Preparations are still bubbling away on the Terminator 4 movie, which has alas lost its title, but gained a Kyle Reese. Given that it’s a story about the surviving the robot-apocalypse, a serial number designation and a key character for surviving that apocalypse is all it needs anyway.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Anton Yelchin, is in negotiations to take on the role of teen version of the Kyle Reese role, played by Michael Biehn in the Terminator 1. Since Anton is currently playing young Pavel Chekov in the new Trek movie, if he steps into the role of Kyle Reese that would certainly cement his genre cred.

Much has been made of the time travel elements of the Terminator movie and television series. Although, for me, the Terminator saga is nowhere near as complex as "All You Zombies", a time travel short story by Robert Heinlein in which the main character is his own mother, father, bartender, and every other character in the story.

One of the things that is so much fun about time travel stories is that they can enable a plot arc like Terminator. Kyle Reese will grow up in the post-apocalyptic future and then travel to the past to save/love Sarah Connor, so they can became the mother and father of the savior of the human race.

Terminator 4, which is set in that post-apocalyptic future, will play out the friendship (and other general weirdness) of 30 year old John Connor (Christian Bale) palling around with his teenage father, talking up his mother, and giving Sarah Connor's picture to young Kyle so Kyle will fall in love with her, and volunteer to travel back in time in the first place. It's a plot arc that's straight out of 12th century literature, if 12th century literature were big on time travel.

Of particular interest to me was another plot revelation in the Hollywood Reporter article,
"Reese, one of the children who survived a machine-driven nuclear holocaust, befriends Marcus (Sam Worthington), an early edition of the Terminator cyborg played in previous films by Arnold Schwarzenegger."

While it had been previously been reported that Sam Worthington was joining the cast as another Terminator, it's interesting to learn that T4 will follow the pattern of the later movies, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles television show, by having a “sympathetic” cyborg character.

With the Terminator production set to start in May, when a genre fan's heart lightly turns to large explosive movies, Paul Haggis (Casino Royale, Million Dollar Baby) is in negotiations to put the final gloss on the T4 script.

Sources
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ifff588c2bae9eaff59b0ab835235b636
http://imdb.com/name/nm0947338/
http://imdb.com/name/nm0353673/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94