A Detailed Look at Selected Moments from the Terminator Genisys Trailer
After months of silence and rampant speculation, and tons of totally unconfirmed story details which have caused some fans to prematurely bury Paramount’s reboot of the Terminator franchise; we finally have the first Trailers, both Domestic and International. I have chosen a selection of screen shots out of the 600+ I took to discuss elements shown to us by Paramount in their first trailer for next July’s release. They will be discussed in the order they appear in the trailer.
So let’s get cracking.
The opening shot shows a burned out Los Angeles and Environs, an ash heap of destruction, painted in an almost noir-like lack of color. This perfectly captures a daylight look at the wasted, nuked, visions of the future described by Jim Cameron. Three newly designed aerial H/K’s move through the scene towards the towering, shattered, spires of the Los Angeles metroplex. How this connects to the other Future War scenes we don’t yet know but it sets a tone of desperation, something some would argue that was missing from RoTM and Salvation. I’ll discuss machine redesigns later.
Here John Connor (Jason Clarke) prepares to fire a mounted Phased Plasma Weapon, behind him we see for the first time on film the red laser nets marking the place of battle to be at least in part a Human Detention Camp. You can also notice the beautiful purple nature of the phased plasma bolts from T1 and T2 is back. It looks like the Resistance will be using both scavenged tech, and modified human tech made Plasma capable.
This looks like Cameron’s Future War or at the very least as close as we are going to get unless Cameron does re-imagine the series after the rights return to him in 2019. On the right we see waves of endoskeletons, and coming in from above and the ground on the left human resistance forces. It is clear from the helicopter that humans use both conventional and plasma weaponry. It is quite possible that in this future humans find it hard to replicate/procure/manufacture plasma weaponry on helpful scale.
We can also see the laser nets, but the detail I find most interesting is the crystalline/angular designs of the machine buildings. This kind of design was prevalent in Cameron’s sketches of machine architecture so it’s very nice to see it fully realized on the screen.
Let’s discover more after the break!