Review: ‘Terminator Genisys’

When “The Terminator” came out in the early 1980’s, it hit like a bomb, a low-budget B-movie about a time travelling killer machine, expertly made, blending a chase thriller with science fiction and horror, and it was an instant success. It spawned a fantastic sequel almost a decade later which helped usher in a whole new era of special effects, and then…well, and then more sequels kept happening. They got goofier, sillier, dumber, not as impressive, and somehow worse with each new installment. Here we are in 2015 with the fifth film in this unkillable franchise, and it appears that “Terminator Genisys” just may be the worst of them all.

The story ties directly into the plot of the first movie, in that this film’s set up starts with Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) being saved by John Connor (Jason Clarke) and becoming his right hand man in the war against the machines, and how John Connor leading mankind to victory against the machines directly led to the start of the events in “The Terminator.” Kyle Reese gets sent back in time to save John Connor’s mom Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from the T-800 sent back to her kill, but when he gets to 1984, he finds that events aren’t happening as he expected them to because the timelines have been changed. Skynet has been sending back Terminators to different times to try to stop mankind from having a shot in the future against the machines, and this has changed everything. Sarah was saved by a Terminator when she was nine, and it raised her and trained her so by 1984 she was already a bad ass and really didn’t need Kyle Reese except to maybe father her child so John could be born. And also she plans to travel to 1997 in order to stop Skynet before it goes online and destroys the world, but for some reason Kyle knows they need to go to October 2017 to the true start of Skynet so they can stop them then.

Got all that?

So they pulled a “Back to the Future Part II” and revisited a past movie but with different outcomes due to the complexities of time travel, which means there is no way anyone could watch this as a stand alone movie and understand it without having seen at least the original movie, if not the first and second (as the second one introduces the idea of a terminator reprogrammed to be a guardian and not a killer, an idea which this movie just leans on knowing it was brought up in previous films). Now, why would someone make this the first Terminator movie to watch? I don’t know, people are weird. I am just pointing out that this is the least stand alone of all five movies, as the previous four can exist mostly as their own stories. This one, however, hinges on the audience really having knowledge of the first “The Terminator.”

Did it work? I don’t think it really does because they are working with a different time travel idea in this movie. You see, the first movie relies on the whole “time is a circle” idea, in that our fates are set and the future is written, which includes the time traveling and the fact that a man from 2027 has sex with a woman in 1984 and they give birth to the person that sends that same man back in time to conceive him. Judgement Day, the Future War against the machines, the successful uprising, Skynet sending back a Terminator, John Connor sending back his own father, all of that is written in stone and that is just how it all happens.

But with “Terminator Genisys,” they are going with the splintered alternate timeline concept (again, like “Back to the Future“), in which sending people back and changing things results in rewritten timelines, all new ones with butterfly effect style consequences, which then causes problems because of the whole thing in which the guy from the future has sex with the lady in the past and sires the future leader of the human resistance. And they even make this all part of the dialogue, as in having Sarah Connor lament how she has no choice how things are supposed to happen because for some reason she knows (I think the reprogrammed Guardian Terminator told her), but then they don’t have sex in 1984, they time travel to 2017, and that already throws off the whole John Connor thing, cause how could he lead the resistance if he isn’t even conceived in the right time period? So instead of the circular time logic of the original Terminator movies, we have this weird alternative timeline in which Skynet comes online a decade later and Connor likely gets born almost two decades later (possibly, not really sure). And quite frankly it just doesn’t make sense, a helluva lot less sense than the original movies anyway.

And about that whole John Connor thing. I would label this paragraph a spoiler alert except that this big plot twist has already been spoiled by the Paramount marketing department in all of the commercials, trailers and movie posters (like the one above). John Connor (for whatever reason and it SERIOUSLY doesn’t matter why) has been taken over by nanobots, which use him as a disguise as the next ultimate terminator. And the way this is done in the movie, it was totally meant to be a big shocking twist, and it probably would have been a hell of a moment except that the marketing geniuses at Paramount saw fit to use this moment as the central hook to all of their advertisements. And it is not like there are additional surprises or twists after that, as John Connor as the villain is the ultimate change up in this movie, and kind of an inspired idea which could have been cool. Too bad I saw that trailer a dozen or so times in front of other movies, trailers which actually showed just about all of the biggest moments and scenes, which is quite disappointing. They really didn’t leave much for us when we actually saw the movie, which then becomes lame as the movie progresses as I realize how all the action moments were spoiled and all I am now seeing is how they are all connected. So save for the fact that I was expecting this twist from the first time I saw John Connor on screen, I actually like the idea of John Connor being turned and working for Skynet and trying to build a future in which humans have been taken over by nanobots.

But this brings with it this whole thing about how Skynet is no longer a missile defense system and instead is now called Genisys and is actually an Apple or Microsoft like company releasing an operating system that will link everyone to all of their personal devices, i.e. cell phones, tablets, computers, televisions, and so on. And somehow the Google-like ubiquity of this Genisys program around the world is what will result in the start of the Future War, but they really didn’t get exactly into HOW this program was going to start the takeover of the machines, as in were they going to just launch all the nukes like the original plan and just blow everyone up? Or was there a new plan? And how does everyone using the same operating system on their phones and tablets set up this new plan? It definitely feels like someone came up with this idea of pointing out how “connected” we all are through smartphones and apps and social media, but they weren’t sure on HOW this could somehow lead to the RISE OF THE MACHINES, which is pretty important when you are talking about a terminator movie. Were these nanobots supposed to be deployed or something? Because there was no indication that this Genisys company had this technology, though they were definitely able to make liquid metal terminators and the giant time displacement machine that allows the time traveling so I really don’t think it had anything to do with that.

It all just feels half baked, or maybe like the central ideas for this story were developed by committee in a board room and then went through a number of screenplay iterations in which everything just got as watered down and muddied as possible so by the time it got to the production stage, there was an idea of a movie without any actual substance or meaning to it. And it’s not like the original “The Terminator” or “Terminator 2” had anything significant to say with their narratives, but the one thing you can’t say about those two movies is that they are dumb. And sadly “dumb” feels like the main characteristic of this particular film.

Which is a bummer because Arnold Schwarzenegger is reprising his role as a T-800 for the fourth time in five movies and they actually came up with a smart way to have him in this movie, both in terms of how to integrate an older looking Terminator in this story and also how to explain HOW he became old, and it all works. And I love seeing him do the Terminator thing, even in a movie that isn’t very good, because at least we’re getting more Arnold doing his thing. But it feels like a wasted opportunity because he could have been in a better movie, and instead he is in this movie which feels like a cartoon version of the original films.

So even though “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” is just mediocre and “Terminator Salvation” is overall kind of whack, “Terminator Genisys” is the worst of the bunch, the dumbest, the most sanitized (for PG-13 rating purposes), and the most obnoxious. Hey, at least we can always rewatch those original movies and just move on with our lives and pretend this one doesn’t exist. That might be easiest.