. But absolutely, it should go beyond bang, bang, flash, flash. That entertains me for 10 minutes and then I'm done."
After much to-ing and fro-ing with the directors and writers he said yes - only while director McG had originally approached the Dark Knight star to play the conflicted role of Marcus, Bale opted to play Connor instead.
Marcus was the film's lead character in the original draft of the prequel-sequel written by by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote the lacklustre predecessor Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
But having the star in the subsidiary role didn't seem right to director McG and his writers. "What can you do then when you go in and say, 'hey Christian, I want you to play Marcus,' and he says, 'I want to play Connor.' And you say, "maybe we need to go back and make this a little bit more of a two-hander," says McG. The other challenges for McG - a music video guy whose few features include the credibility-defying Charlie's Angels films - included taking on the mythology and time-travel plot convolutions created by James Cameron's first two films.
"We had to re-invigorate and re-invent. I've made an inferior sequel myself, in that second Charlie's Angels picture, so it's hard to get out there and reinvigorate something and get people excited. We had to do something different or it wasn't worth doing. That was what I told Jim early on and he kinda shrugged and we went for it."
McG cites what Cameron told him about following Ridley Scott's Alien with his own Aliens and the expectations that he would fail trying to top the original classic.
"People said 'You can't follow Ridley Scott. It's ridiculous.' He said, 'I think I can honour what Ridley put forward and continue the story and do it in a way that everybody gets excited'. I'm not saying that's what we've done with this, but we certainly tried."
And done with it with many nods to the past, including a couple of familiar action scenes, lines and one famous face - the gubernator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger makes an appearance.
Well, sort of. Says McG, "Arnold was in Terminator 25 years ago. We took pictures of him from that period and developed a new visual effects code to create a synthetic character to look exactly the same as he did then.'
The film does depart from the earlier Terminators as it's set in a post-apocalyptic future - in a world where it appears the bad guys have already won.
Ferris says, "It's dark, but to reboot the franchise, there's nothing else you can do. The idea of a Terminator 4 in which someone goes to the old west to kill the great-grandmother of John Connor, that would be insane."
For Worthington, Terminator Salvation represents just the beginning of what's shaping up to be a breakthrough for the Perth-born 32-year-old, though McG had to fight to cast him.
"They wanted a name, of course. But listen, Sam is the breakout star of the year. He is unbelievable. I saw everybody for this role, and I mean all the famous guys in his age group. It was important to have the right physicality. I couldn't have one of those actory, wimpy guys trying to convincingly stand up to Christian Bale. Sam came in and said, 'I'm a bricklayer from Western Australia.' He had two bags with him - a bag of books and a bag of clothes, and that was it. Meanwhile, Russell Crowe emailed me and said, 'you should take a close look at his guy. He's a no tears, honest actor.' And he was right."
It seems word has got out.
Among the films he's got lined up is the lead in the much-anticipated space battle epic Avatar, partly shot at Peter Jackson's Wellington studios where the aforementioned Bloom once worked - and directed by one James Cameron.
LOWDOWN
What: Terminator Salvation
Where and when: Opens at cinemas June 4
