Terminator: Genisys

Released:  July 1^st, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Paramount Pictures

Starring:  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jai Courtney, Emilia Clarke, Jason Clarke, Lee Byung-hun, J.K. Simmons

Directed by:  Alan Taylor

Written by:  Laeta Kalogridis, Patrick Lussier

Personal Bias Alert:  not into Arnold, never seen anything Terminator

7.2 of 10

            Yep, I was a Terminator virgin going into Genisys.  Neither the films nor the T.V. show had crossed my eyes, and outside the catchphrases and other rudiments that have seeped into pop culture, I knew zilch about their plots.  I’m an anomaly among avid moviegoers, some of whom are surely side-eying my self-proclaimed credentials suspiciously right about now, but trust me that I’ve seen a lot of films, enough to suss out the good from the bad, and can at least contribute a uniquely unburdened opinion on this wrongly maligned film.

            Terminator:  Genisys is a timeline-twisting tale, even without all the baggage of the previous installments, that roughly follows Sarah Connor (human from the past), Kyle Reese (human from the future), and Pops (terminator from the future) as they hop around in time trying to prevent the machines from overthrowing humanity.  Humanity is, of course, willingly setting themselves up for their own doom, a theme that’s ham-fistedly brought up and examined with all the depth of a bird bath.  Nearly all the film’s themes are this poorly handled, but this failure is an anomaly in an otherwise well-executed movie.

            For all it’s time jumping, Genisys is rather clear about the ramifications of its constantly shifting pasts and futures.  Some thorny problems pop up after you leave the film, the kind that plague nearly every time travel film, but the writers smartly give you something constant to track as the character’s do the time warp:  the blossoming bond between Sarah and Kyle.  Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney, who play the pair, are seasoned vets when it comes to working in CGI-laced, big-budget affairs, and their comfort around these potential distractions certainly helped them stay focused on tracking the pair’s curious but contentious relationship.  Obviously, their characters have bigger things to worry about, which tempers how prominent this relationship is in the film, but they’re deft enough to add in the nuances even in the midst of the big action scenes.  It’s an easy layer to overlook, particularly given how their characters fade to the background during most of the big terminator fights, but their performances expertly service an ensemble film without going for too much.

            The real stars, of course, are the terminators, whose various models duke it out over and over again without falling into repetition.  Arnold leads the bunch as the oldest model, who must take on the much more advanced versions using trickery and ingenuity instead of brute strength.  The battles are wonderfully staged, particularly the early battles with the liquid T-1000 model, which unfortunately upstages the big finale.  Still, there’s plenty of action spaced out in the film’s two hours, and it’s this pacing that carries the film past most of its wrong turns.  Arnold does his fair share of the lifting, both literally and metaphorically, as one of the most believable and funniest over-60 action characters to date.

            Admittedly, Genisys does take some wrong turns early on, leaving the eventualities of the plot pretty easy to spot.  Perhaps having this blatant of an endpoint helps the whole film feel more coherent, but this fault doesn’t feel intentional like the other downsides seemed to be.  The later revelations are still played out like they’re supposed to be surprising, which they never are, and takes away from the film’s climax. 

            In reading the various reviews that are already flooding the internet, it seems everyone from laymen to professionals are pointing out different upsides and downsides to Genisys.  The consensus is certainly that it’s bad, but the reasons behind this opinion varies wildly.  As an outsider, I have to speculate that the disappointment stems from people’s love of the first two Terminator films and the fact that this isn’t similar enough to those movies.  But those films were released in 1984 and 1991, so long ago that the layout and pacing of films actually differ from their modern-day equivalents.  Genisys is a thoroughly modern blockbuster in terms of pacing and content, something that must be expected for a studio to invest $150 million, and it’s far from the worst of its kind to come across our screens.

Other Notes:

Ø  Beware poor casting.  They put a very famous person in a ‘surprise’ role.

Ø  Why are there gun stashes everywhere?  Wouldn’t someone have caught on that Arnold repeatedly buys an army’s worth of weapons?

Ø  The amount of times they destroy/wreck the Golden Gate Bridge has to be a joke.