TERMINATOR GENISYS (2015) • Film Review ✭✭✭✩✩
Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor from a Terminator, but finds the timeline’s been altered already…
Terminator Genisys is the third best entry in the popular sci-fi saga, because it does something different — for arguably the first time in the franchise’s 31-year history. Even the esteemed Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was just a pseudo-remake of The Terminator (1984), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was a retread of T2 with a female antagonist, and Terminator Salvation was fan-fiction for insane people who think a sequel without Arnold Schwarzenegger but with Sam Worthington is worth doing.
I don’t quite understand why Genisys received such bad reviews, as I think it deserves early reassessment. It does a number of things well, and brings unexpected freshness to what’s essentially just another ‘chase movie’. This is the first sequel to explore the underpinning time-travel aspect of the franchise’s concept, with future soldier Kyle Reece (Jai Courtney) now arriving in 1984 to find himself in a tweaked timeline where Sarah Connor’s (Emilia Clarke) already a well-informed bad-ass, having been raised by a Terminator nicknamed ‘Pops’ (Schwarzenegger) that saved her as a girl.
From there, the film borrows an idea from the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV pilot, by sending Sarah and Kyle into the changed timeline’s future to prevent Skynet achieving consciousness in 2017 — where they discover the infamous A.I’s now a cutting-edge piece of interconnected software folk are eagerly awaiting the release of. Crazier still, Skynet’s origin as this ‘Genisys’ app has been hatched by none other than mankind’s future saviour, John Connor (Jason Clarke) — who’s been augmented into a cyborg at the cellular level, brainwashed into ensuring the birth of his erstwhile enemy, and sent back in time to carry out this mission.
Look, it’s complicated. Tales involving heavy use of time-travel tend to be. Is any wonder Doctor Who’s former star Matt Smith appears here? The story never explains who sent ‘Pops’ back in time to begin with, or how the T-3000/John managed to survive time-travel back to 2017 if setting foot inside a time machine is how he’s defeated in the finale. I’m also unconvinced by the logic involving Kyle being able to remember fragments of an altered timeline from his childhood.
Thankfully, the majority of Genisys remains focused on having inventive ways for flesh and steel to violently collide across California. And while the film strives to carve out its own approach to the Terminator mythos — by rebooting the whole damn thing — it pays homage to the original James Cameron movies in some enjoyable ways. Not least a few sequences that replicate the 1984 classic, going so far as to have a surprisingly believable CGI ‘Young Arnie’ fight the contemporary 68-year-old version outside the Griffith Observatory. Or to involve another liquid metal T-1000, played to icy perfection by Asian superstar Lee Byung-hun.
By far the film’s most controversial decision is to transform saviour John Connor into the devil’s lapdog, which the GENISYS marketing team unforgivably chose to spoil in trailers. I wish I could have seen this film without any knowledge of that halfway twist, because it’s a ballsy move that actually works. The Terminator saga has always been about future humans trying to ensure their own survival by sending soldiers and cyborgs back in time to protect their leader’s bloodline. In Genisys, it’s about Skynet using time-travel to protect its own “codeline” — ironically, by defeating its arch-nemesis and using him as a tool to keep its own timeline pure.
I also liked how Genisys has a lot of fun with its insane family dynamics. We not only have the awkward relationship of Sarah and Kyle (who know they’re destined to fall in love, but initially dislike each other), but there’s an amusing mother/father interplay with Sarah and Pops that works as a twist on the father/son interplay seen with teen John and the T-800 in T2. I particularly liked how Kyle has to essentially get the approval of Sarah’s cyborg “father” over the course of the film. And when cyber-John arrives on the scene in Genisys, we then have a trusted friend becoming an enemy in Kyle’s eyes — but also a father/son turning against his family because he’s been corrupted by their mutual enemy. There’s actually a lot of interesting tweaks to the basic relationships we know and love, which felt refreshing.
Call me crazy, but I genuinely didn’t hate Genisys — and I’m speaking as a big Terminator fan. The humour was often too ripe for my taste (why use the joke that the T-800 has a dumb smile from a justly deleted scene in T2?), and elements of the time-travel don’t make much sense when you engage your brain, and it wastes J.K Simmons interesting side character, but it took bold risks and more of them paid off than I was expecting.
The casting’s a bit wonky (Emilia Clarke’s fine, but she lacks the physicality and stature that made Linda Hamilton so memorable in T2), and the saga has long ago stopped being a terrifying sci-fi horror aimed at adults (compare and contrast scenes of nuclear devastation here to those from Sarah’s nightmare in T2), but Terminator Genisys just wasn’t as terrible as I was braced for. I don’t think it demands sequels of its own, but I’ll happily think of this as the ‘true Terminator 3’.
Cast & Crew
director: Alan Taylor.
writers: Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier (based on characters created by James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd).
starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, J.K Simmons, Dayo Okeniyi, Matt Smith, Courtney B. Vance & Lee Byung-hun.
Originally published at letterboxd.com, now updated and slightly extended for the purposes of Dan’s Media Digest.
