Terminator Genysis review

Time travel is the ultimate continuity etcho-sketch. It doesn’t matter how many time-lines you’ve started or how much plot there is to consider, if you set the clock back far enough you can shake the whole thing clean and start all over again. What’s disappointing about “Terminator: Genisys,” the fifth film in this wildly-inconsistent sci-fi franchise, is that every time they start over, they somehow manage to keep telling the same story.

Longtime fans of the series will immediately recognize the tropes and familiar set-ups in this film. John Conner, now played by “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” star Jason Clarke, is the leader of the human resistance of the future robocalypse, after A.I. was made possible by a shady tech organization called Skynet. After the rebels find a time machine built by androids to kill Conner’s mother Sarah Conner (Emilia Clarke) in the past, human soldier Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent back in time to 1984 where he must protect the future of their cause.

Yada yada yada, we all know this, but where “Terminator: Genisys,” flips the script, is by pre-supposing that the machines already knew that this counter attack would happen, causing them to send a lethal, liquid-metal android (Byung-hun Lee) back in time to keep their plan in motion, thus inspiring the human resistance to send a reprogrammed Terminator even further back in time to prepare Sarah Conner for the worst possible scenarios. Wait…that’s not different at all. That’s just plot of “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.”

What THIS movie does differently is that the robots create a new safe-guard to outsmart Reese, Sarah Conner and the weirdly-aged Arnold Schwarzenegger father-bot from stopping the atomic destruction of Judgement Day—now rescheduled from 1997 to 2017—by sending back a new opponent with personal ties to the entire group.

The plot is needlessly convoluted, especially if you’re still trying to keep up with the continuity of the franchise, but the dynamics of the story are so familiar that, narratively speaking, the whole thing feels like a video game starting over from the last save-point. Despite slight variations that occur, such as newer ideas about cellphone and internet privacy/NSA paranoia, the majority of the movie still hinges on clunky action set-pieces and lazy fan-service. I’m all for timely metaphors in my science fiction, but the zeitgeist-y gesturing here is never committed to or integrated well enough to give the film any sense purpose or real gravity.  

James Cameron’s two Terminator films of the 1980s and early-90s were dark and misanthropic genre movies that reflected society’s fear of the unmitigated progress of technology amidst the slow fade of humanity within the rise of corporate competition. This film, however, is a bottom-line money-machine, banking on pre-recognized iconography rather than creativity.  With that said, Jason and Emelia Clarke are fine enough in their parts, even as they deliver some of the most preposterously bad, cliché-ridden dialogue heard this summer. Schwarzenegger’s happy to play along, but looks about as tired as the material he’s working with, while Jai Courtney, who played Bruce Willis’ son in the equally-misbegotten “A Good Day to Die Hard,” has still yet to convince me of his appeal.

“Terminator: Genisys” is a bad movie but not offensively so. The action scenes are marginally fun and the aesthetic choice to make the film look and feel dingier and grittier than the usual 3D/IMAX, millennial blockbuster was something I could appreciate, even if,  like so many other reboots and relaunches of late, everything here felt rushed and cobbled together by focus-group notes and marketing speculation.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2015