Gabriel Luna’s Terminator and What we Know So Far…

While we don’t know what type of Terminator unit Gabriel Luna will play; we can at least speculate. This article is all based on the idea that Gabriel Luna is indeed the main title villain of the Terminator (2019) and there isn’t any type of flip/twist to his character…

“Blend into the crowd” Terminator Unit?

Terminator (2019) seems to be going back to James Cameron’s original concept (when he wanted Lance Henriksen to play The Terminator). While Arnold Schwarzenegger was like a panzer tank and totally stood out in the crowd as a hulking mass of muscle menace- Gabriel Luna on the surface looks like he could be a top notch infiltrator, he perfectly blends into the Mexico setting of the movie and does not stand out as remotely suspicious.

Of course Robert Patrick came to do this role previously (in T2) and did an amazing job blending in to every day society as a police officer. It is unknown if Luna’s Terminator will arrive as the actor’s identity or whether he will assume an identity on contact of a character (like the T-1000) but that would suggest liquid metal or a similar molecular particle technology but potentially more advanced. If Gabriel Luna’s Terminator arrives looking like Gabriel Luna then SkyNet has purposefully chosen a Latino identity for its killing machine.

One thing to be assured though is that Mr. Luna is in good physical shape, this isn’t a beer belly blend-into-any-crowd Terminator. Gabriel Luna is toned and has muscle but he is also lean and we would anticipate that like the T-1000 he might be quick on his feet if a scenario necessitated it in order for him to fulfil a mission objective or to remove a target.

Back to basics or more advanced Terminator?

It seems to be the Terminator craze to make the villain more lethal with each outing in terms of abilities (even if less brutal in terms of violence and gore) we might just reach a point one day where a Terminator just touches someone and they vaporise into a cloud of red smoke and the brutality of Termination will be gone all together for PG-13 land but we still hold hope that the new Terminator is going to be a horror fest with plenty of blood (and ultimately that fans are listened to and true Rated R classification is granted and reinstated for good for a fanbase that deserves better)..

What hasn’t been done yet? A fire Terminator, a sentient frequency matter (electricity style energy) Terminator (scripted for the original T3:ROTM script but not used) or maybe a H20 Abyss style Terminator or even something more crazy involving elements or multiple abilities?

The other option could be to go back to basics and Luna is a T-800 with a different CSM number (Cyberdyne Systems Model) to show fans that all T-800’s don’t look like Arnold (which we all know anyway but the movies act ignorant to the fact).

Now, we saw the mo-cap suit but this makes us think about torso Terminators, you know the endoskeletons that drag themselves across floors? Is Luna going to lose his legs, or will they magically regrow with ILM’s digital magic, or is some crazy ass morphing/shape shift/vfx show going to take place as he paces along? Will he start to glitch out like the T-1000 or is this a far superior unit with a near flawless design?
We’ve made no secret that we prefer Practical FX over CG,- in fact we pretty much hate CG these days (just an opinion). We trust the guys at ILM to do a good job but why do we get the feeling that anything involving CG just won’t be as satisfying as real FX… ?

If Luna is a basic old school Terminator we wouldn’t mind (we might actually prefer it) but if he is some whizz dazzle piece of CG it’s gonna have to be fucking amazing or it might disconnect us from the imagery we witness on-screen (there have been plenty of those moments in the last few movies). We understand some people are not as critical as we are, we hate CG Arnold’s after all but we know some of you guys think that stuff is amazing and you want to see multiple CG Arnold’s turn up in every future Terminator movie (sadly we don’t know how much longer we can tolerate that ideology because it doesn’t look real to us).

A make-up tease reveals nothing but foundation application, either that or Mr. Luna has soft baby-faced complexion that many people would kill for. No chrome battle damage is seen in the picture (unless practical FX applications/prosthetics are hidden off camera) so we could be going for another “doesn’t bleed” Terminator like the T-1000 Terminator. Not bleeding is kind of a give away that you are not human by the way but we suppose Terminators that are just sent back to kill only need to blend in to a certain extent, it’s not like they need to live with people or build relationships etc.

The musical Guitar Playing Terminator

Some fans were recently concerned that Luna was thrashing out on an acoustic guitar in front of a camera on the Terminator (2019) set but Mr. Luna addressed this on Twitter…

Big Vehicles of Mass Destruction

In the first two Terminator movies the T-800 and T-1000 both did big damage in big vehicles in efforts to take down their targets; what makes this Terminator movie any different? We wanna take the stab that this big vehicle seen in set photos is Gabriel Luna’s Termination vehicle of choice…

Photo credit: @CatralActual

The wheels underneath the actual plough are obviously just a rig to allow movement for filming without wrecking the public road. So, is this a snow plough? Hmm, well Mexico does actually have a winter, could it perhaps be obtained from storage at the airport? Clearing runways in winter seems logical and we know that Corvera Airport will feature in the movie.

So is Gabriel Luna going be behind the wheel of this yellow monster? We would presume so but with the movie being so secretive anything could happen and we prefer it that way.
Public filming has revealed a little too much if you ask us but that cost should be worth it to have real set locations in the movie and not 100% trash green screen sets which are commonplace in tent poles of today.

Sound off your theories and thoughts about Gabriel Luna’s Terminator in the comments below.