Once again, it’s Google Day here at the Sarah Connor Society. That’s right, today is the day when I hunt down all the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles-related news that’s fit to stuff into a search engine so you don’t have to….
As we await official word on what’s in store for us in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles‘ second season, the first spoilers are starting to trickle out. Scifi blog io9 has a condensed version of the tidbits from last week’s Watch With Kristin report here.
In old but good news, Malaysia’s Star Online has an interview with Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau from their antipodean press tour earlier this year here.
Also from the Star Online is this piece about the growing overlap between movies and TV series:
Just as we were getting used to the fact that this franchise may be better suited for TV (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), news came about Christian Bale agreeing to play John Connor in the new movie, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. Casting the talented star of the Batman movies (who’s soon to be seen in The Dark Knight) as the guy who fights the machines in the future is definitely a coup. Terminator 4 is scheduled to hit the screen in May 2009. Exciting, isn’t it?
Read the complete article here.
And another about potential trading-card game franchises:
The Terminator franchise has been steadily reinvigorated of late, especially with the recent airing of Warner Bros’ Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series. And with a fifth movie in the pipeline (Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, starring Christian Bale, and slated for a 2009 release), it will mean that there should be plenty of takers for all things that have images of the menacing T-800 and John Connor.
There was a Terminator card game in the late 1990s (interestingly also by the ill-fated Precedence), but was quickly forgotten amidst lacklustre sales.
They say that timing is everything, and we’d actually think that given the strong ratings enjoyed by the TV series and the hype surrounding the upcoming movie, a Terminator card game should enjoy modest success.
Read the complete article here.
While no longer really news, CraveOnline has posted a blurb about TSCC’s return and new cast members here.
In cast news, terminator Kristina Lokken and Sarah Connor version 1.0, Linda Hamilton, get top-10′d by GayWIred in their list of the “LesbiaNation Top Ten Big Screen Bad-Assed Babes”:
Long before The L Word scooped her up for a season, Sci-Fi and fantasy film fans knew all about that blonde bad-assed bombshell Kristanna Loken. As the latest and greatest in the Terminator proto-types, Loken made for a mighty-fine cyborg in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines! Clad in red leather, Loken went toe-to-toe and then some with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wall of flesh….
[Meanwhile] many a budding lesbian girl discovered her true nature while drooling over Linda Hamilton’s bared, blazing deltoids in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Who could have predicted that the woman who starred in the schmaltzy television romance Beauty and the Beast would diesel out like she did to face off with a muscle-bound cyborg killer? A mama bear with her cub, Hamilton’s ripped Sarah Connor wasn’t about to let anyone f*** with her son.
Always remember the First Rule of Robot War: Do Not Mess With Sarah Connor’s Son.
Read the complete list here.
And in cast-related news, Variety reports that “Legendary Pictures has confirmed it is developing a 300 follow-up for Warner Bros. that Frank Miller is writing and Zack Snyder is intended to direct.” No word from Variety on whether or not the movie will be a sequel or a prequel to the film.
Read the complete report here.
However, the Glasgow Sunday Mail notes that “Gerard Butler could return to 300 role as producers plan new movies” here.
Sequel, prequel, whatever - as long as there’s a role for Lena Headey, I’m there.
Also in related news, MoviesOnline has a look at a limited edition 300 DVD release here.
In Terminator Salvation news, every geeksite known to Google is reporting that Helena Bonham-Carter been cast in T4 in what’s being referred to as a “small but crucial role” by the Times of London. Canadian website JoBlo chimes in with the news that this role is not Sarah Connor (as rumoured), which is too bad. A Terminator movie without Sarah Connor is just, well, Terminator 3: close but no shotgun.
As for the casting Bonham-Carter itself, all I can say is: to all the girls in Alexandra Hall who sneered at my regular Saturday evening appointment with Star Trek: The Next Generation while they clutched their VHS copy of A Room With A Viewto their chests, look who’s doing sci-fi now!
JoBlo has some rumoured character details and a rather kinky pic of Bonham-Carter here.
The Times of London has a rather more… refined and British take on Bonham-Carter’s casting here.
Meanwhile, Cinematical is intrigued:
“As Sarah Connor has morphed to a lovely brunette Lena Headey in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, perhaps she [Bonham-Carter] will be playing her in a flashback? (I know, the television show is on a separate mythology/timeline as the films, but I have to consider all the possibilities.) Could she be a Terminator model, despite her petiteness? A vital designer of SkyNet? A baker who comes up with an industrious way to dispose of fallen soldiers and feed what’s left of humanity?”
Read the complete post here.
And while ScreenRant is perplexed - “the casting of this film is getting stranger and stranger by the day” - here, AfterEllen is skeptical - “Is Helena a genius casting pick? Or is [this] a thought worse than biting into one of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies?” - here.
Also reporting are DreadCentral, FlickDirect, ReelzChannel, GeeksofDoom and you can read the Sarah Connor Society’s original report from The Hollywood Reporter here.
Meanwhile, older John Connor, Christian Bale, has been all over the Internet promoting The Dark Knight and chatting a bit about Terminator Salvation along the way.
From DarkHorizons:
Bale is currently shooting the new Terminator film and laughs slightly when asked what it is about him and franchises. “That was actually something which I questioned greatly, I would say, ‘Do I want to do that again?’ But what I saw with Terminator was what I saw with Batman Begins. Now whilst Batman Begins was clearly an origin story, and we were in many ways ignoring any of the other movies that had come before, that won’t be the case with the Terminator - we are staying true to the mythology, certainly to one and two more so than three, but it’s the opportunity and the chance to reinvent and revitalize that, otherwise. And there’s no point in making it. So that is my aim, and that’s why I finally decided, because I took a long time to consider and why I finally decided yes, I wanted to try this, because that’s a responsibility that we have as filmmakers and that’s what I’m aiming to achieve.” He says he is pleased with the way Terminator is progressing. “It’s going well, but it’s a tall order, it really is, and I recognize that and we have a lot of work to do, and I’ve just begun on it, because I only just finished working on Public Enemies a couple of weeks back.”
Read the complete interview here.
The Chicago Sun-Times has also posted a short interview; MoviesOnline teases an upcoming interview; and from a Q&A session with the LA Times “Dish Rag” blog:
DR: What drew you to play John Connor in another classic film franchise, the new “Terminator Salvation”?
CB: In a similar fashion that “Batman Begins” revitalized and reinvented, even though with “Terminator Salvation” we are, of course, continuing a mythology, we’re not ignoring a mythology as we did with Batman.
I see there being great potential for reinvention and revitalization of the mythology of it. And that’s when I’m aiming to do. That’s what I feel like our responsibility is; otherwise there’s no point in making it.
Read the complete interview here.
Finally, we have commentary from JoBlo’s Arrow-in-the-Head site about the official Terminator Salvation logo revealed on the movie’s official blog here.
As we all contemplate the horror of a potential strike by SAG, in news of strikes past, Film.com wonders if “long gone shows will regain their audiences” and accuses FOX of essentially turning Prison Break and TSCC into “into cable shows, giving them 13 weeks during this coming fall and benching them for the winter and spring.”
Read the complete article here.
And, to end, a few miscellaneous pieces:
The Welland Tribune has an Associated Press piece about Hollywood’s ongoing love affair with robots to coincide with last week’s release of Wall-E:
Though the feeling can’t yet be reciprocated, Hollywood has a crush on robots…
The Terminator movies are based on the fear of a future taken over by robots, but we eventually begin to root for the Terminator, played by our most robotic of actors, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Read the complete article here.
From behind the scenes, Albequerque cop Rob DeBuck who retired as a captain from the Albequerque PD and worked as a technical advisor on Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles and USA Network’s In Plain Sight has returned to the police department as a rookie.
Read the Albuquerque Journal report on PoliceOne here.
In real-life technology news, Geek.com reports that Tufts University has received funding from the US military to develop chemical robots:
Aren’t robots like the liquid morphing T-1000 in Terminator 2 supposed to be in works of fiction about a diabolical future? Maybe not if one university is successful in their research. Tufts University has been tapped to develop a new breed of robot that will operate much like the T-1000 rather than the hard shell robot varieties we are all familiar with.
I, for one, will be investing in a portable blast furnace.
Read the complete report here.
And from the University of Bath comes the news that self-replicating machines are a reality:
The idea of a self-replicating machine can be traced back to remarks made by the Queen of Sweden to René Descartes, but they were more seriously explored in the 19th century by Samuel Butler, who described a machine that could mimic the biological process of plants in his novel Erewhon.
Science fiction writers have kept pace. Phillip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke and Nobel-nominated Karel Capek have all toyed with the idea, before John Sladek based his 1968 satirical novel, the Reproductive System, on a self-replicating machine that goes wild. It set the scene for movies like The Terminator to tap into fears of robots capable of reproducing and taking over.
Bowyer thinks his RepRap will prove much more benign. Besides, his machine can’t self-assemble and cannot yet reproduce all its own parts. These last two points do make you wonder if the RepRap is a self-replicating machine at all. A lathe could be used to make parts for another lathe; what’s so different about his RepRap? “You could see the whole of engineering as effectively a self-replicating machine,” Bowyer says. “It’s very difficult to use a machine tool to make another copy of itself, but RepRap is designed to make that as easy as possible.”
Read the complete article from The Guardian here.
