This weekend audiences will be treated to Justin Linâs third entry in the T & Acceleration franchise Fast Five, a film thatâs best quality is just how ridiculous it is. Earlier in the week it was announced that the director had been handed the keys to Terminator 5 and today the French film website Cinemateaser released an interview with the director, in which he discusses his next unnecessary 5th entry in an action franchise. Lin is apparently a big fan of the Terminator movies and makes it clear that he doesnât simply want this to be an empty collection of robot fight sequences, which is promising even if McG expressed similar sentiments back when he took over the series for Terminator Salvation. Hit the jump to read what Lin has to say about his potential cyborg action opus.After the Christian Bale screaming prequel, the rights to the Terminator franchise got tangled up in some legal troubles and since those rights will return James Cameron in 2018, there is an understandable desire to milk this cash cow before Cameron regains control. Enter the Santa Barbara-based hedge fund Pacificor who nabbed up the rights for $29.5 million and hired on Justin Lin to sit in the directorâs chair.
âIt's actually Pacificor that approached me,â explained Lin. âThey had an ideaâ¦but I guess a lot of studios didn't go for it or something happened... So then, they came back to me and they said, âD'you have an idea?â and, I said âI have THE idea!ââ
Apparently Pacificor was so impressed by Linâs new approach to the series that they abandoned their concept and sent the director to pitch it to Schwarzenegger (who will probably end up with the most control over the project, a la Terminator 3: The Rise Of The Machines). Schwarzenegger liked what he heard and now he, Lin, and Pacificor are in search of a studio. Given the vast sums of money previous Terminator movies brought in and Linâs big cash making ways on his three Fast And The Furious sequels, itâs hard to imagine they wonât get someone to bite.
On the plus side, Lin did admit that, âThe Terminator was one of those movies I just kept watching when I was a little kid and this means so much to me.â So perhaps heâll take this project a little more seriously than his three admittedly silly Fast And The Furious sequels. The guy also recently directed the beloved âModern Warfareâ paintball episode Community (which even features a direct line reference to The Terminator), so he clearly not only knows his way around action tropes, but is smart enough to know how to poke fun at them. The biggest concern with Lin handling the franchise is that all of the clever time travel chronology and human drama of the series would be dropped in favor of additional car pile ups and gratuitous booty shots. Fortunately the director did (kind of) address those concerns in the Cinemateaser interview as well:
"Technology has grown so much that thereâs a whole idea of gluttony. Sometimes you get carried away because you can have a camera go through the window, but do I need a camera go through the window? Those choices are up to the director,â claimed Lin. âFor Terminator, itâs still very early on, but I donât want to make a movie where itâs not just showing off. I want to support the human elements. If you donât have humanity, then it just becomes robots."
So, fortunately it looks like we donât have to worry about an excess of cameras flying through windows in the possible Terminator 5, but itâs still too early to tell if Lin actually has a compelling story worth telling. No writers have been attached to the project, so at this point all itâs riding on is Linâs big idea and Schwarzeneggerâs support. In the end, while Lin will certainly get a chance to marshal the troops from some big action scenes, the guy who will most likely have the most control over the project will be Schwarzenegger. He had approval over everything on Terminator 3, which led to such unfortunate sequences as The Terminator sporting Elton John sunglasses and telling convenience store clerks to âtalk to the hand.â Still, itâs probably too early to make snap judgments. We donât know who will be writing it and we donât know whether it will be the Fast Five or Community version of Justin Lin who shows up to direct. For now, itâs just another project looking for a studio to call home. Fortunately, once Fast Five brings in a few dump trucks full of cash over the weekend, weâll probably get the answers to those questions very soon.