"I was trained as more of a traditional artist, and sculptor, and portraiture is always about the sum of the parts and the details," Rosengrant says. That period-accurate reference, he believes, helped create a visual that's as effective as it is unnerving. Rosengrantz sent those photos, as well as castings taken of the new bust his team created, to Industrial Light & Magic, which handled the movie's digital effects.
#Cast of terminator salvation skin#
Along with that vintage lifemask, Legacy had inherited extensive photographic reference of Schwarzenegger from 1983, taken to help Winston's team recreate accurate details (such as eyebrows, hair and skin tone). Although Salvation director McG told the Los Angeles Daily News that "it's the Schwarzenegger created from the scans from the first picture," Rosengrant points out that taking 3D scans wasn't an option 25 years ago, when the state-of-the-art in prosthetics required building a cast of Arnold's head out of dental alginate. Rosengrant has worked on all of the Terminator movies, and his company, Legacy Effects, is essentially a renamed version of Stan Winston Studios (the name is a reference to Winston, the legendary visual effects wizard who died last year). "We dug out our original cast from the first Terminator movie, and created a new, cleaned-up, properly textured life-size bust," says John Rosengrant, the animatronics and special makeup effects supervisor for Terminator Salvation.
![cast of terminator salvation cast of terminator salvation](https://ik.imagekit.io/9ifn2ouyo26/movies/terminator-salvation/terminator-salvation-poster.jpg)
If the cameo has a death mask quality to it, there's a reason-the basis of the digital model wasn't Benjamin Button-esque retrofit of Schwarzenegger's present-day face, but a life mask created in 1983 by Stan Winston Studios.
![cast of terminator salvation cast of terminator salvation](https://www.cheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Christian-Bale-1-scaled.jpg)
Getting the face right was crucial, not just for the scene's dramatic impact, but for the meta-movie thrill of seeing Schwarzenegger at his most iconic-without the actor-turned-Governor even showing up on set. Now, in the year 2018, a freshly minted T-800 is trying to kill John Connor, closing this bizarre Freudian loop (or is it wormhole?). Finally, an updated version showed up in 2003, to save the predestined messiah figure one last time. In 1991, another one appeared, this time serving as a combination bodyguard (against the liquid Terminator T-1000), robotic pet, and de facto father figure. First, a T-800 was sent back through time to the 1980s to kill Connor's mother, before he was even born.
![cast of terminator salvation cast of terminator salvation](https://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2019931/rs_1024x759-191031104214-1024-terminator-news-feature7.jpg)
For Connor, this particular model of Terminator was a formative childhood figure.
![cast of terminator salvation cast of terminator salvation](https://www.coloradodaily.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2009/0731/20090731_192989-1.jpg)
#Cast of terminator salvation movie#
Schwarzenegger's digital cameo comes late in the movie ( spoilers ahead), as human resistance leader John Connor (Christian Bale) duels what is, for his time period, a brand new kind of android assassin, the T-800. The result is the resurrection of the killer robot that launched a franchise-and a feat of time travel that's worth the price of admission. If the first three Terminator films were a flipbook portrait of an action star entering middle age, the fourth installment resets the iconic actor's cinematic clock with a climactic fight scene that blends the latest digital effects with a prosthetic prop that's been shelved for a quarter-century. When Arnold Schwarzenegger's face appears onscreen in Terminator Salvation, it's precisely as it should be: wide, menacing and trapped in 1983.