Review of Terminator Genisys (2015) by Filippo S — 23 Jul 2016

Bland, inconsistent, and directionless.

I love time-travel stories because you can (almost) always go back and rewrite something, somewhere, somehow, and so never run out of alternate universes and new ways to reconsider old themes.

But I also hate time-travel stories because they're so easy to mess up completely.

Terminator Genisys unfortunately falls more into the "messed up" category.

Genisys was bland: the direction was bland; the cinematography was bland; the music was bland; the acting was bland; the messaging about our digital addictions was bland (and woefully incorrect); even Matt Smith was bland. J.K. Simmons stole the show. Arnie wasn't too bad either. If, for instance, you look carefully at the scenes where Pops tries to smile, you see a lot more complexity than you might have expected.

Emilia Clarke, who will always be the perfect Mother of Dragons for me, is just too soft and cerebral as Sarah Connor. This Connor lacked the borderline bipolar disorder that I think is a much more realistic representation of what a "real" Sarah might be like. Basically, Linda Hamilton in Judgement Day - just can't beat that.

Jason Clarke just didn't do it as John Connor. I'm not sure I can blame him, though, as there just wasn't enough in the script to glom to him. There have been so many different John Connors, I don't think any audience member can possibly come to feel anything grounded about the character. Just more blandness.

I wasn't even impressed by that "famous" scene of the battle of the two Arnies near the beginning of the movie. Quite frankly, they should have digitized and reused the actual original footage completely - especially for the sake of seeing a young Bill Paxton again in that classic scene.

Genisys was inconsistent. One modern-ish terminator was destroyed with a shotgun blast to the head. But "obsolete" Arnie survives diving head first into a helicopter's spinning rotor blades. The physics just doesn't work. That a "personal global network" like Genisys should also be simultaneously connected to military systems is patently ludicrous.

Genisys was directionless. I was intrigued by the big reveal - John Connor being the bad guy - but they didn't do anywhere near enough with it.

I was quite satisfied with Pops's upgrade at the end of the movie. After all those years of getting the shit kicked out of him mostly due to his perpetual obsolescence, it's rather like he finally got something that even his robot brain can appreciate. And one can only imagine how he'll deploy his new self, and the new puns he could use. On the other hand, it's a weird and inconsistent move. Given Arnie's age, I'm not sure he's got the physical mobility left in him to do portray a Terminator for much longer. Perhaps they'll get a new actor and just CGI his face on for key moments? Seems rather limp to me.

Quite frankly, I'm pretty sure they knew they had a dud by the time they were editing because the ending was far less equivocal than it should have been if they really intended there to be more movies in the series. Sure, there are unanswered questions - who sent Pops and the T-1000 back? And one can wonder if evil-John-Connor is really dead - like, what if one tiny bit of his nano-botty self managed to get out of the time machine, like dandruff on Pops's leather duds, and end up in the liquid metal?

But who cares? There just wasn't enough life in this movie for me to care.