McG Premieres T4 Footage in London! And Bale 'Will be back!"

Terminator: Salvation director McG hosted a private screening of unseen Terminator: Salvation footage at the Vue in Leicester Square, London, yesterday. A 7 minute montage of unfinished scenes was shown, with no spoilers being unveiled.

FILM4 were one of a select few invited to the screening. Here's what they had to say:

The footage we saw took the form of a hectic, seven-minute montage, like a slightly ramshackle, beefed-up trailer with unfinished shots (wires, green screen etc) and very little in the way of spoilers. Yep, the real meat of Terminator Salvation remains a closely guarded secret.

McG is very much the handsome Hollywood showman, a ringmaster who strutted across the front of the auditorium at London's Vue Leicester Square's bigging up the film, yet he told us very little we hadn't heard before. He's an entertaining chap though. "I realised how ridiculous my name sounds when I hear other people say it," he said, before explaining that he's been going by that moniker (his full name is Joseph McGinty Nichol) since he was a child. "It's a terrible cross to bear."

The director, whose previous credits include videos for Cypress Hill, Charlie's Angels and its sequel Full Throttle and the pilot for TV series 'Chuck', very much talks the talk. When he was first offered the Terminator gig, he said, "I thought, why flog a dead horse?" Franchise creator James Cameron did after all say that he told the story with Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

McG's well-honed anecdote about how he was drawn into Terminator Salvation is designed to satisfy fanboys and girls. We've always wanted to see the post- Judgment Day world. So be it. McG says, "Cameron didn't give us his blessing, but he didn't shit all over this movie". He says the cerebral Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher ) really cracked it when he proposed a "becoming story" for John Connor. He says their early drafts of the screenplay had to be good enough to "read cold on a stage" to win over Christian Bale, who previously encountered the post-apocalypse in Reign Of Fire . McG likened this back-to-basics "becoming story" to what we've seen recently in the Batman and Bond franchises.

Before we got to see those seven minutes of Terminator footage, we watched a short film about the production design work of Martin Laing. Laing, who worked on Titanic and Ghosts Of The Abyss and is now working on Battle Angel , provides a direct link with Cameron but his work here very much expands what the franchise creator originally gave us.

We're promised 10 new Terminator models, including the vast Harvesters, which collect humans, Moto-Terminators, which are basically AI motorbikes, and Hydrobots, whose element is water. As if T-800s weren't formidable enough. Looks like humanity hasn't got a hope. Talking of T-800s, the film also introduces the earlier model, first mentioned by Kyle Reese in the original film, the bigger, cruder T-600 ("The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy").

Special make-up effects supervisor John Rosengrant, who is stepping up after the death of his mentor and Terminator designer Stan Winston, was also present and he says the reverse-engineered T-600s have a "gritty, nasty Soviet kinda look". One model was present at the event - he's a big bugger and no mistake. Between Rosengrant and McG we learned that these elements of the film are being realised with a combination of practical effects and CGI, and before he's stripped of his faux-flesh, the T-600 is even played by an actor - Brian Steele, the six foot seven chap who appeared under layers of latex as the formidable Mr Wink in Hellboy II: The Golden Army .

"I don't want to cheerlead the film," McG said. "I don't want to be hyperbolic - I want the film to speak for itself." And so we got to see those seven minutes. After all that talk of a character-led film with the emphasis on practical effects rather than something reliant on explosions and CGI, it was ironic that the footage we saw featured one set-piece involving a Harvester smashing up a petrol station in the desert, then giving chase to Sam Worthington 's mysterious Marcus Wright and Anton Yelchin 's young Kyle Reese in a sequence full of explosions and fairly standard Hollywood action.

It felt pretty much like Mad Max 2 meets Transformers . Transformers was mentioned by McG, who said he was a fan (of course) but was aiming for something a lot more sombre. He and his colleagues kept coming back to their film world's "patina". McG calls it "a dirty, difficult, grimy, Giger world."

Beyond the snippets of action sequences, we did get some sense of the drama. The story involves Connor trying to step into the role of leader of the resistance, the role he'd been brought up to believe in. However, there are other, more experienced military figures (Michael Ironside among them) who can't let this young, non-soldier take over.

That conflict forms a strong strain of drama. There's also the Connor/Wright duality. Although McG and the Sony team are avoiding revealing too much, there's some conjecture out there about just what Wright is. McG says that alongside the "becoming story", the film is also about "where does humanity end and machine begin". In Salvation, Connor learns that the T-800, which is the first of the Terminator models to be able to blend in thanks to its human tissue, is coming online 10 years earlier than expected. This appears to be a key motor for the plot, and McG said, "the T800's a big character in the film."

The film also seems to be doing some interesting things with John Connor. A key quote is: "This isn't the future that my mother told me about." To which resistance pilot Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood) replies, "If you saved us in another future, you can save us in this one." Which gives things a nice tension but also gives the film a parallel worlds justification for any differences it might have to the post-Judgment Day worlds we've glimpsed in earlier Terminator films or in the 'Sarah Connor Chronicles'.

In the discussion that followed the screening of the footage montage, McG talked more about the film, and plans for the franchise. It was all pretty guarded, though he did confirm they had "arced out" stories for two more films. In his least guarded moment, he was even critical of some important work special effects company ILM is currently doing for the film.

"I think it's the responsibility of a Terminator film to push the visual effects envelope," he said, and here he hopes to give us a character where the actor and the CGI version are indistinguishable. His tone implied ILM haven't quite achieved this yet. But then it's still early days for the post-production team. Despite the claim of not relying on CGI too much, principle photography wrapped back in September, so the production has eight-or-so months to twiddle the digital visuals. Fingers crossed they pull it all together and Salvation lives up to ringmaster McG's enthusiastic spiel.

IGN were also invited to this premiere and were told in a later conversation that Christian Bale's character, John Connor, will say the trademark "I'll be back" line this time around, however for completely different than the Terminator. Read their review HERE.

Also, we somehow missed T4 set pics! Back in July, VideoETA.com posted 47 photos from a location of Terminator:Salvation! They show a post Judgment Day highway in the daytime with charred car wreckages and shells of 7-11 stores scattered. Check the pics HERE!

GlobalArnold Staff