As I had previously explained in my review of Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, I had mostly seen the Terminator concept art on display before, mostly. Though, the ultimate gem for me was actually a simple pencil sketch of an early concept of Kyle Reese in the future war wearing some sort of cybernetic armor.
The Terminator – Kyle Reese Concept Art
In Tech Noir The Art of James Cameron, Jim stated:
“This is my design for Kyle Reese’s future-war uniform from The Terminator. It was created a couple of years before the Colonial Marine designs for Aliens, but you can see there are a lot of similarities, including the greave on the boot. I also included a cybernetic undersuit, which was similar to the one I designed for Galaxy of Terror, but we eventually abandoned that idea. This bullpup rifle augmented with the night vision scope wound up being pretty much what Kyle carried in the final film. We hadn’t cast Michael Biehn as Kyle at this point, which is why the illustration doesn’t look like him.”
James Cameron
We can see that Kyle Reese is potentially using repurposed SkyNet technology in the form of a chest piece and some kind of a gauntlet on his left forearm. Had The Terminator (1984) had its own figure line then this would have been one of the must-haves “Cybernetic Battle Armored Kyle Reese”, but I’m glad the concept was ditched in favour of a much more bleak and basic future, wherein survival is near impossible. By the time we reach Terminator: Dark Fate we literally have a reverse engineered idea of James Cameron’s take with a mesh / armor being placed under the skin of “super soldiers” and it felt almost farcical in its ambition to push for a sense of futuristic technological advancement.
James Cameron’s idea was better – though it still raises questions of its own, like: are these cyber armor under-suits only available to high ranking Tech-Com officers like Kyle Reese? Are they obtained from early models of Terminator, or adapted from SkyNet tech (thus meaning that the Resistance would need to reproduce them,- necessitating a never ending supply of resources and technicians at hand to build them)… ?
Maybe, just maybe, this futuristic bullet vest can take a 40 watt plasma rifle blast and negate its charge?
Although this was just a simple sketch on one of the pages of the book, as a Terminator fan it intrigued me the most and in that sense, to me, it was one of the most interesting parts of a book that I would highly recommend to any fan of James Cameron and the first two Terminator movies.
You can buy Insight Editions and James Cameron’s art packed book at Amazon.