Terminator Salvation - False Prophet

Salvation seems appropriate given that some fans of the Terminator franchise have been anticipating this particular kind of Terminator movie as if it were the second coming. Terminator Salvation, the action packed fourth installment to the franchise, is a bit of a false prophet in that regard. The film recovers some of the ground that many feel the franchise surrendered with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but even with a perfectly awesome John Connor and lots of big summer action, fans will find it hard to escape the feeling that the film fell well short of its potential.

Directed by McG, Terminator Salvation takes place in the post apocalyptic world that we’ve seen in flashbacks throughout the previous films over the course of the last quarter century. John Connor (Christian Bale) is the prophesied leader of the human resistance against Skynet. On the brink of a major breakthrough in the war against the machines, Connor must decide whether or not to trust his instincts when he encounters one of Skynet’s latest creations, a part machine, part living human entity. The hybrid character remembers a human life and goes by his human name, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington).

Salvation takes a duel protagonist approach with Connor and Wright, surprisingly giving both characters fairly equal screen time throughout the movie. Christian Bale has a serious approach to his role, and he truly makes you believe that most of John Connor’s life has been dedicated to the fight against the machines. His routine consists of sending radio addresses to the fragments of humankind around the world and obsessing over his mother’s recordings, searching for any bit of intelligence that will give him an edge in his fight. John Connor has spent the majority of his time in the franchise running for his life, but Bale presents us with a Connor that’s ready to stand and fight, and more than qualified to do so.



Skynet’s design of Marcus Wright is very complex, but you don’t leave the movie thinking he’s a complex character. There’s a simplicity to him that I enjoyed. Similar to Connor, he’s a bleak individual, a man of few smiles. He’s in search of redemption for actions undertaken in the life he remembers, but for him redemption doesn’t seem attainable for much of the film. He carries his emotional pain while distributing physical pain to any man or machine that gets in his way. It’s easy to watch Marcus Wright in action. He’s bad ass to the point where you kind of want to see more of his story in the pre-apocalyptic world.

What I appreciated most about John Connor and Marcus Wright was that their attitudes fit what I envisioned to be the world of Terminator Salvation. Unfortunately, the nuclear devastated world as presented by McG, was hardly what I was hoping for in this installment. There just isn’t really a sense of dread surrounding Skynet and their operations. The conflict between man and machine appears be a fair fight, a far cry from the hopeless world we saw in flashbacks where dozens of terminator infantry were annihilating humans with the support of heavy armor and aircraft. In post-apocalyptic Los Angeles Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) fights a single bungling terminator with the use of silly pulley system traps. For over twenty years our imaginations ran wild about what an impossible obstacle Skynet must be. In Salvation we get to see one of the Skynet bases and it’s defended lightly enough that a helicopter can swoop in and land right in the middle. Most of the characters look clean, trimmed, and in some cases salon styled. If you’re a fan of the previous films and love the gritty world they painted of the future, the world of Salvation was a flat out disappointment. All in all, if you don’t dread the terminators and fear the outcome of them catching up to the main characters, a Terminator movie can’t succeed. The film made the worst possible mistake they could have by having terminators that absolutely suck at terminating.

It would be hard not to blame this failure largely on the PG-13 rating, something that made all fans cringe when first discovered. The violence the terminators inflict is hardly intimate, because the rating prohibits it to be. Most of the time we see a huge explosion and surmise that several humans must have just met their end. Terminators in the previous films were a force to be reckoned with, primarily because they could get up close and personal and do things like gun down a police station, punch out somebody’s heart, or spear somebody through the mouth. That is not mindless violence. It reinforces the idea of a purely lethal force that only exists to find our protagonist and extinguish his/her life. Considering that John Connor and Kyle Reese are such high priority targets for Skynet and given the lethality of the terminators in previous films, it’s just frustrating to see terminators get their hands on the characters over and over again and fail to kill them.

After seeing Salvation I couldn’t help but think back the original Terminator and admire everything they accomplished. Michael Biehn was simply amazing as Kyle Reese. From the moment he comes scurrying into pre-apocalypse LA, we see someone who has been entirely consumed by an almost hopeless fight for survival. What fuel he has left in the tank is solely dedicated to finding and protecting Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor was equally excellent as she presented a completely overwhelmed and utterly terrified woman who is suddenly confronted with her grim destiny. Let’s not forget about Arnold, whose terminator is still the standard for what every killing machine should be. “Are you Sarah Connor?” The moment that unfortunate lady said yes, there was absolutely no escape. But had that been Salvation she would have been able to run out the backdoor with the terminator firing inaccurate shots into the ceiling.

Thematically, screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris focus on what separates a human from a machine. Marcus Wright provides the perfect vehicle for exploration of this, but the film doesn’t seek to dive in too deeply to the questions it poses. Instead John Connor and Kyle Reese have thematic blurbs that do little more than reinforce the thematic conclusions the audience already had in their heads. Zombie seemed concerned because this is the screenwriting team that gave us Catwoman. Rest assured, Salvation is far from Catwoman, but you won’t be studying the script much. Most of the story’s disappointments will most likely be overlooked because something else will disappoint viewers or audiences will be distracted by a fairly quick pace and blockbuster action.

Salvation does leave things open for future John Connor adventures. There’s no doubt that they’ll stick with the PG-13 rating and cash in on Christian Bale’s fantastic box office run, but fans will cling to hopes that the fifth film will tap into the full potential of the world the first three movies established. Salvation was the skirmish in man’s fight against machines. What we want to see is the all out war.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) Part 73 – Finding Legal Advice

I’ve encountered a weird sort of conundrum in my recent searches for legal representation. On the one hand, I find it’s often overwhelmingly difficult to get anyone to offer help without being directly referred to them. On the other hand, certain attorneys seem more than willing to help, but then disappear off the radar.

My guess is that I’m subscribing to the same belief that a lot of young/new writers do that you have to get people behind you almost from the get-go – not just people who support you, but a team to work for you, i.e. lawyers, managers, agents, etc. To a degree, this is true. I wouldn’t suggest that any writer sign a contract or anything other than a release form (maybe) without having an entertainment lawyer take a look at it. Yet that doesn’t mean that the very same writer should pay a retainer or get a full-time lawyer on his or her side.

I recently had a producer approach me regarding a potential option on one of my scripts. At this point in the game, I still had a lawyer. (In case you’re wondering how I got this lawyer – she was a friend of my boss’s. As a courtesy to my boss, she looked over my initial agreement with a manager I was about to sign with. Then, as a courtesy to her, I agreed to remain with her, using her for future services.) When I got in touch with my lawyer about the option agreement, we had to first get the little issue of her fee out of the way. This wasn’t something I had discussed frankly with her before, which was probably a mistake on both our parts.

Before speaking to managers/lawyers/agents or anyone who takes a chunk of your sale, know what they are entitled to. Managers and agents typically take 10% (some managers go higher to 15 or more). Lawyers, even the top of the line ones, are either hourly or take 5%. Because I knew that lawyers get 5%, I knew to be on high alert when my lawyer said that she would take a little money upfront, and then 10% off the sale. Red flag. I like her, and she did me a big favor helping negotiate with my manager (a lot of managers will bypass signed documents in favor of a handshake agreement, which can be a lot nicer). However, I knew that I was being asked to give more than she was entitled, and the producer I was in connection with had mentioned I might need someone with more experience negotiating big deals, so, as I had done with my manager a month and a half earlier, I moved on.

To date, I haven’t been able to secure a new lawyer. Some firms wanted $600 an hour. Some wanted a $15K retainer just to talk to me. Others agreed to take me on – provided they liked my script- at the standard 5% but then never got back to me. I spoke to someone at the WGAE who was kind enough to read over my option agreement for me and gave me some pointers about it, with the caveat that she’s not legal counsel. Confident in the revisions and with assurances from other paralegals who did take the time to look at the agreement, even though I did not sign with their firm, I sent the revised agreement to the producer who was agreeable to the changes.

In the end, I realized that the world’s not as united against young writers as we might be made out to think. People were eager to help when and where they could, and encouraging when they couldn’t. Just don’t be afraid to make the phone calls. And know what’s standard. You’re your first line of protection.

Trailer Trash XLVII: Strange Behavior (1981)

"Straaaaaaaaaaange Behaviooooooor... a movie of mystery, horror, and suspense!"

Even good writers can write bad movies. Bill Condon won an Academy Award for his Gods and Monsters script in 1999; he would later receive another nomination for his adaptation of Chicago. This is the same guy who wrote Kinsey and Dreamgirls, which were certainly nothing to sneeze at. But let's look back two decades, all the way to a year known as 1981... What was Condon up to?

A barely-comprehensible little flick called Strange Behavior.



The trailer makes about as much sense as the movie itself, if you're wondering.

Fellow young writers: you know that weird little horror/sci-fi script you're working on now? There's a good chance it'll look pretty embarrassing in 20 years, when you're accepting an Oscar for your heartbreaking drama.


Trailer Trash is a weekly tribute to oddball, cheesy and often just plain terrible movie trailers. Writers: These movies got made... so can yours! You can read through our archive by clicking here.

What, When, Where this Weekend - The Girlfriend Experience, Terminator Salvation

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters. Have an event you'd like to see listed here? Give us a heads-up at info@screenwritersleague.com.

Opening this week...

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, dir. by Steven Soderbergh


Premise: A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.

Playing: Landmark Sunshine, Clearview Chelsea

Most of the buzz around this 'un came Soderbergh casting a porn actress in the lead. (Time Out thinks she did a good-enoughjob.) For fun, check out her NSFW imdb filmogaphy here.

TERMINATOR SALVATION, written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, dir. by McG


Premise: John Connor is joined in his attempt to defeat Skynet and its army of Terminators by Marcus Wright, a man who apparently has been rescued from the past, though Connor wonders if instead he's been sent from the future as a foil to his plan. As Connor and Wright push deep into the heart of Skynet, they get closer and closer to learning the secret behind the organization's mission to wipe humankind off the planet.

Playing: Everywhere

Terminator 4, via the director of Charlie's Angels and the screenwriting team of Catwoman. Needless to say, I'll be entering this one cautiously...

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Free Outdoor Movies in Brooklyn this summer - Summerscreen @ McCarren Pool Announces Lineup

Summerscreen is a free outdoor movie series projected in Brooklyn's McCarren Pool every Wednesday. These are always a ton of fun and draw massive crowds - just show up around dusk. Food and drinks are sold on-premises.

The 2009 Schedule:

July 8 - Reality Bites
July 15 - Evil Dead 2
July 22 - 24 Hour Party People
July 29 - Wild at Heart
August 5 - Fame
August 12 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Evil Dead 2! Wild At Heart!

See you all there.

Image courtesy of Gowanus Lounge.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 72 – The Sum of Its Parts

I’ll admit right now – I’m not very good at writing female characters. They always wind up being either completely one-dimensional or erratic and, more often, flat out crazy (obvious insight to my dating history, I’m sure). So, knowing full well that my female characters always need more attention – and hence, pretty much every romantic relationship I write does, too – I decided to go about my rewrites in a different way this week.

My comic book style spec is full of big action, big battles, big danger. But at the heart of it, it’s a story about redemption, as told through a budding romance. (OK, maybe not quite as sappy as that makes it sound, but there is a romance that evolves throughout it.) I knew that the ten major beats that comprise the relationship weren’t quite working before, but for some reason, I always tried to fix them within the context of the scenes that come immediately after or before them. I wasn’t able to fix anything, since I was too involved in what was next to make the scene work in and of itself. So, this week, I pulled the ten scenes out and read them back to back, with nothing other than awareness about how they fit into the greater scheme of things), to make sure that they worked as a storyline.

I can’t tell you how helpful I found this approach. OK, scenes one through five work, but then what’s said in six appears again in eight. And why is she mad in eight when they were fine in seven? By reading this select group of scenes together, I was able to figure out what story I was trying to tell (purely between these two characters) and how its evolution was either working or failing. When I reinserted them into the script, they formed a much more coherent subplot, and therefore, worked within the greater context much more effectively.

I actually found the approach so useful that I tried it with two other storylines. (I don’t want to make it sound like the script is fragmented – everything works together, but the romance is happening as the antagonist is doing his thing as X, Y, and Z. In order to make sure that the parts added up to a solid whole, I broke the script down and analyzed the parts.) By the end of the weekend, I had cut out an inconsistent (and unnecessarily drawn out) ticking clock, raised the stakes, streamlined the action and dialogue, and clarified characters’ motives. All because I broke the script down into its individual parts. Maybe you, dear reader, do this al the time. I hadn’t before. Now I wonder how much time I’ve lost in rambling rewrites that didn’t quite address or even find the problems in the script.

Star Trek: Warp Speed to $300 Million and Beyond

Apparently Star Trek is a big deal. The original series of 1966 paved the way for four additional live action series, an animated series, several movies, video games, comics, books, a new language, and I’m sure there’s more. Trekkies will have to forgive me. My exposure to the Star Trek universe is limited to fragments of the various series, and one prolonged exposure to Star Trek Voyager during a nine month stint where I was stranded on my brother’s couch with nothing but Spike TV to watch. I’m a fan of science-fiction, but I never was completely sold on Star Trek, so I approached J. J. Abrams' latest film with skepticism. Could it really be as great as all these reviews claim? After seeing the movie I think most critics are being a little too rewarding, but nonetheless, Star Trek is definitely a fun addition to the summer movie season. The film moves at brisk pace with lots of exciting sci-fi action, a beautiful presentation, and the gags you’d associate with a summer blockbuster.

Star Trek presents the origin story of the original crew of the starship Enterprise. There are seven crewmembers we follow, but the film stays closest to James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). The film moves at warp speed pretty much from the first scene, where we witness the dramatic conditions surrounding Kirk’s birth in space. The next few scenes parallelize the lives of Kirk and Spock as we see the development of a spontaneous and brash Kirk compared to the more subdued and logical entity that is Spock. It’s impossible for me to gauge how well Pine and Quinto’s characters stack up to the originals, but most of the Star Trek fans I know feel they did a good job. But from a story standpoint, Abrams’ ultimate goal is not to appease trekkies, but establish the polarity, rivalry, and eventual friendship between the two main characters. In that regard you have to acknowledge that they did a fine job, but the film ultimately serves the relationship of these two characters more than it does its story and conflict.


Eric Bana plays Nero, an alien obsessed with destroying The United Federation of Planets (this includes Earth) and seeking revenge against Spock for his failure to save his home planet. The circumstances surrounding this failure are unfortunate, but in my opinion don’t add up to match Nero’s hatred and motivation. Even if I were entirely comfortable with Nero’s desire for revenge against Spock, his desire to go on a planet destroying rampage is somewhat forceful. But hey, it’s a sci-fi movie, villains are allowed to be unreasonable. Sci-fi movie or not, a great antagonist will always feel locked to the protagonist emotionally and physically. There’s something about Nero that feels separate from James Kirk, even though Kirk was born in the wake of Nero’s destruction. The two characters weren’t even both aware of one another until the climax. For much of the movie Nero is fixated on Spock, and Kirk seems to inherit Nero as his greatest obstacle.

Star Trek is fortunate that its quick pace takes us from one action scene to the next before audiences can really get hung up on some logic problems and big coincidences in the story. Going into some of the coincidences could venture into spoiler territory, but from a screenwriting standpoint it’s the kind of stuff that every league member would have gotten called out for if we tried it in class. It’s hard to determine if screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were lazy. I have a hunch that the film has a ton of extras that didn’t make the final cut, some of which might have ironed out a few kinks. If I’m wrong then I would say that the screenwriters are guilty of writing what they needed to get from A to B, and not what the story needed.

The supporting characters aboard the Enterprise are introduced and come to their posts aboard the starship quickly. Treating it any differently would have involved slowing down the movie and cluttering it with more dialogue. To Abrams’ credit, Star Trek stuck with its desired pace over the course of a comfortable running time of just over two hours. Of the supporting characters I need to mention Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana), the character that gets the fourth most development of the seven. She’s probably the only thing more pleasing to the eye other than the great visual effects the movie has to offer. Women are underrepresented in the film, and if Uhura is an indication of what women will be like in the future, unfortunately the best description would be intelligent harlots. Uhura shows promise in the early going. She’s smart, motivated, and one of the more qualified members aboard the Enterprise. All of my respect for her as a character went out the window with the way she throws herself at Spock. It made no sense to me. It was as if suddenly Abrams had to throw a bone to the thirteen year old boys in the audience who wanted to see her rub up on somebody. Where’s a Captain Janeway when you need one?

One could look at Star Trek as a two hour introduction that sets up the adventures to come. Abrams puts his pieces in place well and manages to mask most shortcomings by whisking us quickly from joke, to great visual, to action scene. We can expect the sequels to be equally entertaining, but viewers should demand a more rewarding story that has the capacity to engage the characters more thoroughly. A menacing and ever-present antagonist would be a great step in this direction. I wish I could comment more on how the film stacks up in the minds of true Star Trek finds, but I know you guys are out there. Chime in and let me know what you thought about the movie.