Hollywood has been remaking and rebooting so many huge movies from the 80s in recent years that it feels a little bit like I’ve been reliving my childhood—if my childhood were filled with really bland, bad movies made by studio committees instead of really great movies full of blood and boobs that were made by exciting young filmmakers, of course. Terminator Genisys takes this process a step further by not only remaking or rebooting the franchise started with James Cameron’s 1984 film, The Terminator, but by using the series’ killer-robot-sent-back-in-time conceit to actually revisit meticulously recreated scenes from The Terminator and spin them off in new directions, which effectively erases the other sequels and creates a launching point for a new franchise that still pays respect to the original. Watching the film must be what it feels like to experience déjà vu.
Or to use a more damning metaphor, watching Terminator Genisys is like having a dream that starts off as a revisiting of old memories and then spins off in nightmarish, hallucinatory directions. This is a bad movie—a really bad one—maybe the worst Terminator movie that could have been made by generally competent people. Its director, Alan Taylor, proved that he could work in a strictly controlled studio environment before by making the generally acceptable Thor sequel for Marvel in 2013, but when faced with the task of filming a script that’s as broken on a fundamental level as this one, he falls flat on his face.
The film starts off by providing backstory to the events we’re already familiar with from The Terminator. John Connor (Jason Clarke) and his band of rebels mount a last ditch attack against Skynet, the evil computer system who nuked the world and then hunted down human survivors with robotic drones, and they succeed in shutting the AI down and defeating its robotic forces, but minutes before their victory Skynet is able to send a killer cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to kill Connor’s mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke), before he was ever born, thus ending the human resistance before it starts by erasing his existence. Seeing one last shot to counter this new offensive and stop Skynet forever, Connor uses Skynet’s own time machine to send his lieutenant, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), back in time to protect his mother and ensure his own existence, as well as humanity’s future. The twist comes when Reese shows up in 1984 and instead of meeting a Sarah Connor who’s a shrinking violet like the one in The Terminator, a slight bend in the time continuum sees him confronted with a battle-hardened warrior who has been awaiting his arrival and who turns the tables on him by making it her mission to protect him.
Right now I’m going to stop doing plot summary, because there’s already a lot of it on the page, and we haven’t even gotten to any new events that everyone hasn’t already seen play out in the first Terminator movie. That’s what watching Terminator Genisys is like. You sit there and watch characters explain situations to each other that you’ve already watched play out on the big screen, and you feel like you’ve tuned into your favorite TV show expecting a new episode and instead have gotten a rerun. The first third of Terminator Genisys is all recap, the second third is all long-winded explanations of what’s different this time and why, and then the last third is all pointless action scenarios that don’t matter because you stopped paying attention a half hour ago and, really, you didn’t need to watch members of the Connor family battling to stop the launch of Skynet yet again anyway.
What’s the wrinkle in time that makes 1984 Sarah Connor a seasoned combat vet instead of a simple innocent? Apparently somebody now sent a T-1000 (the shape-shifting, liquid metal Terminator that debuted in Terminator 2: Judgment Day) to kill her back when she was a little girl in 1973, somebody else sent another T-800 Terminator that looked like Schwarzenegger to stop it, and that Terminator has been raising her as his warrior child ever since. Who did any of this stuff or how is never explained, so suddenly you have no concept of what’s possible in this timeline or how many players are now involved in this struggle, and the story loses all sense of structure or tension. If, at any moment, an action scenario we’re invested in can be interrupted and changed entirely by the random, unanticipated arrival of a new player, then nothing matters. Action scenes only work if the audience knows the goals of the protagonists, knows the risks involved in what they’re doing, and are fully aware when something has gone wrong. In a story where anything is possible, nothing matters. Fiction needs rules. That all of the action in this movie is unimaginative, shot with no panache, and exists as mostly bad-looking CGI that lacks any sense of the physics or tactile impact (a horrible bus crash that everyone survives unscathed hammers home how toothless and A-Team the violence in this movie really is) necessary to make us feel like our heroes are vulnerable and mortal only makes things worse. The action in Terminator Genisys is just awful. Boring and awful.
The story that’s first redundant, then confusing, and always overly explained fails to engage, and the unrealistic, uninteresting action scenarios fail to thrill, so is there anything about this latest attempt at revisiting the success of the first two Terminator movies that doesn’t fail? Maybe the cast? No. All of the main players are horribly miscast, except for Schwarzenegger. He’s the rock of this franchise—always reliable whenever cast as a killer robot—but he doesn’t get enough to do here to carry the movie. He’s given a mentor relationship with Sarah, but we’ve already seen him do the mentor robot thing much better in T2, and the focus here is much more on the Sarah and Kyle relationship anyway, so the retread doesn’t even amount to much—especially because the Sarah and Kyle relationship is DOA thanks to neither character being played by an actor who suits the role.
There’s no question that Emilia Clarke has been able to affect audiences as the troubled girl queen who stands behind her armies and her dragons on Game of Thrones, but she’s so completely unsuited for playing the gritty warrior who doesn’t take any crap off of anybody and who gets her own hands dirty during a fight that it’s borderline adorable. Clarke’s Sarah Connor is like a puppy who doesn’t know how tiny it is barking at a grizzly bear, so all of her big hero moments play as farce. Her big romantic moments do the same, but the blame for that can likely be laid at the feet of Jai Courtney.
Courtney showed some personality as a smug bad guy in Jack Reacher, but every time a movie has tried to cast him as the square-jawed hero he’s been an absolute failure, and this film is no substitute to that rule. Courtney’s hero work is impossibly bland and forgettable, and he seems to be unable to find a spark of chemistry with anybody. There’s a lot of banter in this movie, both of the friendly rivalry type between Reese and the Terminator, and of the budding romance type between Reese and Sarah, and because Courtney lacks chemistry with both of his co-stars it all just fails. Well, it fails because of the lack of chemistry and because the dialogue was already clichéd and clunky on the page, but boy does it fail.
Thanks to some unanswered questions and a mid-credits stinger (and a basic understanding of how the studio system works these days), it’s clear that Terminator Genisys wasn’t just meant as a one-time, nostalgia-filled revisit of something that a lot of people used to love, but instead as a launching point for a whole new series of Terminator movies meant for a whole new generation of potential fans, and at this point I just can’t imagine anyone in their right mind who would want that. We’ve seen these characters battle robots in the past, we’ve seen them battle robots in the future, we’ve seen them battle robots in different combinations and at different ages, and it really feels like we’re long past the point where there’s going to be any exciting new way to frame the Connor family’s continued raging against the dying of the light. We’ve had Terminator movies that said our fates are written, Terminator movies that said there’s no fate but what we make, and now this one, which seems to posit that we all have a million fates, and they’re probably all happening at the same time. That sounds exhausting. Hopefully some studio exec somewhere, instead of dooming us to a fate of endless Terminator sequels, will take our futures in their hands and cancel any more attempts at making anymore Terminator anything. The first two films still exist, they’re still perfect movies, and they’re still so much fun to watch. Let’s just leave it at that.
