The Terminator Genisys Movie Review for Geeks… Arnie Is Back, Unfortunately
Written by Andre Infante July 3, 2015
All the while I was watching Terminator Genisys, the same phrase kept coming
back to me… “We have to go back in time and kill the screenwriter.”
Terminator Genisys is the latest edition of the Terminator series, a
property rivaled only by the Alien series for turning two great films into
an awful franchise. The last two entries, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
and Terminator Salvation clocked in at 70 percent and 33 percent on Rotten
Tomatoes, respectively – and they’re being rather generous with the 70
percent.
The early trailers suggested promising signs about Terminator Genisys.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is back playing the T-800, and the film is trying
something kind of cool – rewriting what happened in The Terminator,
portraying a timeline snarled from many iterations of time travel. The cast
also includes talented actors like Emilia Clarke, J.K. Simmons, and Matt
Smith (of Doctor Who fame).
I avoided reading reviews before I watched the movie to avoid bias, so I
really didn’t know what to expect walking into the film. Does Genisys
succeed in redeeming the franchise? Can a cool idea and a star-studded cast
of actors save the series?
So, is Terminator Genisys worth watching?
The short answer is no. Not at all. Terminator Genisys is one of the dumbest
movies I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen The FP. The longer, more detailed
answer is below, so read our spoiler-free review for geeks to find out all
the gory details.
The Acting
Good actors are only as good as their script and direction – compare Liam
Neeson in Schindler’s List and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, for
a poignant example. Clearly, something similar was going on in Genisys.
Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones) looks like she’s
acting at gunpoint. More importantly, she totally lacks the physical
presence and strength of personality you need to play a convincing Sarah
Conner. Compare her to Lena Headey (also from Game of Thrones) in the
excellent Terminator television show, who consistently looked willing and
able to kick your teeth down your throat should the need arise.
Generic protagonist Jai Courtney (Kyle Reese) (who you may remember from the
most recent Die Hard movie) clearly has no idea where he is. In The
Terminator, Kyle Reese projects a kind of a hardened vulnerability. His
acting conveyed a lifetime of trauma, and a certain amount of disgust with
the luxury of pre-apocalyptic life. In Genisys, Kyle Reese projects
literally nothing. He looks like a pile of biceps inside a trench coat.
The love story between Reese and Sarah Connor in Genisys is one of the least
convincing romances I’ve ever seen. And, to reiterate, I’ve seen The FP.
Jason Clarke does a credible turn as the adult John Conner, but even he
chokes occasionally on the frankly awful dialog the writers keep shoving in
his mouth.
Matt Smith is just sort of there, for no apparent reason.
Pretty much only J.K. Simmons and Arnold himself seem to be having fun. One
of the few bright points in this movie is watching Arnold wander around with
a mouthful of scenery, thrilled out of his mind that they’re letting him
do this again.
The Plot
Time travel has consistently generated most of the cool plots in the
Terminator films. John Connor sending his best friend back to die to ensure
his own paternity is really cool. So is the plot in Terminator 2: Judgment
Day about having to murder innocent scientists who will someday create world
-ending technology.
Genisys adds a new element to the time travel trope, allowing time-travelers
to recover memories from their alternate selves when the timeline diverges
due to a “nexus point”… or something. I’m going to be honest, I’m
having trouble remembering the technobabble they forced Arnold to mumble his
way through.
The point is, it’s an extraneous and insultingly magical piece of mythology
dreamed up to give the characters a piece of information they could have
gotten in much cooler ways. In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the writers
wanted to solve the same problem in order to give their main characters
hints that the future has changed. Their solution was to have a mortally
wounded time traveler show up, and scrawl half-legible messages in blood in
their garage before dying. I think we can all agree that that’s much cooler
than so-called “nexus points”.
Then there are the Terminators themselves. Since Terminator 2, the
Terminator franchise has had a complex relationship with the humanity of its
machines. Both Judgment Day and the TV show hint at the possibility of
sentient, emotional Terminators – but they don’t do much more than hint.
That’s a very good thing, because actually giving us a sentimental
Terminator would be a huge mistake, and betray the chilling characterization
the films have set up. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, I’m
sad to say that Genisys does exactly that.
The strength of Terminators is that they are machines. What’s it like to be
an intelligence that lacks emotion, morality, and even boredom? Is such a
machine a person? Could it ever be? These questions are more relevant than
ever, in a world in which our ability to create intelligent machines is
growing more powerful at an astonishing rate, and we’re struggling with
giving more and more control to machines that we often don’t fully
understand.
What happens when a Google self-driving car has to make a moral judgement
with life or death stakes? Or a military robot? Can we trust software to
weigh the complexity of one life versus another when it can’t reliably
figure out which audio device to output to? These are interesting questions
that the Terminator franchise, at its best, can answer.
Unfortunately, Genisys is far from the Terminator franchise at its best.
Generally, Genisys feels like a movie that suffered from too many revisions
of its script. Concepts are introduced that are never fully explained or
used for anything of consequence. Arbitrary-seeming elements abound. The
plot meanders between set pieces, checking off Terminator references and
summer blockbuster tropes with no particular direction or urgency.
This feels like Terminator as made by Michael Bay. Which, if you haven’t
read the memo, is a bad thing.
The Technology
Even among film robots, Terminators are special. Too often, when sci-fi
franchises explore the idea of humanoid robots, they go to ridiculous
extremes of biotechnology or nanotechnology, and make robots that literally
cannot be distinguished from humans (we’re looking at you, Battlestar
Galactica). This can be useful for plot purposes – and saves on special
effects – but it can also make things a little too abstract to really carry
that punch of ‘this isn’t a person, it’s a thing.’
The Terminator franchise, in contrast, embraces the mechanical nature of its
robots. The famous Terminator endoskeleton looks like a machine. You can
see rods and joints and motors working underneath. The films don’t shy away
from stripping off the flesh and letting you see the moving parts. The T-
800 endoskeleton doesn’t look that far off from something Bostom Dynamics
might build.
And, while current robots struggle to pass for human (or, in some cases,
even stand upright), there’s a clear path from here to there. We all know,
on some level, that the technology will get there eventually. That’s one of
the things that makes the Terminator so scary. It feels like something that
we could really make in the future.
Every attempt to improve on the Terminator (including, much as I hate to
admit it, the T-1000) has lost some of that magic. And, unfortunately,
Genisys‘ contribution (a new kind of Terminator that resembles a swarm of
magnetic moths) is no different. It’s a great piece of CGI (computer-
generated imagery), but it totally fails to be plausible enough to be
threatening.
Then there’s the attempt to modernize the Terminator mythology by turning
Skynet into an app, presumably as a nod to the population of moviegoers old
enough to be cranky about slightly new technology. Let’s be clear here:
there are a number of technological developments that are scary enough to be
taken seriously. Smartphones and apps are not on that list. There has
always been an anti-technology angle to the Terminator films, but it’s
never been this dumb before.
The Visuals
One of the few redeeming elements of this movie are the visual effects as
they are genuinely impressive. Computer-generated Arnold is right on the
cusp of the uncanny valley. Several of the sequences involving the T-1000
and the new model of Terminator are extravagant, and a joy to watch.
However, even here the quality is uneven. A number of the special effects-
heavy scenes have jarringly unpolished elements in them – especially the
sequences set in the future. Some of them are so glaring that I have to
wonder whether the post-production process simply ran out of money before
finishing some of the scenes. Which is unforgivable for a big-budget
blockbuster such as this.
Final Thoughts
The Good:
Good, if uneven, special effects
Charming performances from several actors
Some neat ideas buried inside the plot
The Bad:
Dull writing
Unconvincing acting
An incoherent mess of a plot
A general failure to capitalize on the strengths of the Terminator
franchise.
The Verdict
Terminator Genisys is a bad movie. It’s After Earth bad. It might even be
Battleship bad. Unless you’re a die hard Terminator fan who just wants to
watch robots punch things, don’t pay money for it.
Buy Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles instead, and spend some leisure
time binge-watching the whole series at home. It covers a lot of the same
ideas in a more satisfying way, and is generally a joy to watch. As for
Genisys, I suggest waiting for the Rifftrax version.
MakeUseOf Rates Terminator Genisys 1 Star out of 5.