Review of Terminator Genisys (2015) by Colginator — 16 Jul 2015

Now in it's fifth instalment the Terminator series, Arnold has returned once again in another attempt to stop the seemingly unavoidable judgement day from happening. But sadly at this point it feels as if the franchise has been back too many times. It fails to bring anything substantially new and instead feels more like a weak rehash of things we've already seen in previous films.

We open the film with familiar ground. In a post apocalyptic war the humans, led by John Connor (Jason Clarke), launch an assault taking out Skynet once and for all. But after their victory they discover that a T-800 (played by a CG Arnold Schwarzenegger and a body double) has been sent back in time to 1984 in order to kill Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and they send Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to protect her. But when he arrives everything is different. Sarah is not the meek helpless person we saw in the first Terminator, but rather a hardened warrior. And the Terminator Kyle is sent to kill has already been taken care of. with the only T-800 left being an aged model who has raised and protected Sarah since her childhood that she calls "Pops" (played by the real Schwarzenegger).

After this we diverge in to needlessly convoluted storyline of time travel silliness involving our leads travelling from 1984 to 2017, dealing with alternating time-lines that correct Kyle's memories and a new Skynet using a new "killer app" to take over the world. At times it's hard to follow and all the complicated time travel is basically the film's way of being able to reset the world and the characters to start a new slate in a more modern setting.

The strongest part of the film probably ends up being Schwarzenegger. Whilst his aged Terminator is obviously just a clever way to get him into the film, the concept of his flesh ageing as any human make sense and his "old but not obsolete" theme is different to what we've seen in previous films and does lead to some interesting scenes of his joints stiffening up mid battle. Plus as usual he does deliver the most laughs in the film through his robot trying to be human routine whilst still able to pull of the imposing figure that made the Terminator great to begin with.

But unfortunately this old Arnie seems to be the only element of the film that isn't a rehash from earlier films. The story is the same mixture we saw in T-2 with Arnie protecting the humans, a theme of whether a robot can love and the heroes attempting to stop judgement day. The only difference being that here the characters are so poorly developed that we don't really root for them the same way we did in previous instalments. Our characters are given such little time to develop that when they go from 1984 to 2017 they never have a single line of dialogue reacting to how different things are in the future.

Then there's the way the film seems to destroy the intimidating presence that Skynet had in the other films. They're defeated so quickly in the short opening with the humans toppling them like domino's, that I was left wondering how they were even a threat to begin with. But worse yet is how the film seems to ruin the intimidating image of the original T-800 from the first Terminator movie changing him from a near unstoppable presence from the first film, into an easily defeated nuisance who's defeated almost as quickly as he is introduced.

When it comes to the fight scenes they're a bit of a mixed bag. At times Alan Taylor proves himself confident of creating a decent action sequence with some of the earlier fight scenes with Byung-Hun Lee set in the 1980's are good creating a cool game of cat and mouse with a T-1000 chasing a helpless Kyle through a clothing store. But other fights just appear as mindless CGI violence looking as generic as you can get. The worst being a helicopter chase which uses some of the worst CGI that I've seen in a blockbuster movie in quite a while with helicopters having a cartoon's concept of physics and look atrociously unbelievable throughout.

Ultimately the film relies only on nostalgia. It tries to remind you of the past Terminator any time it can with half the dialogue in the film being recycled from the other movies ("I'll be back" "Come with me if you want to live" etc.) and relying on tie ins to previous Terminators showing the original T-800 along with the iconic designs of the futuristic metal exoskeletons. But in trying to do this it feels more like a homage to the Terminator films than it does a new instalment. And not a good homage either.