Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.
In the 21st century, human survivors of a war are persecuted by sentient machines. When resistance fighter Kyle Reese is sent back in time to prevent a cyborg changing history, he discovers that the past has already been altered...
Main characters:
* As the story begins, it’s 2029. John Connor (a dull Jason Clarke) is the messianic leader of the human resistance in a war with the self-aware computer system known as Skynet. If you’ve seen the previous Terminator films, so far so standard. However, just as he’s sending his lieutenant Kyle Reese back in time to save his mother from an assassination attempt, John is attacked by one of his own soldiers… Much later in the movie, when we’re following Kyle’s adventures in 2017, John suddenly appears on the scene too – having also travelled back in time. He gets to meet his own mother, Sarah, who hasn’t given birth to him yet. (Are you keeping up?) But then we realise that something’s wrong… John has been taken over by the evil Skynet and is now their agent! Oh no!
* As he travels back through time, twenty-something Resistance fighter Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) has some bizarre dreams or flashes. He pictures himself as a boy, but living a life he didn’t have and warning that ‘Genisys is Skynet’. It turns out that these visions are from an alternate timeline – one where Sarah Connor prevented the war with Skynet beginning in 1997 (keeping up?). Why Kyle is now experiencing these memories of a life he hasn’t lived is a question that the film doesn’t want you to waste any time considering. There’s a technobabble reason given in dialogue, but it’s really because the script needs him to know certain things and can’t come up with a character-based way for him to learn them. When Kyle gets to 1984 he realises that history has been changed. He encounters Sarah and her android friend Pops, who know all about the future war, and has to become Mr Asks-Lots-of-Questions as they explain all the timey-wimey nonsense. The story then gets even more timey-wimey-nonsensey as Sarah and Pops reveal that they’ve, um, built their own time machine and plan to skip forward to 1997 and prevent Skynet from taking over the world. Putting his trust in his visions (what if they’re just daydreams caused by the trauma of time-travel?!), Kyle insists the apocalypse will now happen in 2017 instead, when a global computer-operating system called Genisys will go online for the first time. He manages to persuade Sarah of a new temporal destination pretty easily, and the pair head into the future… Sadly, for the second Terminator film running we have a new actor playing Reese and for the second Terminator film running he’s miscast and lacks the essence of Michael Biehn’s original performance. Jai Courtney, who also starred in a putrid Die Hard film and the terrible Suicide Squad, plays a meat-headed and petulant version of the character. The performance doesn’t have any of the heft and experience that Biehn had implied in every moment.
* ‘Pops’ (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator. He’s been living with Sarah since 1973, when he arrived from the future to prevent an attack on her as a child. Having stuck around as she passed through her teens, Pops is now visibly older than other T-800s we’ve seen in previous films. But he’s no less effective – ‘I’m old,’ he tells Kyle. ‘Not obsolete.’ Because of… reasons… Pops can’t travel in time, so when Sarah and Kyle leave 1984 in the time machine he must take the long route to 2017. He spends his time preparing for the fight ahead and researching the mysterious Genisys corporation – in a good gag he later tells us that he was on the construction crew for their HQ… ‘until I was laid off’. We also get a nice sense of the loneliness he suffers across the 33 years of solitude: he’d created a little shrine to Sarah with photos and childlike drawings. Schwarzenegger is very good in his fourth Terminator movie, dishing out some droll one-liners along the way.
* Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) first appears on the scene as she saves Kyle from an evil Terminator in 1984. ‘Come with me if you want to live,’ she says, a famous Terminator catchphrase being repurposed. This Sarah differs from the one we saw in the original James Cameron film… because she’s known for 10 years about the future war and her unborn son’s role as a resistance leader. As she explains, the timeline of Kyle’s childhood now never happened (keeping up?). In *this* version of reality, an additional Terminator from the future was sent back to 1973 to kill Sarah as a nine-year-old. Thankfully she was saved by a good Terminator, who has since stayed with her as a kind of father figure she calls Pops… Emilia Clarke (no relation to co-star Jason) is one of the film’s genuine bright lights. Her Sarah Connor doesn’t especially remind you of Linda Hamilton’s original (she’s not blonde, for one thing). But she’s spiky and likeable in her own way, without the coldness that can sometimes dog ‘tough’ female characters in genre films. One area that does fail to spark, however, is the feted romance between Sarah and Kyle. The actors have no connection, even when stripping naked in order to use the time machine. Incidentally, Clarke filmed Terminator Genisys in between seasons four and five of her huge TV hit, Game of Thrones, and she’s not the first cast member from that show to play Sarah Connor. Lena Headey – Cersei Lannister in Thrones – was the star of the TV spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In another link, Alan Taylor had directed six episodes of the series before helming this film.
Other characters:
* A shapeshifting T-1000 Terminator (Lee Byung-Hun) follows Kyle to 1984 and is the action-based antagonist of the first act. He’s another iteration of the same type of bad guy we saw in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, though not as menacing or compelling.
* O’Brien (Wayne Bastrup and JK Simmons) is a young cop in the 1984 LA sequences – as he gets caught up with Kyle and the T-1000, we’re told that it’s ‘his first day on the beat’. By 2017, having transferred to the San Francisco Police Department, he’s still obsessing over this encounter – so has his interest piqued when he comes across Kyle and Sarah again and they haven’t aged a day. Simmons is a funny presence, as he often is. In this film, the humour often feels like it’s been plastered on top of everything else during a last-minute rewrite, but Simmons manages to sell his gags.
* Alex (Matt Smith) watches on as Kyle travels back in time, then launches an attack on John Connor. We later learn that Alex is a T-5000 Terminator (do the evil machines have a marketing department to decide on all these codes?) and is a kind of physical embodiment of Skynet’s consciousness. Later in the film, we also see him as a holographic representation of Skynet because screenplay writers like ideas to be visualised. Why an actor as iconoclastic as Doctor Who’s Matt Smith was thought suitable for this straight-ahead role is difficult to fathom.
* Danny Dyson (Dayo Okeniyi) is the inventor of Genisys, an operating system that allows billions of people all around the world to sync up their devices… but is in reality a front for an maniacal plan to take over the world and destroy humanity by using their mobiles against them. There’s some heavy-handed satire going on here, of course – these days everyone’s addicted to their devices! (Well, at least a few people are. When John Connor says that everyone’s addicted to their devices, he’s walking past some people glued to their phones. But the idea doesn’t show up at any other point of the film. A better script would have weaved this theme into the plotting.) Danny is a *nothing* character with no stake in the story. His father is Miles Dyson, who we met in Terminator 2 and now gets a consequence-free cameo. Here he’s played by Courtney B Vance rather than T2’s Joe Morton.
Where: California. We see Los Angeles in two time periods, then the story plays out in San Francisco. (And yes, there’s an action sequence on the Golden Gate Bridge.)
When: Here’s where it gets convoluted – even by the standards of a series that has often torn up the temporal blueprints. The story begins in 2029, during the war between the human resistance and Skynet. In other words, we begin in the same future as depicted in James Cameron’s original movie. As then, Kyle Reese is sent back through time – and arrives on 12 May 1984. We even see the moment of Kyle being told the date by a policeman, restaged from the first film. At first this seems to be the same 1984 as seen in The Terminator, but then we find out there has been an earlier schism in time – in 1973, in fact, when a T-800 arrived in the past and changed history… I mean, the present… or the 80s, I guess. (Keeping up?) Kyle, Sarah and Pops then time-travel to a non-apocalyptic October 2017 for the second half of the story. We also see flashbacks to Kyle’s childhood in the war-torn version of the early 20th century and Sarah’s in the 1970s.
I’ll be back: Schwarzenegger’s catchphrase is said when Pops is just about to jump out of a helicopter. The actor had actually curtailed its use in recent years, with only an extra-jokey citation in the gang-show action film The Expendables 2. In that woeful movie, his character tells Bruce Willis that he will be back. ‘You’ve been back enough,’ snarks Willis’s Mr Church. ‘*I’ll* be back.’
Review: This idiotic – yet admittedly never dull – film is essentially fan fiction made with a bloated Hollywood budget. The script riffs onanistically on pre-existing characters, concepts, plotlines, dialogue… even how certain scenes were staged in previous movies. Early sequences deliberately recreate moments from 1984’s The Terminator – shot for shot, with lookalike actors. It’s impressively done, especially a CGI Arnold Schwarzenegger looking as he did in the 80s, and quite eerie if you know that film well. Then, in one of the script’s best moments, this film-facsimile is invaded by a new character – another Terminator, played by a 60-something Schwarzenegger. Pops attacks his predecessor, tearing up the franchise’s timeline (again) and opening up the story for something new. However, like a lot of fan fiction, Genisys doesn’t do anything new. It takes what has gone before and churns it all up, hoping for new flavours from once-fresh ingredients. The movie also completely misses the point of the series. The team behind this film seem to have concluded that the Terminator franchise is *about* time-travel, rather than that simply being a way of setting up each story. The script is therefore overly concerned with alternatives timelines and altering history – elements that have always been a part of the Terminator recipe, for sure, but never the focus – rather than what the events mean for the characters. In Terminator 2, for example, Sarah Connor went through absolute hell to protect her son and ensure the survival of the human race – it’s a primal story of extreme motherly protection. Here, she time-travels over the time period in which John would have been born… ensuring that he’ll never exist in this timeline, right? Then she meets a grown-up John who has travelled back from 2029… but *very soon* after learning he’s under the control of Skynet she starts trying to kill him. Why? Because that’s what happens in generic action films: good guys try to kill the bad, irrespective of any emotional context. And this is a movie full of very generic action – lots of shooting, running, punching, exploding, crashing, none of which tells you anything about the characters involved. Like a lot of fan fiction, it also has a really stupid title.
Five goddamn time-travelling robots covering up their goddamn tracks out of 10
Next: Terminator Dark Fate
See here for a redux review of Terminator Genisys, which looks at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s age…
Ian Farrington 