Terminator Genisys starts out pretty much the same way as the original did. Humanity, led by revolutionary John Connor (Jason Clarke), is on the verge of defeating Skynet and its army of machines. But Skynet is able to send back a Terminator to 1984 to kill John's mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke). John's most trusted soldier Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) volunteers to go back in time to save Sarah and preserve their victory. But when Reese gets to Los Angeles in 1984, the movie takes a very different path.
It turns out that Sarah Connor was first attacked when she was 9, and that she was rescued by a Terminator she now calls "Pops" (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The timeline has already changed, and Sarah has spent the last eleven years preparing with Pops for the arrival of Reese and her robotic assassins. Thanks to Pops' files, she knows exactly when Skynet goes online, and she plans to go to extreme means to stop Judgment Day from happening.
The Terminator franchise already has one of the most convoluted timelines in all of cinema, and Genisys only makes things murkier. There’s really no point to parsing the time travel shenanigans of this film. It just doesn’t make any real sense, the film just glossing over huge paradoxes in the time stream, and seemingly saving the explanations for future installments. And perhaps this would all be more bearable if the film itself was more unique, if it messed around with the timeline in order to create a new vision of what these movies could be. Unfortunately, it is at best, just trying to replicate what previous installments have done.
The best idea the film has lies in the relationship between this version of Sarah Connor and Pops. There is eleven years of new history between them, and their wry familiarity gives the film a measure of personality. This largely goes away, however, as the film gets to the business of its action set pieces. These big, VFX-heavy sequences are moderately entertaining, but they actually pale in comparison to the ones put together by James Cameron back in Terminator 2. It feels like the film is trying to live within the shadow of that movie, replicating beats and throwing out all sorts of callbacks to the biggest moments of that film.
The cast is a mixed bag. Arnold Schwarzenegger is aging well into this role, even though it doesn’t quite make sense for the Terminator to be aging at all. Schwarzenegger turns a lack of emotionality into strange, wry humor, and he is consistently the most entertaining thing about this film. Emilia Clarke lacks the physicality of Linda Hamilton, but the actress displays toughness in ways that go beyond her slight frame. The weak link in this cast is Jai Courtney, who once again proves to be as bland as leading men get. He is a poor replacement for Michael Biehn.
Terminator Genisys is further proof that sometimes, there’s only so much story you can get from one property. In revisiting these old beats, the film actually makes the whole franchise seem weaker. Skynet feels like less of an actual threat with every iteration of this series, the danger that it represents becoming more and more ephemeral with every new ridiculous plan to change the timeline. Skynet, despite being an all powerful computer system that is supposed to be in every way superior, is weirdly limited by plans that involve killing one family. After repeated failures, one would think that this system would learn to try other things. The same could be said about the franchise.
My Rating:
