James Cameron’s 1984 classic The Terminator set a new standard for sci-fi thrillers and launched a hugely successful franchise, not to mention the acting career of Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. Five movies and a television series later, a series of increasingly diminished returns continues with Terminator: Genisys, which sits somewhere between a clever reshuffling of the film’s notoriously paradoxical time travel plotting and a blatantly soulless cash grab.
The film opens in the year 2029, as John Connor (Jason Clarke) realizes that the malevolent robot force called Skynet has sent a T-800 terminator (Schwarzenegger) back to 1984 to kill his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke). Connor decides to send Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to protect her, in what fans will recognize as the backstory behind the first movie. When Reese and the T-800 arrive in 1984, however, things play out quite a bit differently.
Sarah is no longer the helpless damsel from the 1984 film, having grown up under the tutelage of an older T-800 (also Schwarzenegger) that was sent back to 1973 to protect her. In addition, a T-1000 – the shape shifting model played so well by Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 – has been sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah and Kyle. Sarah explains that all the time travel has created a new timeline, the same trick used by J.J. Abrams in his 2009 Star Trek reboot. This new, audacious version of the plot is probably too convoluted for some to follow, and verges on self parody.
The gritty look and feel of the first two films is gone. While much of Genisys is shot at night or in dark environments, Courtney’s hopelessly wooden performance and the silly alternate timeline conceit robs the narrative of gravitas and immediacy. The lack of an R rating cuts down drastically on the sense of danger as well – the T-1000’s ability to morph its limbs into blades only feels threatening when we see the results, as in Terminator 2.
Why James Cameron chose to endorse this mess as the third “real” film, effectively writing off the last two movies, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the story read better on the page than it plays out on the screen, or perhaps his participation was needed to pull Schwarzenegger back in after his stint as California’s governor kept him out of the last two installments. Whatever the reason, Cameron’s influence on director Alan Taylor is obvious in this film, especially during the challenging recreation of scenes from the 1984 original.
Genisys makes no mention of the events from the third and fourth films in the series, which is just as well, considering how overstuffed with plot the movie already feels. It has under-performed both critically and commercially, sitting at a 39 on Metacritic and opening at number 3 in domestic box office. Fans of the franchise have found little to praise beyond Emilia Clarke’s spot on casting as Sarah Connor, citing the uninspired writing and direction as major drawbacks to the film’s watchability. This doesn’t seem like much of a surprise as the sequel Judgment Day was the only film that generated as much excitement as the original. In fact, it’s argued that this movie is even better than the original, and is certainly played far more often by the likes of C4 in the UK and DTV in the U.S. Although the third and fourth films received less than thrilling reviews, Genisys has been said to be a “franchise-killing disaster” even before it premiered.
The rebooting and re-imagining of major film franchises is becoming a more common practice, as studios hope to cash in on branding and audience familiarity. However, it takes more than imitation for them to succeed. Filmmakers must have fresh and engaging ideas at their disposal to engage viewers and it’s here that Genisys falls short. Upcoming reboots like Ghostbusters and Star Wars have the potential to be exciting and profitable – as long as the creative forces behind them respect their audiences and explore intriguing new terrain.