TERMINATOR GENISYS Is The Final Nail In The Coffin for the TERMINATOR Franchise
by Ed Travis
The problems with Terminator Genisys are legion; but chief among them is that it is never exciting.
Laden with exposition and convoluted to the point of tedium, even if there were any top notch set pieces or memorable stunts, their impact would definitely have been offset by the inert storyline. But in an egregious turn of events, there aren’t even any great set pieces to be found in the first place. So viewers are left with a film that simultaneously relies heavily on a familiarity with the first two phenomenal Terminator films and yet understands nothing of what made those films great.
Time travel movies are often complicated. Filmmakers can depict this across a whole spectrum of approaches. Some go down the rabbit hole and try to make that complication fun, ala Looper or even Primer. Or they can go with simplicity, sidestepping many of the paradoxes presented with throwaway lines or an overall spirit of fun that nudges those technical questions off to the side. You know, the Timecop approach: “We can only travel back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet”. The first two Terminator films operate in that less complicated realm. There’s a bad future where artificial intelligence has destroyed the planet with nuclear weapons and now subjugates humanity. A lone warrior teaches humanity to resist and begins to win the war against the machines. The machines send a robot back in time to kill that lone warrior’s mother. The end. Kind of. There’s a bit of a paradox in that the human soldier sent back to protect the mother is himself the father of the future warrior. It is that perfect kind of movie paradox that you just accept because the story is so satisfying and the characters are so genuine. Terminator 2 expounds upon the mythology of the first film and introduces some iconic new characters while not over complicating things at any sort of exponential rate. Ignoring Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show, Terminator 5 overcomplicates the established mythology of the first two Terminator films with such wanton abandon, it feels like writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier were almost trying to remove any possible fun from the equation.
There are so many timelines and ripple effects and logic gaps in Terminator 5 (henceforth referred to as such because if the filmmakers can’t justify such a meaningless misspelling as “genisys”, then I refuse to perpetuate their miscalculation) that one could certainly parse it all out on a napkin, but the motivation to do so is nil. At one point the “old” Terminator (who is routinely referred to as “Pops” by Emelia Clarke’s Sarah Connor, causing a distinct desire to get up and leave each time) has to make a joke about how multiple timelines aren’t really complicated just to try to put the audience at ease, and Jai Courtney’s Kyle Reese also comments aloud that he is greatly confused by the various timelines happening. Characters giving voice to the way the audience is likely feeling doesn’t let the film off the hook for being so stultifyingly packed as to crowd out any hope at entertainment.
Thus far I am ripping this film to shreds, when in reality there are some bright spots to the proceedings. I’ll list them out, as beyond these items, there’s almost nothing praiseworthy about Terminator 5.
- Emilia Clarke is inspired casting for Sarah Connor and while it takes her a while to get her footing, she’s easily the most compelling screen presence to be found.
- Jai Courtney, who is normally a kind of cinematic black hole, is totally serviceable as Kyle Reese and is not even in the bottom 5 worst elements of this movie.
- I laughed at several points at jokes I was supposed to laugh at.
- J.K. Simmons is in the movie. And J.K. Simmons is incapable of being bad.
- The opening act sets up a potentially interesting new twist on on the original two films and is filled with the iconography of those films.
Sadly, there are counterpoints to every bright spot I mentioned. By way of example… J.K. Simmons’ character is ultimately meaningless and his thread goes so “nowhere” I almost totally forgot he was in the movie until pressed to think of some good things about it. Or there’s the fact that for every joke I laughed at, there were at least three cringe-inducing whiffs. In the most egregious “joke” of the film, Genisys (the new Skynet in the alternate 2017 timeline [don’t worry if you don’t understand this sentence so far, you won’t understand it in the movie either]) is referred to as a “killer app”. This isn’t even played as a joke. It is played straight and feels like a desperate stretch for relevance, suggesting the “new” Skynet is to be found in our mobile devices which we are already hopelessly addicted to. Or in a final example of counterpoint to something good in the film, the last two thirds handily put to rest any of the potential which the opening act may have established.
Terminator 5 feels exactly like a movie created by a corporate committee. A worst case scenario of filmmaking based on intellectual property rights and appealing to some kind of preexisting audience base rather than moving forward because a filmmaker has an idea they can’t get out of their head. With a heavily felt PG-13 rating, the adult nature of the first two films is abandoned, even as this iteration virtually demands that you have seen those films and like them. In order to introduce some of the “cool” new twists this film purportedly exists to display, it has to do choppy gymnastics to explain everything in a satisfactorily obvious way so that unthinking audience members will “get” it. Characters are spouting off exposition at a rapid clip, awful timeline splintering story devices are introduced with reckless abandon and never resolved, and through it all there’s just never any spark of life.
Director Alan Taylor brought some verve to Thor: The Dark World which was simply missing from the first film of that series. But here he’s saddled with such a burdensome script which is shoehorned into working for an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger while attempting to hit all four quadrants to make the studio happy. Thus Taylor’s direction is relegated to workman status. It is just hard to see who this film is supposed to be intended for and what the script was really trying to achieve. The callbacks and visuals and plot points appropriated from the original films repeatedly serve to remind us that those films were noticeably better than this is. And if a “new generation” of fans are supposed to be created, then they better have seen those earlier films, because I can’t imagine the kids who will be allowed to see this due to the PG-13 rating will have a chance in hell of following this plotline if they aren’t already familiar with this series.
I’ve largely kept the details of the overstuffed plot out of this review, and will continue to do so. But Terminator 5 has one very major plot twist/reveal about halfway through the film which could potentially have been a neat reveal had the marketing campaign not completely ruined it. Ultimately, this reveal is a massive plot thread to the final film which, while possibly gutsy, isn’t executed well at all. Jason Clarke’s John Connor is just as wasted as J.K. Simmons here, which is sad because he’s an exciting screen presence generally.
A best case scenario for Terminator 5 would have been a franchise re-invigorating return to an economical sci-fi/action story with characters that really matter at the core of it all. Perhaps some new visuals or cool new designs could have offered something not previously possible when James Cameron was crafting those first two films. Or maybe some of the studio tentpole budget money could have been spent on crafting a single action set piece that wasn’t hampered by weightless and limp computer graphics. That is a best case scenario. Instead, the reality is that Terminator 5 gets a couple of casting decisions right, has a few laughs, and is otherwise devoid of excitement and suffers from a total crisis of target market identity. I imagine it is possible that this film will earn its money back and go on to launch further sequels. But it is equally possible that, together, we could ensure that this is the last Terminator film. There’s no better way to send a message to the studios that the missing ingredient from the most recent Terminator films isn’t Arnold, or a newer, bigger, badder villain… but rather James Cameron. And excitement. There’s no fate but what we make, guys. So it’s on us if this movie succeeds enough to warrant yet another Terminator film.
And I’m Out.