Terminator Genisys

Ok, I have to review this movie because I’m going to go crazy if I don’t review it. We have now come to the latest installment in the “Terminator Franchise,” “Terminator Genisys,” which came out on the first of this month.

The Terminator was always funny, whether he was a cyborg assassin sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor, or a reprogrammed protagonist robot protecting Sarah from more advanced and evil robots such as the T-1000 or the T-X. Of course, he wasn’t trying to be funny, which is why lines such as “I’ll be back” still linger on.

However, he was scary, and never someone you would want to hug. We don’t want a Terminator that we can hug, do we?

Richard Roeper stated in his review, “In the admittedly well-made and action-packed but ridiculously convoluted and sometimes even off-putting “Terminator Genisys,” the fantastically entertaining Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as the old-school cyborg who never uses 10 words when five will do — but he’s actually called “Pops” by Sarah Connor throughout the movie.”

If you want to know why Sarah named the Terminator “Pops,” you’d have to see the movie to find out because that would be a spoiler.

“Terminator Genisys” is the fifth installment in the movie franchise, and now we can see very clearly that they should have stopped the series after “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and we would have had one of the best one-two punches in modern movie history, period. I agree with Roeper when he said, “Even though “Rise of the Machines” (2003) and “Salvation” (2009) had their moments, with each succeeding film, the events of the first two movies lose their dramatic gravitas, because that dang Skynet synthetic intelligent machine conglomerate keeps reaching into the past to rearrange everything.”

There are some spoilers that Roeper gives, which are: ““Terminator Genisys” takes the “forget everything you’ve learned before” concept to a whole new level, and that’s what I mean about it being a little insulting and off-putting. You present us with this whole new timeline, this whole new set of circumstances for Sarah Conner and her son John, not to mention Kyle Reese (John’s father) and the Terminator, I mean, Pops? And we’re supposed to just forget all that happened in the first two movies?”

What if we don’t want to?

“Genisys” starts out in 2029, where John Connor, this time played by Jason Clarke, is leading the human resistance against the machines. (Warning: The opening credits keep going for at least the first 10 minutes of the movie. Roeper admits, “I’ve always found that drag-it-out technique to be distracting, as if we’re being told the movie is STILL just starting.”) It looks like the humans are about to win, but Skynet has that fallback emergency plan – a giant time machine so they can send a T-800 cyborg back to 1984 to kill John’s mother, Sarah, before John can be born.

Obviously John knows about that plan, and we see the moment where Kyle Reese volunteers to go back in time, and since we have seen the original movie, we know Kyle protects Sarah from the Terminator, falls in love with her, fathers her son and then, well, Kyle dies protecting her.

Once we’re back in 1984, however, I’ll just tell you they decided to alter the events. Sarah, played by Emilia Clarke from “The Game of Thrones,” has teamed up with the protective cyborg known as the Guardian, or as she calls him, “Pops,” reprised by Schwarzenegger, and yes, they do explain why this cyborg has aged. “I’m old, not obsolete,” the Terminator keeps telling Kyle Reese, as he eyes this robot like a protective father not sure his boy is good enough for his daughter.

We jump from 1984 to 2017, the plan being for Sarah, Kyle, and the Terminator to destroy Genisys, a cloud-like operating system that’s really a Trojan horse for Skynet. Soon we see the same thing we saw in “Back to the Future,” with the characters time-traveling, meeting future and/or past versions of themselves and generally getting headaches as they all try to make sense of rule bending in time travel.

Emilia Clark looks hot in the role, but she doesn’t have Linda Hamilton’s ruthless determination. Jai Courtney is really bland as Kyle Reese. (Michael Biehn rarely gets credit for his strong work as Reese in the first movie.) Byung-hun Lee is an expressionless player as the new T-1000 killing machine, but even that performance is dull next to Robert Patrick’s work in “Judgment Day.” J.K. Simmons lightens things up as an officer in 2017 who witnesses some events in 1984 that convinced him time-traveling robots exist.

The best part of the movie is Schwarzenegger, who delivers the Terminator’s lines with perfect timing and creates a sympathetic character, because as we know, nearly all the best movie robots somehow become just a little bit human as time goes on. When bad things happen to the Terminator, we feel it. Not so much with the new actors portraying Sarah, Reese, and John Connor, who simply don’t echo like their counterparts from the 1980s and 1990s.

Of course, the special effects are more impressive than ever. I agree with Roeper when he ended his review with, “But nearly every curveball offered up in this new parallel-universe version of the Terminator world isn’t as interesting or as original as the timeline we loved in the first place.”

I don’t understand what they were doing with this movie. It’s a complete mess with the whole time-traveling element, which only worked if done right. That’s why films like “Back to the Future” and “X-Men: Days of Future Past” worked so well. This is supposed to be a start to a new trilogy, and they’re not off to a good start. Jason Clarke is a great actor, but his performance as John does not have the same weight that Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl or even Christian Bale brought to the role. When you see this movie, you’ll see that they are trying to redo what James Cameron did so well in the first two, but they combined it here and made it a mess. The action scenes are good, the characters are decent, but the story is all over the place and the pacing really hurt this film. My rating for this would be a 4/10. DO NOT go to the theater to watch this movie, it’s the worst in the series. If you want, wait until this is released on DVD. The good thing is that you can easily forget this movie. Jeremy Jahns is right that you will forget this movie the next day.

Oh boy, that’s a relief. Well, that ends “Terminator Month.” I hope you liked my review of the movies and I hope that I made good recommendations to the films. Stay tuned next month to see what else I have in store for everyone. Now I have to go cool off with a glass of ice cold water so that I can forget this movie.