Entry 114: Terminator: Genisys (2015)

Terminator: Genisys (2015)

Dir: Alan Taylor

"The rules have been reset"

 

Since James Cameron's The Terminator is nothing if not a cyberpunk-twinged slasher flick, I figure the whole franchise is fair game for bringing down to the Basement.  I'll start with the most recent flick in the series, primarily because I just watched it last night.  Throw on your leather jacket and shades, reset your CPU and come with me if you want to live; we're traveling through time with Terminator: Genisys.

Jesus Christ, this movie...I'ma try to explain it as succinctly as possible...The film opens in 2029 with the human resistance smashing Skynet's defense grid and arriving at the evil supercomputer's central core just in time to witness the original T-800 (series star Arnold Schwarzenegger) being sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (this is a recreation of a scene scripted, but never filmed, for Terminator 2: Judgement Day).  John Connor (Jason Clarke, Death Race, Zero Dark Thirty) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney-where the fuck did this guy come from and who decided to make him a movie star?  He has all the presence and charisma of a used condom lying in the gutter) back through time to protect his mother, but is then attacked (in one of several odd developments that are never properly explained) by some sort of human personification of Skynet (Matthew Smith, TV's Doctor Who).  Reese arrives to find Sarah (Amelia Clarke from TV's A Game of Thrones) already developed into the hardened badass she became between the first two movies, accompanied by and aged T-800 she's nicknamed "Pops."  You see, the attack on John has altered the timeline in such a way that, instead of striking at John in 1992, the T-1000 and reprogrammed T-800 are sent to, respectively, kill and protect Sarah in 1973.  Sarah and Pops make quick work of the evil T-800 (the Schwarzenegger vs Schwarzenegger fight is one of the film's highlights), but, for reasons unexplained, the T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, the G.I. Joe movies, replacing Robert Patrick, who was offered the role but declined to participate) has also shown up in 1984.  After Reese helps them defeat the T-1000, Sarah reveals that she and Pops have built a crude time machine and plan to use it to travel to 1997 to stop Judgement Day from happening.  Because of visions he's had of the altered timeline, Reese convinces Sarah to travel with him to 2017 instead, while Pops spends 33 years preparing for their arrival.  In 2017, Reese, Sarah and the now much older-looking Pops discover that Skynet has become an iCloud-style app called Genisys, John Connor is alive and well as an evil human-Terminator hybrid and Reese's birth has moved from 1964 to 2004. My fucking head is about to explode-I'm not doing a poor job of summarizing; these things really aren't given ANY sort of adequate explanation other than "because time travel!"  Any way, Sarah, Reese and Pops defeat the evil John and manage to ward off the activation of Genisys/commencement of Judgement Day, Pops gets upgraded to a T-1000 (?!) and a mid-credits stinger lets us know that the battle isn't over...

2015 is going to go down in history as the beginning of the era of nostalgia, when Hollywood decided to stop remaking properties beloved of Gen Xers and Gen Yers and instead produce heartstring-tugging, carefully calculated belated sequels to said properties.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World topped the box office, Mad Max: Fury Road cleaned up with critics and we got announcements for new Indiana Jones and Pee-Wee Herman movies.  On TV, Full House got a sequel series and Sam Raimi finally gave us the long-delayed Evil Dead 4 in the form of the ten episode Ash vs Evil Dead Starz series.  All of these things were designed very carefully to recreate beloved moments from the parent franchises/remind viewers why they enjoyed the properties in the first place, and all of them were financially (if not critically) successful.  Why, then, was Terminator: Genisys, built on the same model, not?  Probably because it's about 75% a terrible fucking movie.  By this point, every trace of the claustrophobic intensity that made Cameron's original such an effective thriller has disappeared.  The gritty, murky future combat scenes in the original, where emaciated and rag-clad tiny squads of human soldiers battled monolithic, slow-moving but imposing Hunter-Killer machines have been replaced by legions of action heroes clad in futuristic, G.I. Joe-inspired armor battling flashy CGI robots in crystal-clear widescreen.  The script is INSANELY convoluted and nonsensical; it never provides any explanation for its timeline changes and manages to retcon out of existence most of the first movie and all of the second (the only two that people actually fucking liked!).  Worst of all is the casting of Courtney, who takes Michael Biehn's wiry, sweaty, wild-eyed, PTSD-suffering Kyle Reese and turns him into a bland, musclebound, quip-spouting generic action hero.  Looming over all of these problems is the fact that The Terminator probably never should've been a franchise.  The original is a tight, self-contained and nearly perfect thriller.  The almost as good T2 expands the narrative into a widescreen action epic, but also closes the plot loop with a hopeful, slightly ambiguous ending that works best if it ISN'T expanded on.  The three non-Cameron sequels have all felt like they're searching for an identity and reason to exist other than making money.  They're desperate attempts to find a story where there isn't one.  If you're going to watch it anyway, there are a few pleasures to be found in Terminator: Genesys.  As always, Schwarzenegger is a joy to watch in his signature role, and the idea of the T-800's bio-flesh aging like real human tissue is, honestly, kinda brilliant.  Amelia Clarke gives the film's other standout performance; she's no Linda Hamilton, but she does a nice job playing a Sarah Connor who never had to witness the death of Reese and never had to spend years locked in a mental institute; she's tough and resourceful, but also hopeful.  Director Taylor (a vet of Game of Thrones and Disney's Marvel Studios movies) does a decent job of recreating the sets and lighting of the original film in the movie's early 1984 scenes, and the previously mentioned Arnold vs Arnold fight, though too brief, is amusing.  Considering it's the third Terminator film to have only modest box office success, it's likely that Terminator: Genisys will be the end of the road for the franchise (the rights revert to Cameron in 2019, and he'll be busy with his four (!) Avatar sequels).