Originally published July 3, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com
If I’ve learned anything from the Terminator series, it’s that there’s no fate but what we make. The choices we make in this world shape what comes after; our futures are built upon the foundations we set down today. It’s as true for film franchises as it is for our lives. All the best series build upon their earlier entries in ways that strengthen the core story while incorporating new ideas into the fold. Having now seen Terminator: Genisys, though, I honestly cannot fathom how anyone plans to build a franchise off of a movie this insanely ill-conceived. At this point, I’m inclined to say this particular series is beyond salvation. (And not just because it’s what they called the last movie.)
Genisys once again starts by dropping us into the midst of humanity’s future war against the machines, on the eve of Skynet’s destruction. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) narrates this intro, telling us how the leader of the human resistance, John Connor (Jason Clarke), saved his life during the war and raised him up as his right-hand man. As foretold by James Cameron’s original Terminator, Reese is sent back in time to 1984 to protect John’s mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke, no relation), from the robot sent back to kill her before John is born. This is where the film throws us its first of many curveballs, as Reese arrives in 1984 to find Sarah already in the habit of hunting Terminators with a grizzled T-800 of her own, which she affectionately refers to as Pops (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
From here, the film blazes through a series of plot complications and developments that feel like leftovers from five other rejected Terminator scripts. Most of the first act involves Sarah and Kyle fleeing from a liquid metal T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee), featuring a litany of visual nods and references to the first two films. This is actually Genisys at its strongest, if for no other reason than the real shit hasn’t yet hit the fan. Kyle is baffled by this new series of events, and speaks for the audience when he (repeatedly) announces that something is not right here. As soon as the T-1000 is dispatched, our heroes jump forward to the year 2017 in Sarah’s homemade time machine to stop the launch of a new social media platform called Genisys. This turns out to be a cover for Skynet sending itself back in time to ensure its own creation (which we learn through a recovered memory Kyle has where he looks in a mirror and literally tells himself that Genisys equals Skynet). This is where you’ll probably start going cross-eyed, as the film begins introducing alternate timelines, double-crosses, and paradoxes in a desperate attempt to justify the central twist boldly plastered all over the movie’s advertising.
When we arrive in 2017, all bets that this story will pull itself together are well and truly off. J.K. Simmons shows up as a detective-cum-conspiracy nut who believes Kyle and Sarah’s time-travel story, but even he can’t make this mess any more interesting. Not saying he couldn’t, but rather the film never affords him the chance. By the time we meet him, things are already barreling too fast toward the inevitable showdown to really take advantage of his character. He essentially fills the Dr. Silberman role that Earl Boen played in the first three films, and given how much Genisys loves making lazy callbacks to the earlier films, it’s a mystery to me why they didn’t just cast Simmons as Silberman proper. They brought Miles Dyson’s kid back for some stupid reason, so why not Silberman?
In fact, that’s pretty true for Genisys across the board. It’s more concerned with paying lip service to the sights and sounds of Terminator and T2 (and to a lesser extent T3) than using those references to any kind of effect. There’s no narrative purpose for this film’s T-1000 to still look like a silver blob of goo. It simply is because that’s what 1991 CGI looked like. There’s no reason for John Connor to jump a Harley Davidson onto a school bus, aside from the fact that Arnold pulls a similar stunt in T2. They didn’t need to stage a fight sequence inside a police station, except … you get the idea. It reminds me of that George Lucas line about the Star Wars prequels rhyming with the original trilogy, except in this metaphor, Genisys is like a poem written by a high school freshman who just discovered free verse. The franchise rhyming that goes on here has no scheme or structure; it just happens.
The main culprit is the screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier. It has no idea what kind of Terminator story it wants to be, so it tries a little bit of everything in the hope that one of its directions will stick. Alan Taylor directs the resulting chaos with a competent eye, but without any noticeable style of his own. As beholden as his film is to James Cameron’s original work, he doesn’t even bother to actually mimic Cameron’s aesthetic. Say what you will about McG’s work on Salvation, at least he had the wherewithal make his film consistently brown.
I could go on, but at this point you already know the verdict. This is an absolute mess from start to finish, and not even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s jokey deadpan shtick can rescue it. At the risk of belaboring the point, Terminator Genisys is the film equivalent of a bratty child making up its own game and declaring takesies-backsies every time it starts to lose. Before too long, the game has lost all meaning and everyone stops trying to play. If that’s really the game this series wants to play, we’d all be better off playing literally anything else.
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