When John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and safeguard the future, an unexpected turn of events creates a fractured timeline. Now, Sgt. Reese finds himself in a new and unfamiliar version of the past, where he is faced with unlikely allies, including the Guardian (Arnold Schwarzenegger), dangerous new enemies, and an unexpected new mission: To reset the future...
Reviews
I want so much to give this a big Arnie's thumbs up but in all good conscience I just can't, at least not an enthusiastic one. The good news is that it didn't suck and it has all the ingredients of a popcorn tentpole movie. But it just can't be compared to the first two James Cameron classics. That's a near impossible task, but I do admire it's attempt to try.
When John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and safeguard the future, an unexpected turn of events creates a fractured timeline. Now, Sgt. Reese finds himself in a new and unfamiliar version of the past, where he is faced with unlikely allies, including the Guardian (Arnold Schwarzenegger), dangerous new enemies, and an unexpected new mission: To reset the future...
Terminator Genisys is a clever reboot in that it changes the events of T1 so that all the characters go on a new timeline trajectory. It is not a new approach (recall X-Men: Days of Future Past) and the writers took the premise of The Terminator, the cyborg buddy plot of T2: Judgement Day, mixed it up with lots of time travel tropes and let it ripped. It is clever and smart, but IMHO it's numerous self-awareness markers wear thin after a while. Still, this is a creditable piece of writing that attempts to change a constant that runs through the past four films - the John Connor genealogy.
The movie feels bogged down by having to explain all the time travel mumbo jumbo (as usual, it gave my wife a headache and she couldn't keep up) in uncreative ways. It even introduces a new term, "nexus point", which conveniently sort of explained all the parallel timelines (I need to google that one). After a while it is indeed hard to keep up and I gave up. It made me miss the stark simplicity of Cameron's iconic first Terminator film that didn't bother to do all these explanation because making characters compelling is a cheat code.
Genisys also suffers from a lack of a convincing antagonist. For that I blame the trailer which reveals the identity of that antagonist. I can see how the writers want to change it up but the antagonist is not given room to develop in a satisfying manner. In terms of protagonists it fares better. It is great to see Arnold Schwarzenegger back uttering his iconic lines and some new ones - "I am old, but I am not obsolete". For my taste, Emilia Clarke did a good job with her one note character but seriously in my book no one can ever beat the singularity and gravitas of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor.
The action spectacles are of the staple type and not game changers. It made me miss T2 a lot more. Those days in the cinema, as I ogled at the action sequences of T2 I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. Sadly, not here. How many times do I need to see the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed? Apparently not enough. There was one sequence involving helicopters which looked so cartoonish that I was taken out of the story. Some of the action sequences felt embedded because an alarm has sounded after some lengthy exposition. In short, it didn't feel organic. However, there are some great ones that are still worth the price of an admission.
IMHO Terminator Genisys represents a nice homage to Cameron's seminal films and successfully (to a certain degree) built on the premise to hopefully justify a new trilogy. Let's see if that happens.
PS - Do yourself a favour by re-watching the first two films. We did that over two nights and it really made a lot of stuff clearer in Genisys. This new one is not kind to people who have not seen the James Cameron films.
