****ing unprofessional. [comic con]

So I'm not a rabid Terminator fan or anything, but I still felt compelled to post about this.

McG's presentation of the new Terminator trailer was engaging and winning without being desperate, something he was rumored to be at the Butnumbathon, to the point of alienating- dare I say 'weirding out'- the audience. At the IGN, however, he was mostly funny and earnest, and came across as a director who's a fan trying to create an original work worthy of its canon while appeasing that canon's fans.

He also handled the Christian Bale Rage issue with good poise and, more importantly, good humor. The audience made this easy by playing along- there were no fans up-in-arms or soured by the actor's online record of bad behavior. The 'the trust of the set should not be compromised' line thrown out by McG could have played very poorly- as an actor, I've been in situations where tensions were running high and the process was getting rough, and tempers were lost and things said that otherwise wouldn't have been. I can imagine these situations I've experienced first hand being compacted by clinical anger-management issues and boom- thirty four f-bombs in four minutes. The audience seemed to accept it, though, which I thought was rather giving. My father, never a great believer in film acting as art, generally takes the view that what a lot of actors or James Liptons call 'being brave' is, in fact, doing their damn job. Likewise, getting through on a film set should not be something that inspires hissy-fits and breakdowns- but it's different when you're there. Additionally, Bale is well known for being an intense actor and presence on set, and McG brought up a point that I appreciated- he's making a war movie. This isn't an action romp; it's not aimed to fill a summer blockbuster fluff void. It is, much like the first two Terminator films, constructed as a war movie, a serious work aimed at examining a complex and serious situation.

Now, the presence of youths and giant spider-bots and motorcycle-droids sort of curbs my ability to believe the film will have the same sort of gravitas as the original, but Bale's weight is going to be felt, and hopefully act as a sort of counter-balance to the magnificent and plentiful desert explosions.

All this said my chief objection to the presentation and, indeed, the trailer itself is this: It's too damn long. Dismissing my general loathing of the way trailers are now cut to give away the entire plot and most of the good bits, the trailer was still too damn long. It was the Return of the King of trailers. I spotted four separate occasions where I thought, ah, good trailer, and had my thought interrupted by the fact that OH WAIT IT'S NOT DONE YET.

All in all, it was an inspiring and potentially winning presentation. But dear, God, McG, chop that epic down.