It’s been a good while since my little tirade after we first heard that Terminator Salvation was aiming for a PG-13 rating (See: ‘Terminator Salvation: The Dilution Of A Franchise’). Well, the controversy has arisen once more!

Last year, director McG addressed the issue regarding the film’s rating, explaining that if the movie could be achieved with the PG-13, it would be, but that he was under no circumstances being forced by Warner Bros. to make it PG-13. He also said if the film turned out to be R-rated, then Warner Bros. would be fine and dandy with it.

Now the newest “What a twist!” moment in the story. At this weekend’s WonderCon convention in San Francisco, McG held another Terminator Salvation panel. At said panel, McG shared that there was a scene in the movie involving Moon Bloodgood topless in the rain. The reason for the scene was to bring back that Sarah Connor presence in the movie. While we may still get actual Sarah Connor voice-over, McG wanted his female lead to have that strong-yet-sexy “I’ll kiss you or I’ll kill you” kind of a feel to her. It turns out though, that WB wasn’t so open to whatever was needed as we were once promised, asking that McG remove the scene from the final cut so that the feared PG-13 rating could be achieved.

This is all a bit shocking, really. I’ve personally come a long way since that angry rant almost a year ago. All of the footage that we’ve seen so far has been really impressive and by all accounts, it seems as if the final product will be very bad-ass. This doesn’t mean that I’m OK with a PG-13 — I still think that in order to make this a Terminator movie, it needs that rated-R tone to it. The thing about this though, is that I wasn’t looking for nudity to achieve that rating; I wanted a handful of really dark, violent scenes to pull it off. For example: in Terminator 2, there was the scene where John’s stepmother is replicated by the T-1000 and turns her hand into a blade and drives it through a milk carton and right into John’s stepfather’s face. We don’t even SEE the act, but the visual after the fact is so hardcore and even haunting, that it’s not something you could likely pull off in a PG-13 movie. Not to mention the very obvious fact that if you’re in the middle of a war with extremely dangerous machines, you just don’t say “fuck” one strategically placed time. I’d be dropping them left and right in between humming renditions of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” gently to myself whilst curled up in the corner crying.

McG is urging fans to e-mail Warner Bros. execs and beg them to allow the movie to stay R. At this point, there’s not much that can really be done. We just need to brace for impact and hope for the best. Worst case scenario, maybe there will finally be an Unrated DVD that makes the movie better and isn’t just full of cheaply added “adult” stuffs like Live Free or Die Hard‘s joke of a movie.