Oops, did I just spoil it for you? I wouldn’t worry about it. McG’s statement pretty much gives the impression that the rumors about that stupid ending are crap. In his blog entry he also gives some pretty cool details about the movie and defends his stupid, three letter name that everyone makes fun of.

You can find all the details on the official blog for the movie…or you can just read the entry below:

One Possible Future

We’re in the middle of week five. The New Mexico wind is kicking the shit out of the crew but providing a perfect backdrop for our post-apocalyptic world.

Sam tore a muscle on the left side of his ribs in a fight sequence. Neither of us wants to use a stunt double.

This movie takes place several years after Judgment Day, but prior to 2029. Just like it took a long time to get an HD plasma screen in our world, it took Skynet a lot of research and development to get to the T-800, and this movie explores that “space between.” We have all been fascinated with the world after Judgment Day. Here it is.

In this film, there are Hydrobots that patrol the water, Transports that move human prisoners around, Harvesters that collect human beings as lab rats for Skynet and Aerostats that survey all that is going on with the resistance the world over.

We’ve started shooting the T-600 – the bigger, grimier, nastier version that preceded the T-800.

Like Reese says, they’re easier to spot but they pack a mini gun and carry kick ass fire power. They’re eight-foot tall killers that prowl the badlands looking for anything with a heartbeat to terminate.

Stan Winston, Production Designer Martin Laing and ILM came up with the designs and that thing is on Kyle Reese’s ass throughout the entire picture. Wanted to achieve that bummer, rubbery skin, prosthetic look that cloaks an unrelenting machine with a singular focus of killing.

More to come…

Also, I realize my name is ridiculous. I was born Joseph McGinty Nichol. McG is short for McGinty. I have been called this since the day I was born to create separation from my Uncle Joe and Grandpa Joe. I realize it sounds like some Hollywood nickname, hip-hop choice. But the truth is, this is simply my name – for every day of elementary school, every zit-filled day of high school. I have been taking shit for it ever since. I get it, I would think it’s lame too. But it’s just a name, and to change it now would seem fraudulent.

Oh yeah, don’t get too uptight about the prospect of the film being PG-13. We have entertained the idea of a PG-13 rating largely because Batman Begins, in my opinion, was made compromise-free. So we’ll see. The movie comes first and it will be protected at all times…

By the way, there are only three people who know the ending.

The unknown future rolls toward us.

McG

Common will play a freedom fighter and member of John Connor’s (played by Christian Bale) inner circle. The story of the film centers on John Connor who is now in his 30s and who now leads what is left of the human race in a battle against the machines.

The cast list right now looks like this:

• Christian Bale – John Connor, leader of the resistance
• Sam Worthington – a central character in the planned three picture arc
• Anton Yelchin – Connor’s friend and future father Kyle Reese
• Moon Bloodgood – a no-nonsense and battle-hardened member of the resistance who is carrying a lot of guilt over surviving the nuclear holocaust
• Common – freedom fighter and member of John Connor’s inner circle
• Josh Brolin (rumored) – director mentioned him as an ideal Terminator, but has not been confirmed for the cast

McG is directing from a script by John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Paul Haggis.

Terminator 4 is set to hit theaters on May 22, 2009.

The previous films had eluded to the fact that Reese and grown-up John Connor were both best friends and around 30 years old. Well, with Yelchin being cast, he’ll be playing a Kyle Reese about half that age. So instead of best friends, there may be more of a father-son relationship.

Cinema Blend compares what they’ll have to that of Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi.

We read that Reese isn’t just a bit part, he’s going to be the central figure in this movie and the upcoming sequels.

The other huge tidbit is that the movie could actually end up connecting and following storyline from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Those movies by the way, our source says “will also address the terminators and their evolution including the terminators of the first three films.� And somewhat surprising, there may actually be direct connections between the movie and the recently aired Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series. Our source says, “they might connect the TV Series to the original three films as well but that depends if for one Fox decided to continue the series and if the people in charge want to have those plot lines cross over with this new trilogy.

Hopefully, as Cinema Blend suggests, this will definitely cause Fox to renew the series (which I sort of have heard is already a given).

According to Terminator mythology (which is getting more complicated all the time), Reese was born after the first war and survived the capture and killing of his fellow humans only to be put into one of Skynet’s concentration camps. John Connor, Reese’s son, led a resistance movement that freed Reese and some others from the Skynet camp. Reese then volunteered to go back in time to the year 1984 to protect Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor who is the resistance leader, from a Terminator sent by Skynet to kill her before she can give birth to John to stop him from leading the resistance.

As will sometimes happen when you time travel, Reese gets into some shenanigans that actually bring about the future he’s trying to save…don’t ask me about the paradox effect. All I know is that while running from the Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), Reese and Sarah have a night of “relations” that ultimately impregnates Sarah and brings about her son, John. Reese was later killed by his own pipe-bomb while attempting to destroy the Terminator. I’m not sure how the TV series has added to this story.

Now, from what we know about Terminator 4, Reese becomes friends with Marcus (played by Sam Worthington – now cutting his chops on James Cameron’s Avatar), an early version of the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger from the first film. Christian Bale will play a 30 year old John Connor now fighting desperately to save a decimated civilization against machines that have taken control. Other plot details are still sketchy.

With production scheduled to start in early May, Paul Haggis (writer of Crash, Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace) also has been in talks about coming on board to do some rewrites on the script. David Campbell Wilson, John Brancato and Michael Ferris wrote the screenplay.

So what do you think? Will Anton Yelchin make a good Reese?

It also seems like I end up finding these kind of shows my most favorite, like Firefly, Journeyman, and countless others.

Well, maybe everyone’s luck has changed. Kristin over at E Online is reporting that in a recent interview with Thomas Dekker, the young John Connor, he appeared very upbeat and almost certain we’d see season two.

There is also some serious rumors that production is starting up again in mid to late June.

Star Thomas Dekker told me at last night’s American Idol party he was feeling pretty good and is “pretty sure” the new season will happen.

According to Dekker, the producers are currently pitching second-season stories to the network.

Well that sounds mighty fine to me. The show really got good towards the end, and the season finale was awesome. I knew that the moment I started to really enjoy it, the rug would be pulled out from under me.

Yet this time, it might stay put. Let’s hope these rumors are true.

And on a side note, she also asked him if he’s sick of the rumors regarding a relationship between John Connor and the Cameron terminator protecting him, and this was the result:

He thinks the idea of a human and a robot having that sort of relationship is interesting and cool and added that fans should “wait until the second season, because some really great stuff is plannedâ€â€?all those questions will be answered!”

From the Captain Obvious department: I’m sure his answer is swayed a bit by the fact Summer Glau plays Cameron and that doing those kinds of scenes with her wouldn’t be THAT BAD.

Here’s to a second year of The Sarah Connor Chronicles!

And let’s hope that Journeyman, while it appears dead, will somehow miraculously return.

True, nothing much comes close to Lost this year, but after a slow start, The Sarah Connor Chronicles really took off and the season finale was explosive and moving. It really grew into the show I was hoping for from the start and other than Journeyman and the afore mentioned Lost, there really hasn’t been anything as fun to watch for me.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles season finale was actually broken down into two episodes, so you got two different stories here. Unlike the usual recaps I do for this show, I’m not going to do a serious play-by-play, but delve somewhat into what happened and what it means.

Episode 1×08: Vick’s Chip

We find out why Cameron kept the chip off the Vick terminator that was trying to kill Derek Reese. The chip is like the brain of a terminator, containing memories and higher brain functions. In fact, if you give it too much power, it can make things happen around it.

Derek finds the chip and outs Cameron, casting doubt on her trustworthiness. But she convinces everyone that it has a ton of information on it that is worthwhile. We don’t know what she was going to do with it, but she doesn’t try to get it back.

So John hacks it. And I really love how they are growing John’s character. We know what a great leader he will eventually become, and I like that the guy just has a knack for figuring things out and hacking computers. It’s going to come in handy.

The chip contains video memories of Vick’s mission, which was to protect a woman who worked for city hall. She developed a program to basically control all traffic lights and video cameras in the entire city.

You give that thing a little intelligence, and suddenly it can see and monitor everything happening, follow you around and know exactly where everyone is. Yikes. It obviously was important to Skynet because they send a terminator to protect it.

That was a sweet twist. All we’ve known so far, in T2 and now this series, is terminators being sent back to protect Sarah and John Connor. Now we see one being used for the reverse motive by the robots themselves.

Nice.

The program is active and our heroes figure that causing a virus to bring it down will cast major doubts on its reliability, perhaps halting the entire project.

Seeing what Vick’s chip did when it got too much power (it started watching John and trying to use his cell phone to dial out), they decide to use Cameron’s own chip to infect the program.

I don’t know why, but there was something touching in the way John carefully removed the chip from her head. He has a fondness for her, that is clear, but in what capacity, we don’t know yet.

He plugs her into the network and causes the virus to bring the system down, creating a gridlock across the city. Mission accomplished.

But the Turk is still out there. Oh and also, Sarah figures out that Derek killed Andy Goode.

Episode 1×09: What He Beheld

This finale episode was so great. I don’t even know where to begin.

The title could refer to a multitude of things. You have what Derek Reese beheld when the nukes went off and he had to save his brother. You have John beholding his father as a 5-year old child.

Maybe it refers to James Ellison finally seeing with his own eyes what is at stake.

I’ll give a brief recap of what happened here, because I want to really get into the parts that mattered.

The episode focused mainly on finding the Turk and they get led on a chase to get it by some Irish gangster who says he’s Sarkissian, has the computer and wants $500,000. Later he kills the fake ID bunch from the first few episodes and uses information from them to find the Connor’s house. The guy puts a watcher on John and Cameron, and threatens to kill John if he doesn’t get $2 million for the Turk in 24 hours.

There is also some mysterious guy watching the house as well, but we don’t find out until the end who it is.

They eventually kill the Irish guy and take his hard drive which leads them to discover that the dead isn’t who they were really after. Sarkissian is actually someone else and he was the guy watching them all.

He puts a car bomb in their jeep and unfortunately for him, Cameron was the one to use it first as she went to get a cake for John’s birthday. Boom. Hope she’s alright, but come on…she’s a terminator!

A sweet ending to be sure, but there was a lot of great stuff in this episode.

The first is just a tiny thing. There was a little girl who witnessed the execution of the fake Sarkissian, and the brief moment of care on Sarah’s face as she told her to find her daddy was great. I think the big thing in this show lately is the heart it has and the love for humanity Sarah tries to hang on to.

It could be easy to just kill everyone to get the job done, but she struggles to do it without so many people dying.

There were two poignant moments in What He Beheld. The first was between John and Derek, and the second was James Ellison.

You know, it was around the time of Derek’s arrival that the show found its legs. Who would have thought Brian Austin Green could bring an added layer that the show needed? Obviously it was more of his backstory of being Kyle’s brother, but it was still something that gave the series new legs.

Derek remembers it’s John’s birthday and takes him to the park to just get away from the computer hacking sessions. They buy ice cream and watch two young kids play baseball. Derek recounts what it was like to see the world now compared to the future devastation.

The two kids playing baseball looked a lot like the first two we saw at the beginning, which showed Derek and Kyle at the moments the nukes launched in 2011.

At first you think it’s just one of those cheesy scenes where the writers throw in some kids to remind Derek of what it was like before. But I kept saying…”no, that’s them…that has to be them…”

And it was. They were seeing Kyle and Derek as kids. And then the big reveal…Derek knows Kyle is his father, because every time he looks at John, he sees his brother.

That was a moving scene I thought, something the show is getting better at. The longer we watch, the more we care for these characters. Realizing how powerful it was for John to finally see his father, albeit 5 years old, was just touching.

The second moment was what James Ellison beheld.

Earlier in the episode he goes to see Charley Dixson, and tries to get him to confide in him about Sarah. He says he’s starting to realize that there is something going on out there, that Sarah is alive, that he’s seen the evidence of robots, etc.

While he’s there, he picks up on the name that Charley gives him for an FBI agent that visited him earlier: Kester. James finds him in the FBI database, realize he’s a fraud and they decide to go get him.

He’s worried though…he wonders “what” Kester is…

At the same time, James probably just missed being killed, as Kester/Cromartie was looking for the Sarah Connor file that Ellison had.

Before they hit him, Charley hears the alert while in his ambulance and heads to the scene, having recognized the name Kester.

The beauty of the scene in which Ellison and his SWAT team surround Cromartie’s apartment, is the song playing in the background. It’s called “When The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash and is one of the last songs he ever wrote.

It has many references to the Bible and the Book of Revelations particularly. I didn’t connect them right away, but earlier when James was at Charley’s, he quoted him a verse from Revelations about the end of the world.

As the first of the SWAT team enter the room, the lyrics in the background:

“Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom…”

The first man gets thrown out the door and you see him falling into the swimming pool below in slow motion, as blood spreads into the water. Then you hear gunfire all over as more and more men land in the water. Then you hear Ellison yelling “Fall back now!”

We see Cromartie walking around the pool as he turns and aims his gun at Ellison, the only man left. Sirens in the background.

For some reason, he doesn’t kill him. It could be the fact that he no longer posed a threat and killing him wasn’t part of his mission. Or possibly it meant something else.

Charley drives up and sees the aftermath, with Ellison standing there, over his partner’s dead body…

This scene with Ellison was brutally moving. In that moment, he beheld the reality of the world. The reality of the danger the human race was facing.

In Conclusion

All in all, the first season, or nine episodes, of The Sarah Connor Chronicles was pretty awesome. Like I said, it started a bit slow for me, the mythology was sort of uninteresting until they introduced Derek Reese and the whole backstory of him, Kyle and John from the future.

At the end, I actually find myself caring for all of them. The scene with Ellison especially had me nervous for him, not wanting to see him killed. He’s not used as much as the others, but that character is very important and one of my favorites.

Next year we’ll find out how damaged Cameron is, we’ll continue the chase for The Turk and find out just how Ellison’s future will relate to the Connors’. And also, just who the heck is this Sarkissian guy?

This recap has rambled on for quite awhile, and I’m more interested in what you guys thought. Did you love it as much as I did? Was the season awesome?

Terminator Salvation will star Christian Bale as John Connor, and Sam Worthington as some guy named Marcus who is actually the lead in the movie.

Salvation will start off a three-movie arch that will tell the story of the War against the Machines, and begins shortly after most of mankind has been wiped out from the nuclear holocaust that Skynet causes.

What is sort of interesting for me is that this is taking place next year, 2009, which will (hopefully) be right after season 2 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The point of these TV series right now is the struggle to stop Skynet from ever happening. Well, if we have three movies planned beginning in 2009 that take place after Skynet kills most of the human race, how will they create interest in the show when we know they fail?

Essentially, we know their fight right now is useless and pointless. What might be cool, in my opinion, is to make the series actually end after the second season in time for the movies. Let the holocaust happen.

Maybe that’s lame, but it just seems odd to me to keep a show going when the endgame is already determined. Perhaps things will happen along the way that shed light on the events after Judgment Day, but who knows. I just am not sure what they can keep coming up with to make it worth keeping around when the next chapter in the story has been told.

What is kind of cool to me is to FINALLY see how things will end up. We’ve seen so much about how mankind gets destroyed and that there are resistance fighters, but we have no clue how it all will play out. It should be fun to see that happen.

Anyways, what do you guys think about all this? Excited about Bale in the next Terminator? Do you think it sort of ruins The Sarah Connor Chronicles at all?

Because it just sucked really. And Sarah Connor just gets more and more interesting.

This is the recap for episode 1×07 called Demon Hand, which is the dead Terminator appendage that James Ellison found two episodes ago. It’s obviously important as Cyberdyne was founded by Miles Dyson who came into the possession of a hand and microchip in Terminator 2, which was destroyed at the end.

So once again, a robot hand is out there just waiting to fall into the wrong hands.

Cameron is hunting down the Turk in this episode, first learning to ballet in order to get closer to the sister of the guy who helped Adam in the chess episode. We learn that this guy forced the Turk to lose, making it easier for him to sneak out of the building.

We don’t know where it is yet, but we’re close.

I loved the Cameron story this week. She’s a twisted, complicated character, made even worse by the fact she’s a robot. One angle I like is that she goes about getting information without worrying about who dies because of her.

The guy who stole Turk is being hunted because he owes money, and at the end when Cameron could have saved him and his girlfriend, she leaves them behind amid gunshots and screams.

This makes the show gritty and unique. It’s sort of like Lost in a way, where people do die and there is no lovey-dovey hero doing the right thing every week. Cameron is far from a hero and she does what she needs to satisfy her mission.

But perhaps the best part of Demon Hand was all the nods to Terminator 2. First off you get Cameron dressed up as a motorcycle cop with shiny sunglasses just like Robert Patrick from T2.

Yet that was just a tip of the hat, a salute if you will, to the second film.

We really get deep into it when we meet Dr. Silberman, the psychiatrist who witnessed Sarah’s escape with the help of John and the ‘good’ Arnold terminator.

The doctor, after seeing this and believing, lives up in a cabin away from civilization, obviously frightened and paranoid by what he saw.

In fact, Ellison is getting more and more info about the hand, Sarah and how she was locked up, so he goes to visit Silberman. The ex-doctor accuses Ellison of being a robot himself and drugs the guy with a hot cup of tea.

Ellison ends up with a hole in his leg as Silberman tries to prove he’s no machine from the future. They end up talking and you can tell Ellison is a believer now, after all he’s seen. The hand is in the trunk and Silberman goes out to get it.

Sarah realizes what kind of path Ellison is on and deduces that he may have tried to track down Silberman, so she ends up at the house just as Silberman sets fire to his cabin, with Ellison tied up inside and the robot hand in his clutches.

The shock on his face at seeing her was priceless and matched only by the right hook he takes from Sarah that knocks him the frak out. Sarah takes the Demon Hand from Silberman and saves Ellison, a fact we see a bit later.

It was a great moment. Ellison has finally seen her alive, and Silberman gets locked up in the same insane asylum room that Sarah used to inhabit. Justice is served.

There was a whole subplot about Sarah giving up John for adoption, just seconds before she busted out, which was another use of a T2 plot to bring forward to this series.

And at the end, while she’s alone and secretly watched by Derek, Cameron dances some ballet in her room. Derek just stares at her and we see the conflict in his mind. Is he hating her more, or does he wonder if there is something more there?

Next week is the 2-hour season finale. Only 9 hours of this show for season one and we can only hope it returns.

Can’t wait for next week, it looks like a doozy.

And we actually know that now, as the previews indicate that Prison Break returns in two weeks where “the escape begins!”

They are hyping it as the best escape from prison EVER, so it sure has some serious awesome to give us when the time comes.

Monday’s episode was a bit better than last week, as some people actually died for once. This time it was Sammy and his cronies, who were close to killing Michael the second they could.

I thought it was funny though that Sammy drops a case of beer on the railing edge, makes a big announcement that anyone who brings him Scofield will get that entire box of brewskies, and all anyone does is stand in the courtyard cheering.

These people have like nothing good to eat, you’d think they’d have rushed out in droves to find him.

And of course, Sammy has a frakking gun and he doesn’t even make the attempt to find him on his own. Whatever.

I did groan a little that Sucre now has Mari Cruz in trouble if he doesn’t pass on info he overhears from Lincoln to Gretchen, but that’s the way this show goes.

I really wish they’d try to form plots for this show that extend outside the walls, like the year with them on the run. Yeah, it’s called Prison Break, but we’ve over that by now and it’s time to get them out on the run again.

So what did you think of The Sarah Connor Chronicles this week?

My wife made an interesting observation on how Cameron suddenly acts all robotic, yet in episode one, she is practically flirting with John in the New Mexico high school. How can she act totally realistic there and now forget it all?

Minor plot hole I guess, but this show is naturally going to be full of them. Which brings me to the next question mark.

Obviously the bad terminator, Cromartie, ends up finding the guy who must be the one who invents some kind of artificial skin, but now that he’s dead at the end, who’s going to be the guy inventing it in the future?

If you think that sentence was hard to follow, that’s just about equal to how it is trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

And then there is the cell phone guy who is making an artificial intelligent chess playing computer in this basement. Sarah burns his house down at the end of the episode, but did that really stop the machines?

It feels like every week they will find someone who “could” be the creator of Cyberdyne, only to kill them or stop them, and yet nothing changes. Hopefully it doesn’t get too formulaic.

So what did you think of the episodes of either Prison Break or Sarah Connor? Did you like Cromartie getting his skin back in a bathtub of blood? Did you get freaked out by the girl jumping off the edge of the building?

Are you PUMPED for the escape from Sona in two weeks?

The story is this:

Sarah and John Connor are still on the run after the events in Terminator 2, trying to stay hidden from society so that there is no way they can be found. Apparently the things that happen in Terminator 3 wont be taking into account during this series, which is fine with me because I tend to forget it ever happened.

In the pilot, Sarah fears that they are in danger and leaves a guy whom she loves and has just asked her to marry him. Whether she really feels that, or more exactly fears being tied down and unable to move at a moments notice, she takes John and they head to New Mexico.

The man she was with takes her picture to the police, which puts her into the system. Somehow, this alerts an FBI agent named James Ellison, who recaps the stuff that happened in Terminator 2 for those that forgot.

Along with the FBI, the entering of Sarah Reese into the system also alerts an evil terminator on the hunt for John. With Sarah making a mistake of not changing her alias, it was easy for him to find them in New Mexico.

On his first day of school, John meets a cute girl named Cameron, who we all know is a good terminator sent to protect him. She seems way more human than any we’ve seen before and all we get from her is that she’s “a new model.”

With the news that Skynet was somehow not destroyed with Miles Dyson from T2, the go to his wife’s house to find out if she knows anything, which she doesn’t. Cameron has no idea who built Skynet, and apparently no one does in 2027, which is where she is from.

So they decide that instead of running and running, they’ll try to find out who built Skynet after Miles Dyson died.

Cameron ends up taking them to a bank that was built in 1963. She reveals that John sent someone back in time to 1963 to build the parts for the time machine that they use to send people back. That person also left the parts for a frakking awesome gun, which can be used to destroy terminators.

Sadly, it only got used once as the terminator arrives at the bank where they are constructing the time machine device and Sarah blows it away while the time warp encompasses them.

You cannot take anything with you across time, which is why the parts had to be built.

The trio lands in the middle of a freeway in 2007 with their new mission to find Skynet’s creator. Of course some dopey kid catches Sarah on camera, so James Ellison sees it and so does her long lost boyfriend, who is now married.

Whew, that was a lot to go over and digest.

I have to say, I really liked it. I thought Summer Glau was pretty solid as Cameron. Obviously the creators want to give her more of a human feel, otherwise she’s going to get boring after awhile.

But Lena Headey (from 300) was one of the best parts I felt. She has a great voice, which was used at the beginning and end as a narrative means. But she’s got determination and grit, and is a great casting choice. She’s probably who they could have used in Bionic Woman and made it a little bit better.

John Connor, played by Thomas Dekker, seemed to grow up by the end and I have hopes that he will be a good character eventually, but I really feel the two women are the stars here.

The special effects were on par with anything on TV right now.

The only thing that really didn’t “grab” me was their mission to find Skynet’s creator. This is supposed to be their “mythology” thread in the series, which will give us new information here and there and be a mystery that they’ll solve over time.

I felt a better hook could have been given, but we’ll see how it goes.

What did you think? Did you like it? Hate it?