Review of Terminator Genisys (2015) by Ratimir G — 23 Mar 2018

Firstly: SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Secondly: See, trailer, it's not hard. Or you could just, y'know NOT PUT GIGANTIC SPOILERS IN TRAILERS AND ON POSTERS.

On to the review: This is a steaming pile of crap.

There's a good concept in there. When I first heard the idea of "Terminator, but Sarah saves Kyle Reese and says 'come with me if you want to live' and already knows what's going on", I thought "that could work". It's certainly better than T3's "Let's just copy T2".

Beyond that initial concept though, there's nothing.

Flipping the familiar concept would have been a sound foundation for the film. Take it from there, play it straight and you're golden. Instead, T:G felt the need to pile on additional twists with neither subtlety nor intelligence, while neglecting to do anything interesting with that original concept. I mean, surely the question of who sent "Pops" back to 1973 and changed the timeline is something worth exploring, right? But no, the question is raised, dismissed and never spoken of again.

Instead we have a T-1000 shoehorned in for no apparent reason besides nostalgia, and dealt with quickly and easily. We have a time machine built in the 80s to jump forward to the modern day while leaving Armie behind to wait it out just to justify his aged appearance. So Sarah skips over the time in which John Connor should have been born and did we just erase him from existence like Skynet's been trying to do all along? No, he's just traveled back from the future that no longer exists to meet the heroes in the present which he created by sending Kyle back to the past (oh no, I've gone cross-eyed). And he's now a Terminator, too. Which you already knew from the trailer. Some bollocks about nanotech. John is here to help build SkyNet, redesigned now from a military system to a networked commercial OS (with a billion pre-orders!). Insert violence, implausible bus and helicopter stunts and the SkyNet mainframe getting blown up. John Connor gets destroyed by another time machine which SkyNet has built in 2017 for no apparent reason. So does Pops, but he gets better. Also, Kyle Reese can remember what happens in multiple timelines because um, mumble mumble nexus point mumble, let's be honest, because handwaved bullshit.

The Terminator series has never been much for consistency in the application of time travel. All the major concepts of time travel have been used at one point or another: simple mutable past, stable time loops, fixed trends with some mutable details, etc. T:G outdoes the entire series in a single film. Every single time jump in this film seems to operate on its own rules, and none of it makes any sense at all. Perhaps Smith's presence is supposed to signal to the audience that they're entering a world of wibbly wobbley tiney wimey stuff.

In short, the plot sucks.

How's the acting? Emilia Clarke is as good a replacement for Linda Hamilton as you could hope to find. Schwarzenegger is showing his age as the Terminator, but it's still the role he was born to play. Jason Clarke is hopelessly miscast as John Connor. J. K. Simmons is wasted in a bit part (yet manages to be the most interesting character in the film). Matt Smith appears so briefly that he's more of a plot device than a character. And Jai Courtney...

One need only look at the actor's preparation. Michael Biehn prepared for the role of Kyle Reese by studying accounts of real-world resistance fighters, particularly the polish in WW2. Jai Courtney prepared for the role of Kyle Reese by reading the script. He didn't even watch the original movie. As someone said on reddit: Perhaps they should have hired an actor.

Dialogue? Not painfully awful. Not great. Forgettable, mostly. It is kind of amusing that they assigned almost all of the polysyllabic technobabble about time travel to the guy with the extremely thick accent. Sadly, that's funnier than any deliberate comic relief attempted in the film.

Any redeeming features? Well there's some impressive effects and stuff, I guess. But nothing worth sitting through Jai Courtney and the confused mess of a script to get to them.

After the uninspired T3, the disappointing Salvation and now this festering abomination, it might be best to just stop, but apparently there's one more attempt at reviving the series on the way. Let's just say my expectations are low.