Terminator Genisys

Synopsis: You know the drill - robots and people from the future sent into the past to fight over someone or something important. Cut to explosions and gunfire…  

Ok, let’s do this. Terminator Genisys is bad. Not awful, just bad. Taken as a mid-tier action flick, it’s competent. Things explode, people get shot, the heroes yell a lot and crack wise while voice-overs and awkward exposition substitute for character development and plot. If you’re looking for something mindless to distract you for a couple of hours, it’ll do the job.

But, this is a Terminator film. The first two instalments were hugely influential cultural icons. As the third attempt to recapture the magic of those two it’s got a lot to live up to. It doesn’t.

(Spoilers below…)

First off, there’s the casting. Jason Clarke is miscast as John Connor. He’s a talented actor, but this isn’t a good fit for him. I don’t buy him as the guerrilla leader who saved mankind. Christian Bale wasn’t a perfect fit for the role either, but at least he had an intensity that persuaded you he was up to the job. Clarke is too personable to carry it off. He’s a kindly uncle, not a hardened military leader. And when he returns as the evil Skynet version, he’s less than terrifying. Next, we’ve got Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese. He’s unable to project the traumatised dedication of Michael Biehn with his slightly creepy sense of devotion to Sarah Connor. Plus he’s way too buff. Seriously, Biehn was wiry as hell, you believed he’d grown up hiding in tunnels and scavenging what he could eat. It’s a problem when your heroes from the future all look way too healthy to have been fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And he totally lacks any chemistry with Emilia Clarke, our new Sarah Connor. She just shouts a lot and cracks jokes about “Pops”, her guardian terminator sent to protect her when she was a child. At least it explains why Arnie looks old. But as a character, Sarah Connor makes no sense. Raised from the age of 9 by a Terminator, she should be emotionally stunted, robotic. Closer to Mowgli or Tarzan than the whining teen we get. How she’s capable of handling human interaction is a puzzle that never gets solved.

Next, we’ve got the plot. It’s obvious the directive given was “reboot the franchise” as the story is basically about rewriting the timelines to justify another go-round. What’s kind of interesting is that for a moment, they go all Back To The Future 2 on us and dive into the original film’s timeline and mess with it. That showed some promise, as events get screwed up and confusion reigns. I wish they’d stuck with it. Instead they use a jerry-rigged time machine to travel to 2017 to fight a new incarnation of Skynet. It does at least lead to the one good joke in the entire film. On being told you need to be naked to stand inside the time portal, the answer comes back “I know how time travel works”. For one brief moment, I laughed with the film, not at it. But once we’re in 2017, we’re back to stupidity. Skynet is now Genisys, a new operating system that sounds like Google’s Android, it’s plugged into everything.

The plot logic totally fails. If this is a new timeline, then John Connor hasn’t been born, certainly hasn’t been trained to be the great leader of humanity, and therefore his “surprise” reappearance can’t happen. It’s a major plot hole that nobody is interested in addressing. But there’s plenty of others, like who sent “Pops” back to protect Sarah?, or who thought it was a good idea to hire Matt Smith to personify Skynet when giving it a face was one of the more odious elements of Terminator Salvation. But really, cataloguing the dumb ideas present in the film would make this a handout, not a review

To be fair, there are some good ideas present but ideas aren’t any good if you can’t execute them and they’re thrown away as moments of comic relief rather than developed into anything interesting.

Terminator Genisys  is an emotionless mess with zero charisma punctuated by explosions. Whilst the franchise has been on a downward slide for two decades, it still sucks to see a bad Terminator film.

 

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