Director McG has said that he cut a topless scene of Moon Bloodgood from Terminator Salvation because it felt gratuitous when he looked at it during the edit.

McG said: It just felt like: 'Oh, there's the genre stunt of the good looking girl taking her top off.' It felt counterproductive in the spirit of what we were looking to achieve on a storytelling level.

He said: I suspect it will be on the DVD. I don't know, ask Moon. She was very passionate in sort of a third-wave feminist take on the whole thing. It was a fun conversation to have.

The director had previously said that he would not remove the half-naked scene in order to receive a lower age classification for the movie from the MPAA.

Terminator Salvation Director's Cut has just been rated R by the MPAA for Violence and Brief Nudity.

The official line on the PG-13 rated Theatrical Version was:

Director McG only cut one shot in "Terminator Salvation" to earn the PG-13 rating. The quick cut involved featuring Sam Worthington's character Marcus stabbing a screwdriver through the shoulder of a thug.

McG claims that in the end the nude Moon Bloodgood shot “felt more like a gratuitous moment of a girl taking her top off in an action picture, and I didn't want that to convolute the story or the characters.

So the MPAA's rating doesn't really dispute the earlier reports about what was taken out of the movie, but calling it a Director's Cut causes you to ponder the director's credbility.

Terminator Salvation is a 2009 US/German/UK/Italy action film by McG

The (US PG-13 rated) Theatrical Version was passed 12 without BBFC cuts for the 2009 cinema release and 2009 Sony DVD.

• Director McG cut one shot to earn the US PG-13 rating. The quick cut involved featuring Sam Worthington's character Marcus stabbing a screwdriver through the shoulder of a thug.
• But McG also removed the nude Moon Bloodgood shot claiming it: felt more like a gratuitous moment of a girl taking her top off in an action picture, and I didn't want that to convolute the story or the characters.

The pre-cuts were restored for the (US R rated) Director's Cut (Extended Cut) which was passed 12 without BBFC cuts for the 2009 Sony Blu-ray.

The BBFC put the triviality of the nudity cut in good perspective:

Terminator Salvation is the fourth instalment in the Terminator franchise and sees a grown-up John Connor leading the human resistance movement. It has been passed 12 for scenes of moderate violence and intense action.

The setting of the narrative in this film is an all-out war between the human resistance movement and Skynet with its army of Terminators. There are some spectacular battle sequences with heavy explosions and gunfire which include sight of many robots being destroyed, including a close-up shot of a robotic head being crushed by a helicopter. This sets the tone for much of the violence in the film. Most of the damage and injury is caused to the robotic characters while the human characters generally emerge unscathed. There is some injury detail seen, to the Connor character in particular, but these sequences do not dwell on detail and do not contain any emphasis on injuries or blood. For the most part the injuries are impressionistic and the fantasy setting is always well to the fore. Given this approach to the depiction of violence the film is contained at 12 under the terms of the Guidelines for violence at that level.

The film as a whole does have an unrelenting intensity which is a well established feature of fantasy films at the 12 level but the tone is comparatively light and plays very much to audience expectations for the genre. There is none of the darker, sadistic, elements that occasionally take such works to the higher category. Mature themes and sustained moderate threat and menace are allowed at 12 in the Guidelines and these are all elements that contributed to placing Terminator Salvation at 12.

The extended version of the film also contains a scene featuring brief sexualised nudity as we see a woman remove her top, revealing one of her breasts. This is only seen from considerable distance and there is no clear or sustained nudity present within a sexual context. At 12, the BBFC Guidelines state that in a sexual context nudity must be brief and discreet and this sequence in Terminator Salvation falls within those limits.