Deja Poo: Terminator Genisys (Review)
Terminator: Genisys pays strict homage to the original before traipsing down a senseless, incomprehensible path
A genesis is a beginning. A root of a creation. The moment of inception. Terminator: Genisys (
), the fifth movie in a 31-year-old franchise, is very far from anything resembling that. It fancies itself an origin, which is true in the sense that it’ll surely be followed by a sequel, but it is not new.
The premise is the same as James Cameron’s original movie, The Terminator. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is a resistance fighter in a post-apocalyptic future. He’s led by John Connor (Jason Clarke), a military savant who saved the world from Skynet, an artificially intelligent network of robots. Skynet sends a model T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time, to May 12, 1984, to kill John’s mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke). Kyle volunteers to time-travel as well, vowing to save and protect Sarah. If she dies, John will never exist. Hasta la vista, humankind.
With Genisys, director Alan Taylor pays tremendous homage to Cameron’s legacy. The first scenes from 1984 are, senselessly enough, shot-for-shot recreations of footage from The Terminator — which Taylor could not use because it’s owned by another production company. The T-800 still scares away a cigar-chomping forklift driver. Kyle, after writhing from his time-hop, still steals a homeless man’s pants in a back alley. All of this has happened before.
And then, things change. The T-800 is destroyed by another grey-haired and wrinklier Terminator of the same model. When Kyle accosts a cop at gunpoint, the officer transforms into a T-1000, which originally didn’t appear until Cameron’s sequel, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. An armored car plows into the T-1000, the door swings open, and a woman orders Kyle to get inside. It’s Sarah Connor. She’s saving him. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.
I wish I could explain why Terminator: Genisys does these things, why it mimics its forebear for so long, why Taylor chooses to drop the imitation when he does. It’s vaguely satisfying to watch — if only for the moment when Emilia Clarke’s barks “Come with me if you want to live!” — but to what end does this all serve? Why rewrite what came before? In later scenes, Genisys scribes Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier drop a heaping pile of scientific mumbo jumbo about “alternate timelines” into each character’s mouth. It’s a lazy construction that never fully explains how the story moves forward. Genisys ties itself in knots, but can’t loosen them.
Sarah, we’re told, prepared for more than a decade to meet Kyle. She was attacked by Skynet as a child, lost her parents, then was found by a friendly T-800, which was programmed to protect her. The robot, indulgently named “Pops” by Sarah, looks older because it is older; the skin covering its endoskeleton ages just as Schwarzenegger’s has. How convenient!
Finally united with Kyle, Sarah, and Pops reveal their plan: they’ll travel through time, yet again, to stop Judgement Day. Who needs a schuck like John Connor when you can save the world yourself?
Of course, it’s not that easy to stop doomsday. For reasons beyond reason, Kyle and Sarah jump to the year 2017, mere days before Skynet’s Trojan horse, an Apple-esque operating system called “Genisys,” launches worldwide. They had years — years! — to stop Skynet, yet these dunces skip to the precipice of nuclear winter. To make a near-impossible nearly more impossible, they also face an improbable opponent: a hybrid Terminator built from a nanomachine-infected man.
Again and again, Genisys contorts itself into these Gordian situations, where characters must behave like fools to raise the stakes higher and higher. As a consequence, there’s no consistency within each character’s development. Sarah veers between warrior and damsel-in-distress more times than you can count, yanking Clarke’s performance from tough and indefatigable into something shrill. Courtney might be the least charismatic leading actor in Hollywood, yet he’s forced into bizarre repartee with Schwarzenegger — think of the “dad meets daughter’s boyfriend” to get a decent idea of how silly it is — and Schwarzenegger’s robot outdazzles him.
“I’m old, not obsolete,” Pops says, when he and Kyle first trade barbs. It’s not just him. The Terminator is old. Schwarzenegger is old. The whole damn thing is old. It’s enough to make you wonder if the series shouldn’t have been retired years ago. That’s not the way Hollywood works, though. The heroes prevail, driving off together into the unknown, while off-screen, on a studio lot, a sequel to Genisys is born. It won’t be new either.
Terminator: Genisys is rated PG-13 and runs 125 minutes. Now playing in area theaters.
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