When I first heard that Fox was set to produce a television spin-off of the Terminator trilogy, I had seriously mixed feelings. Low budget series centering on a character attempting to avert doomsday by achieving a series of difficult and vague feats while on the lamb has been done to death! I don’t think that I need to expound or even offer proof for that opinion for the readers of this blog. I’ll just say that every time the SciFi channel runs a First Wave marathon, I go read a book. However, things suddenly began to look up when I saw the trailers for this series.
To begin with Summer Glau, who played River Tam on Fox’s Firefly, plays a Terminator in the series. Take a second to absorb that. That skinny little girl has just been typecast for life. She’ll be playing bizarre ass-kicking sci-fi characters in obscure sci-fi series until she’s sixty. Still, alone, she’s enough to guarantee I’ll be tuning in this January.
Second, the trailer isn’t half bad. I’m not saying it has the intellectual sophistication of Les Miserables or effects of the Matrix, but it’s not the shoot-out punctuated car chase scene I had expected. The trailer gives me the sense that the producers may be aiming for story arcs rather than self-encapsulated episodic action fixes. If so, I say bravo!
Finally, after browsing through the series’ Wikipedia entry, it seems that Fox isn’t skimping on the talent. This isn’t Fox’s normal grab-bag cast of unknowns flavored with B-movie rejects. In addition to Summer Glau, Sarah Connor will be played by Lena Headey of 300 fame, John Connor will be played by Thomas Dekker of Heroes, and Richard T. Jones of Judging Amy. They also seems to have a great line-up of veteran special effects crew.
- Kristen Branan: won Visual Effects Society Awards for “Best Visual Effects in a Television Series” for Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.
- Jose Perez: won a Visual Effects Society Award for “Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Broadcast Program” on Battlestar Galactica.
- Eric Withee: The Matrix Revolutions, Serenity and Conspiracy Theory.
- Steve Graves: Battlestar Galactica, I, Robot and Interceptor Force 2.
- Saeed Faridzadeh: Æon Flux and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
All in all, it seems as if Fox has really committed itself this time, even giving the series one of it’s coveted primetime Sunday timeslots. So let’s all begin praying that the series’ ratings are high enough that the Sci-Fi channel picks it up like Stargate SG-1, before Fox gets around to canceling it permanently like the thirty or so other sci-fi series it’s spawned.
The series is set for to premiere in January, and will air on Sunday nights from 9-10 pm ET.
Source: ComingSoon.net
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