When it was announced that Warner Bros. would be reviving the Terminator series with a new trilogy set during the future war between robots and humans, fans were cautiously optimistic. When it was revealed that Charlie’s Angels director McG would be in charge, and the first one would be called Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, all hopes were lost.

But then a few pivotal things happened. First, McG landed Christian Bale to play legendary resistance fighter John Connor. Then an early teaser trailer was cut together. Along with a longer version that debuted at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July, the responses were unanimous: “hey, this actually looks really cool.”

Now that the fans are back on Warner Bros.’ side, the studio has been working overtime to make sure that they stay there. That started with the aforementioned Comic-Con presentation, at which a visibly nervous McG laid out his vision, promised to honor the mythology that James Cameron set up in the first two films, insisted that the studio didn’t care if the movie was R or PG-13, and even defended his name. (His full name is Joseph McGinty Nichol, and since there were a lot of Josephs in his family, he’s been called McG since he was a little kid.)

In order to keep the positive buzz going until the movie is released this summer, Warner Bros. has sent McG on a series of “Terminator Roadshows” over this week to present his vision — along with plenty of early clips and a newly cut trailer — to the press. The first of these presentations took place on Monday afternoon in New York City, and we were on hand to grill the director and check out the footage.

The McG in New York was an entirely different person than the man who presented at Comic-Con. Cautious and nervous among the throngs of fanboys, here he was in his element: effortlessly controlling the room, cracking jokes, and in general, appearing superbly confident. Even in an awkward outfit consisting of a jean jacket and red tie.

The “ace in the hole” was casting Christian Bale, he explained before presenting any of the footage. In order to land the fickle actor, McG had to fly over to England to pitch the film face to face with the actor. “He told me, ‘If you can get the script to a place where we can just read it on a stage, without all the noise and effects, and it would work as a story, then we’d have something to talk about.’” With the help of The Dark Knight co-screenwriter Jonah Nolan, the script finally hit a level that Bale was comfortable with.

Appeasing the original Terminator director James Cameron proved even more difficult. McG went to visit Cameron, working on the set of his upcoming film Avatar, hoping for his blessing, but Cameron, while supportive, wouldn’t go that far. “‘Look, I reserve the right to like it or not like it,’” McG remembers Cameron telling him.

The visit wasn’t a failure, though: Avatar stars the unknown Australian actor Sam Worthington — whom McG had already been looking at for the role of Marcus Wright, the amnesiac second male lead opposite Bale’s Connor. Before long, Worthington was officially cast. Oh, and the film dropped its subtitle and became simply Terminator Salvation.

Clip #1: The Harvester and the Mototerminator Chase

With the background information out of the way, McG presented the first clip from the film: an extended chase scene that lasted about ten minutes and features both Marcus and Kyle Reese, played by the 19-year-old Anton Yelchin (soon to also be seen as Chekov in Star Trek).

Fans of the series might remember that Reese was the original hero of the first Terminator movie: played then by Michael Biehn, Reese was best friends with John Connor and time-traveled into the past to save his mother, Sarah Connor, from the original T-800 terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who had also been sent into the past by the evil computer system Skynet. He ends up impregnating her with John in the process.

The scene begins with Marcus, Kyle, and a young girl named Star (IMDb identifies the actress as Jadagrace) pulling up to an abandoned-looking gas station (possibly the same gas station from the last scene of Terminator 2, although I can’t confirm that):

They go inside a shack, presumably to look for food. Kyle sees a half-full bottle of milk. “Someone’s here,” he says — and immediately, at least five men pop up out of nowhere, all with guns aimed at the trio. Marcus regards them coolly. “These people will not help you,” he tells Kyle.

They turn to leave, but then an old woman (named Virginia, played by Jane Alexander) appears. “Not until the young one gets something to eat.” One of the men with guns points it at Virginia: “That’s not your decision to make.”

The standoff is interrupted as the bottle of milk abruptly shatters, presumably from a gunshot. Everybody looks around: where did it come from? Suddenly, a giant robotic claw crashes through the ceiling of the shack and grabs one of the men and Virginia. Everyone else rushes out in a panic; Marcus and Kyle turn back to see the giant Harvester terminator towering over the shack:

The unnamed men all take off in vehicles, but the Harvester fires a blast in their direction that obliterates both vehicles. Kyle, seeing this, shouts to Marcus: “We can’t just run for it.” Instead, they grab a leftover truck and rush to face the Harvester head on — which, in another shot, we see has not killed the people it grabbed but has instead placed them in a cramped holding cell with dozens of other human prisoners.

With Marcus driving and Kyle firing his shotgun at the Harvester, they’re able to poke a few holes in it, and after rigging a trail of gasoline, they throw a flare on it and watch the Harvester (and the shack) explode:

They drive away, but their victory is short-lived: the Harvester emerges from the blast, fully intact. To chase after them, it dispatches two “Mototerminators”:

A chase through the post-apocalyptic wasteland ensues, with Kyle climbing onto the bed of the truck, throwing things off it and still firing away on his shotgun. We see things briefly from the mototerminators’ point of view, as their balancing and targeting systems allow them to stay on target despite almost any obstacle. Very neat.

Eventually, however, they both crash, and Kyle directs Marcus to drive over a bridge across a massive canyon (presumably to return to the resistance forces). When they’re halfway over, however, a massive helicopter-style terminator machine flies overhead and blasts a section of the bridge away in front of them.

And then the scene stopped.

Many of the special effects were unfinished in this sequence; a lot of the wide shots of the Harvester used a basic model that isn’t nearly as detailed or photorealistic as the final product will be, and the same was true of the mototerminators. Even so, it played as a terrific action sequence.

Clip #2: John, Marcus, and the Hydrobots

Before letting the second clip run, McG filled in a little bit of the plot for us: “If the first Terminator movie was about saving Sarah Connor, and the second was about saving John Connor, Terminator Salvation is about saving Kyle Reese.” In other words, Kyle gets captured by Skynet — possibly the end result of the sequence we just saw.

The plot will also focus on Skynet’s creation of the T-800 terminators, the first models to pass as humans. The resistance figures out that the reason Skynet is capturing humans is to use their skin to model the T-800s on. The problem is, they’re ahead of schedule: Connor’s mother told him the first T-800s appeared in 2029, and yet Salvation takes place in 2018. If they don’t stop the T-800s from being built now, thus making it impossible to tell the difference between a human and a terminator, they lose.

And, of course, Connor needs to save Reese not just because he’s a friend, but because Connor knows Reese is actually supposed to become his father.

Confused yet? Anyway, onto the clip: Connor and Marcus are in a helicopter cautiously being piloted over a marsh. The marsh is infested by water-based terminators called Hydrobots:

…which start popping out of the water and attacking the helicopter. Eventually, it gets taken down, and Connor is able climb out and reach land with the help of a very big gun that stops the hydrobots and luckily still works after being submerged in water.

Marcus also emerges from the marsh, and Connor trains his gun on him: injured, Marcus is revealed to be a terminator himself, possibly an early model of a T-800. Problem is, Marcus himself had no idea and thinks he’s a human — either he’s independent of Skynet’s control, or Skynet hasn’t “activated” him yet. (That’s my own interpretation, and something the clip only addresses cryptically.)

Connor tells Marcus he’ll never trusts him but asks him if he thinks he can get into Skynet and figure out where they’re holding Kyle. Marcus says he thinks he can, and with Connor’s gun still trained on him, he slinks backwards into the marsh and disappears.

It’s a good scene, and the hydrobots are way cooler than they might sound in print. Seeing this one clip independently of the rest of the movie, it feels glaringly obvious that it takes place on a set, but within the rest of the movie — and with the possible inclusion of some CG-enhanced wide shots that weren’t included in what we saw — that complaint might be rendered moot.

Clip #3: Extended Trailer

The third “clip” was basically an extended trailer: a three-minute montage of scenes, most of which we haven’t glimpsed before. It opens with John Connor recording a broadcast explaining everything his mother told him about Skynet and asking people to join his cause: “If you can hear this, you are the resistance.”

McG explained later that that’s how Connor begins the film: as a random soldier spouting information about the future that most people don’t believe. On one level, McG explains, the film is about how Connor rose in the ranks to become the leader of the overall resistance (usurping the leader in this movie, General Ashdown, played by Michael Ironside).

There was also a lot of actress Moon Bloodgood in the montage. Playing a woman named Blair Williams, Marcus first comes across her hanging from a telephone pole (possibly after ejecting from a failing fighter jet; the cuts were two quick to grab much context). They seem to team up in some capacity, although nothing we saw implied that it was romantic. (On the other side, of things, Connor is already married, to Bryce Dallas Howard’s Kate Connor, who from the looks of things is pregnant.)

Another scene with Bloodgood shows her coming across two or three antagonistic older men all pointing guns at her. “C’mon guys, we’re all on the same side,” she tries. When they don’t relent, she starts kicking their ass. McG explained later that she’s another strong female character in the tradition of Cameron’s Sarah Connor. Judging how well she comes across in these brief snippets — and how gorgeous she is — stardom will not be far behind.

The montage continues with Bale leading a team into battle. Things seem to go badly. He contacts General Ashdown, who tells him to “stay the course.”  From here on out we get a modified version of the trailer most recently released to the public:

“If we stay the course,” Bale responds, “we. Are. All. DEAD!”

…Followed by some quick cuts and a close-up of Bale saying, “Win or lose, this war ends tonight.”

Since Warner Bros. envisions Terminator Salvation kicking off a new trilogy of Terminator films, I doubt the validity of that statement.

In the brief Q&A afterwards, someone asked him about the future films, and while McG said he didn’t want to seem presumptuous about a sequel definitely happening, he said that if it were to happen, time travel would be a major focus.

We asked a question ourselves: “It looks like Connor knows that Reese is his father. Does Reese know, and if Reese dies, will Connor cease to exist?”

He hedged on the second part, saying that time travel paradoxes are something that they’re trying to avoid as much as possible and that it would be explored more in the second film. (A producer, Dan Lin, jumped in and said that they worked hard to make the screenplay as tight as possible in regards to time travel problems.)

To the first part, McG said that Reese definitely didn’t know he was Connor’s father, and Connor was intent on keeping it that way. “Think about it,” he explained. “If you knew you had to go back in time and have sex with one of these beautiful girls sitting down here, you’d screw it up.”

The rest of the Q&A was a mishmash of smaller bits of information: Bale spends a lot of time with him in the editing room; despite all the action scenes we saw, there’s a major focus on character and it doesn’t have a lot quick cuts; rapper Common plays a resistance soldier; the overall themes of the film deal with heady themes like “what is it that ultimately makes us human?” One major hint he dropped was that he couldn’t talk about some “surprises”: “Don’t put me on the spot. I can’t talk about the governor of California.”

He ended the Q&A with another cryptic note about how the ending might infuriate some people. A possible ending of the movie had been leaked online months ago, but at Comic-Con, he told fans that that wasn’t the ending that they ultimately went with. So in the reception that followed the Q&A, we approached him to see if we could get him to elaborate.

He assured us that the leaked ending was “absolutely not” the ending that went in the film, and that he thinks most people will like the ending of Salvation a lot. “I meant that a few people will be infuriated. Because it’s not a happy-go-lucky, Hollywood-style ending. It’s real. It doesn’t take the easy way out.”

Translation? It could very possibly end in a cliffhanger; it will definitely set up a sequel; and at least one major character will die.

We know this article is a beast, so to recap, here are the major things we’ve learned about Terminator Salvation:

• John Connor begins the film as a random resistance soldier and over the course of the film becomes the leader of the resistance that he was meant to be.
• Skynet is capturing humans to create the T-800 breed of terminators that are indistinguishable from humans. It’s eleven years before Sarah Connor told John they were supposed to show up, so the resistance has to stop Skynet from mass-producing them.
• Kyle Reese is captured by Skynet and the overarching plot of the film deals with attempting to rescue him.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger will probably appear in some capacity. (Read this article for more info.)
• Marcus Wright thinks he’s a good guy but is a terminator underneath, possibly the first of the T-800 models.
• Bryce Dallas Howard plays John Connor’s pregnant wife Kate Connor, but the real female lead of the movie would appear to be Blair Williams, played by Moon Bloodgood.
• A probable sequel with deal a lot with time travel.

And that’s that. Warner Bros. has really figured out how to keep buzz going on their upcoming blockbusters with these roadshow presentations; the format was used to great effect with Watchmen a few months ago. Here’s hoping it becomes a tradition.