By Brett Blake TERMINATOR GENISYS marks the long-awaited (or perhaps not?) return of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the franchise that launched him to mega-stardom. The result is a very mixed bag, a movie with a dodgy (at best) script and questionable characterizations, but also with a genuine sense of breathless fun. Picking up in the year 2029, John Connor (Jason Clarke) - the leader of the human resistance against Skynet and its machines - sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to 1984 to protect John’s mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke), from being killed by a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which were the events depicted in 1984’s original TERMINATOR film. When Kyle arrives in 1984, however, he finds a changed timeline, wherein Sarah has been raised by a “good” Terminator, and is already on a quest to stop Skynet from ever coming online. Complications arise, Terminators (both familiar and new) attempt to kill our heroes, and we eventually travel to the year 2017, where a nefarious new villain is attempting to change the timeline yet again and usher Skynet into existence in the form of a computer operating system called “Genisys.” Does that sound kind of complex and/or hard to follow? Yeah, it is. Too much so, in fact, but more on that later. On the acting front, overall the cast does good work. Jai Courtney’s Kyle Reese acts as the audience point-of-view character, and he’s not bad so much as he’s kind of bland. I don’t harbor the hate for Courtney that many in online circles do, but he brings little to the role of Reese, a character who was so full of nuance and personality courtesy of Michael Biehn in the first TERMINATOR film. However, he’s adept with the physical demands of the action, and he sells (well enough) his character’s devotion to both John and Sarah Connor. As Sarah, Emilia Clarke looks eerily like Linda Hamilton’s incarnation of the character at many points, and she does a nice job of fusing the vulnerability and uncertainty of Hamilton’s Sarah from the first TERMINATOR with the tougher, more kick-ass version of the character from T2. J.K. Simmons pops up in a fun supporting role, and he manages to sell some of the more on-the-nose comedic bits with conviction; the movie could have actually used more of him, as his character’s story is one of the more interesting side-elements in the movie. As the titular Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns for the first time in 12 years (much like Sean Connery returned to the James Bond role after a 12 year hiatus in 1983 with NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN), and he’s great. In the intervening years, it might have been easy to forget that he was once one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but here he reminds us why that was the case. He’s perfected the Terminator persona, and even when playing a supposedly emotionless cyborg, his charisma is present in full force. It’s hard to deny that watching him in this role is very entertaining. That brings us to Jason Clarke’s John Connor. Clarke himself does a pretty fantastic job with the character; he makes him a truly compelling individual with quirks, and in the scenes where he gets to interact with the other principal characters, he’s a magnetic presence. The character of John in this movie, though, is deeply problematic. What the writers do with him feels severely misguided, and it borders on outright character assassination (indeed, almost literally). If this were a fully self-contained movie that would be sort of forgivable, but this isn’t a self-contained movie; the choices made regarding John render the emotional stakes of the first two TERMINATOR films absolutely meaningless and irrelevant, and I’ll admit to being irked at the way the character is treated. Apologies for the vagueness, but to go into greater detail would require spoilage. The Connor issue is symptomatic of the problems with the script as a whole. You can feel the screenwriters throwing every idea they could have possibly had (some of them quite cool) into this thing, with little regard for cohesion or simplicity. The time travel shenanigans - and their effects on the narrative - are borderline incomprehensible at times, and there are at least two obvious plot holes that are baffling. There’s also the issue of the way the movie attempts to reboot the franchise; usually when Hollywood reboots a series, it’s so that they can take the best elements of the good movies in that series and ignore that subpar entries (see 2009’s STAR TREK, or 2014’s X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, a film which exists almost entirely so the franchise could disown 2006’s X-MEN: THE LAST STAND). With TERMINATOR GENISYS, the filmmakers have made the utterly bizarre decision to essentially wipe out the only two truly great movies in the franchise! Also, for all the talk about rebooting the timeline, which - in theory - should allow the story to go into fully uncharted and fresh waters, the plot once again becomes all about stopping Skynet (the A.I. controlling the Terminators and machines in their war against humanity in the future) from coming online and initiating Judgment Day (the day the machines began wiping out the human population on the planet)… which is the same basic plot as two of the previous four movies. Despite having some fun with the time travel hijinks, the movie eventually just becomes the same story we’ve already seen in this franchise, and one can’t help but come away feeling like nothing truly unique has been added to the TERMINATOR mythos. So, you might be asking, what’s good? Well, pretty much everything else! The movie is paced incredibly well, bouncing from action setpiece to action setpiece with just enough breathing room for introspection and exposition in between, and the action stuff is certainly a lot of fun. There are several big brawls between various Terminator characters, and despite some sketchy CGI at times, these fights have a thudding, clunking, heavy physicality that is exciting. There are also a pair of chase sequences that are nicely staged by director Alan Taylor, even as they both rather gleefully defy the laws the physics. “Shut your brain off” is a phrase I tend to dislike, but it does seem to apply to TERMINATOR GENISYS, where no amount of thought put into it on the audience’s part will allow its plotting to make much sense, but there are definite visceral pleasures to be enjoyed, and the cast - for the most part - makes it incredibly watchable. TERMINATOR GENISYS may be less effective as an overall story than either TERMINATOR 3 or TERMINATOR SALVATION (and given that both of those are pretty much already the superfluous also-rans of the series, that’s kind of saying something), but it is definitely a lot more fun and entertaining, which is probably all one should have reasonably expected in the first place.
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