Terminator Salvation edition

For this week’s column, I’m going to provide not too spoilery summaries and reviews of three Terminator Salvation movie tie-in books. There’s Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the movie Terminator Salvation itself, as well as two non-fiction books by Tara Bennett, The Art of Terminator Salvation and Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Companion. So if you’d like a little knowledge about the future before going to see the movie, remember, there’s no fate but what you make when you click that link…

I think my plan had been to read these books in a completely different order than what I ultimately wound up doing. I was totally in love with the cover of the Art of Terminator Salvation book, and having (and loving) a few of these art books in the past, I had figured it would be the first one I’d read. Instead, I found myself drawn to The Official Movie Companion. This is the kind of book for anyone who wants to know more about how these kinds of movies are made. It covers everything from casting and costuming, to script development, stunt coordination and the practicalities of making this movie. There are sections devoted to each of the main characters, plenty of color pictures from the film as well as behind the scenes photos. I learned a great deal from reading this, including: Bryce Dallas Howard (Kate Connor) is a nerd (god bless her – she loves post-apocalyptic stories, and was already a big fan of Terminator); the character Barnes turned out differently in the movie than he was in the script (I think this explains why Zahn had him as an ex-con in From the Ashes, but he doesn’t seem to be in Terminator Salvation, which may be why Alan Dean Foster had to so some rewrites). With all the input from the Director and quotes from the actors and production people involved; I can highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the process behind filmmaking, or a fan of this particular movie.

Next I started reading the novelization of Terminator Salvation by Alan Dean Foster. Now, I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t know how it compares in its faithfulness, but as stated before, I know he did a substantial rewrite on the novel to make sure it more closely resembled the final movie. I’ll give a little nutshell summary, probably not more than what’s already been shown in trailers. This story is really about two characters; John Connor and Marcus Wright. Marcus Wright dies as a convict on death row in the first minutes of the story, and wakes up in the future with no memory of how he got there. He is saved from being blow to bits by a Terminator by none other than Kyle Reese. Their journey through the post-apocalyptic landscape is really the way to introduce it to the audience/reader – where they are pursued by all manner of robot as Marcus tries to figure out his place in this world. John’s journey is moving in the direction of being recognized as the great leader of humanity. The people who work directly under him already see it – but there is a command structure above him who still don’t necessarily buy into him – though they can’t argue with his results. Yet when he becomes aware that his future father has been captured by Skynet on the eve of the most important battle the humans have waged so far against the machine, will he risk Kyle’s life to ensure Skynet’s demise, or will he retain his humanity and risk losing the war. Not surprisingly, there are a great many action scenes, well written and engaging, but plenty of personal moments as well. I don’t know if this novelization shows more insight into some of these characters than we’ll get onscreen, but I do know that I enjoyed the novel (could barely put it down) and can definitely highly recommend it.

As I was reading the novelization, I found myself using the Art of Terminator Salvation as a companion piece to it. This book explains that because of the major change taking place in this movie (moving from a ‘contemporary setting’ as the majority of time in the previous films in this franchise is set, to being completely set in the ‘future’) there was a lot of preproduction work done. One hundred or so pre-production paintings were done, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn they’re all in this book. Moreso than the Movie Companion, this art book walks you through each scene (at least as planned) and shows what the filmmakers had in mind. Many of the scenes seemed to be adapted exactly, some less so. You get to see a lot of sketches of the evolution of various robots used throughout the film, and you also get to hear a lot about Stan Winston’s workshop and how they worked hard to make him proud on this movie (Stan passed away during the pre-production of Terminator Salvation). Judging from what I’ve seen in this book, they’ve done a fantastic job of living up to his memory. Again, for what it is, it’s an interesting look into a particular part of the filmmaking process, and I can easily recommend it.

I hope you enjoyed this look into the Terminator Salvation tie-ins. In the final pages of the novelization, it’s revealed that there will be more fiction set in the Terminator Salvation universe, so I will keep track of that here in this column and let you know about any… future… developments.