Gabriel Luna plays Rev-9, a new highly advanced Terminator that director Tim Miller describes as “essentially a T-800 and T-1000 together.”
“[Linda]’s always fun to work with and she’s just as intense now as she was when we did Terminator 2. She’s very adamant about the way she handles the weapons, the action, and all that.” The legendary actor adds, “She’s a very strong woman and I think that one thing that always comes up is that, in all of these movies, the women are always kind of the leaders and they have the strong upper hand and are very heroic. Cameron writes that very well. Feminine but also hard, it’s a great combination.” If Schwarzenegger was impressed by Hamilton even after working with her before, the newcomers to the cast were even more awed. “She really resonates a type of cool toughness and is incredible to be around,” says Mackenzie Davis. “But she’s also the sweetest woman and so full of love. She does have this warrior’s exterior, and I imagine being in these movies has really shaped part of her. She’s tough and cool and she does seem like she could survive in the apocalypse but she’s also extremely loving. I got to work with her pretty much every single day for six months, and it was such a lovely experience.” While plot details remain as secretive as Cyberdyne’s research and development wing, the story revolves around a woman named Dani Ramos (Reyes), who becomes the
target of a new liquid metal Terminator (Luna) sent from the future to kill her for reasons yet to be revealed. Dani falls under the protection of an android/human hybrid known as Grace (Davis) and ultimately is aided by both Sarah and the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) in her quest to stay alive. Davis says her enigmatic character is a noble warrior. “It was intimidating to play her. It’s a very athletic role and one I never really thought I would play or, if I did play it, not execute. I think she’s an interesting addition to the Terminator canon. She is working in service of the future and that’s a cool sort of mantle to carry.” Davis’ character is described by Miller as an “augment”—a human who has been “enhanced” to fight the machines more effectively. “Mackenzie is a revelation and what a badass she is,” says Miller. “She’s faster than normal. She’s stronger than normal. You give her a set of futuristic weapons, and she is a force to be reckoned with. [Augments] are the shock troops in the future war. But they feel pain. They feel emotion. It’s a messy process; it’s imperfect; it’s not shiny and clean, but she’s fucking tough as nails.” As for Dani, the woman that Grace and Sarah are determined to protect, Miller says, “Natalia is just wonderful all around. She brings a lot of emotion to this movie. The idea with Dani is you want to have this person, like with Sarah Connor, who comes from a background you would never expect someone to come from to then become one of the most important people in the future. I don’t want to tell you what Dani becomes, but I will tell you that she’s very much akin to the way Linda handled [the first movie].” From what we can ascertain of the story based on the relatively small amount of footage we’ve seen, Davis, Hamilton, Reyes, and Schwarzenegger must square off against Luna’s Rev-9, an advanced Terminator that consists of a traditional solid endoskeleton surrounded by a “skin” of mimetic poly-alloy. What makes this machine especially dangerous is its ability to separate these two components into two, fully autonomous Terminator units. “It’s essentially a T-800 and a T-1000 together,” says Miller, who notes that he wanted to keep the film’s action and visual effects on the same gritty level as the first two films. “I think that the DNA of Terminator is very grounded. It’s not space battles… I didn’t want to make a Terminator that was so powerful that you can’t fight it off with guns. I didn’t want to make a Terminator that could shoot ray blasts out of its hands or turn things into molten lava. All of that stuff, while visually spectacular, just doesn’t feel like a Terminator movie. We tried very hard to make Gabriel as formidable as possible while also keeping him and the action grounded.” While much of that is no doubt achieved through CG, Luna says he marveled at the amount of work done on the set in-camera, and tells us that he had to get himself into top shape for the physical action scenes that are still part of the framework of any Terminator film: “Arnold laid the template and then Robert [Patrick] was this other version,”
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