Terminator Genysis

I don’t know how you can try and save a franchise with a movie like Terminator Genisys…I just don’t…

I get rebooting franchises, I get remakes, I even get the 10-20 year gap between sequels that seems to be the current thing to do nowadays but for the life of me, I don’t understand what the people putting together this movie were trying to achieve. A sequel? Kind of. A reboot? Yeah, I guess. A remake? Weirdly so, but as I walked out of the theater I couldn’t help but feel like none of these described the terrible movie experience I had just sat through.

Let me get this out in the open: I absolutely LOVE the world of Terminator. The problem at the core of the series i.e. machines becoming sentient and enslaving/annihilating the human race is still just as relevant as it was back in the day, especially with technology becoming more and more seamlessly integrated and “smart” within every aspect of our daily lives. It’s a good idea that just hasn’t delivered since Terminator 2.

As for the story, it’s a jumbled mess of the franchise’s “greatest hits” (more like a bunch of lame cover songs) and while originally something I was excited to see pan out, I quickly realized that all I was watching was a messy amalgam of all four previous movies anchored by terrible (and I mean TERRIBLE) acting, a weak “original” plotline all the while being held together (holding on for dear life?) by Arnold reprising his iconic role…and even he was pretty terrible by his own machine-like acting standards.

Close to everyone in the film was horribly miscast, the script didn’t help matters much as it stuffed as many callback lines and scenes from the other movies as it possibly could. I don’t need another “I’ll be back” line or another “Come with me if you want to live” moment. These aren’t fan-services, they’re more like slaps in the face and they’ve been done to death in the other sequels mostly to better effect. I almost wondered if the movie was making fun of itself or if it was trying to pay some awkward homage to what made the first two films so great.

All that being said, the worst disappointment stemming from all of this was that the movie held virtually no surprises for me. Each twist was the same as all the other movies. Oh, you avoided Judgment Day? Nah, it’ll just get pushed back or rearranged for more sequels or a final act twist. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is John Connor’s (Jason Clarke) father? Wait a second, you almost surprised me the umpteenth time you’ve make that a pivotal plot point.

The only times that I was even remotely excited was pretty much immediately negated the second the idea floated onscreen. There’s an awesome twist with John Connors towards the middle of the film that I actually perked up to, only to see it devolve into another boring retread of the Terminator vs. Good Guys scene. It seemed like every good, truly interesting idea the filmmakers had they were too scared to go through with. Instead, they brought it out in the open only to prop it up against the safety of those damn “greatest hits” scenes instead of blazing a new path with the choices they’ve made. The director, Alan Taylor, has a whole hell of a lot of damn good TV show episodes under his belt but I wonder if a better director might have saved at least some of the film. Nothing in it really looked all that interesting and outside of one appealing chase scene across a bridge, everything else pretty much fell flat.

It’s a bummer because there really was some potential trying to peak out from all of the broken parts of this movie. I liked the (what I thought of at the time) ballsy move of rejiggering the mythology of the series by having Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) already be trained and prepared for the war to come and I actually loved the idea of explaining that Arnold looked older because the organic flesh surrounding his machine skeleton aged just like any normal flesh would. I even dug the idea behind what Genisys actually was simply because it seemed the most logical way Judgment Day would ever come about in today’s world but alas, it was handled in a silly, half assed way. These ideas had potential, but again, no effort was made to run with them. Instead, it was more like the filmmakers took an early lead only to face plant hard and finished last.

I could go on and on about the little things this movie did wrong but at the end of the day what else did I really expect? The filmmakers seem so worried about pleasing everyone that they end up pleasing no one. So much for that planned trilogy.