Terminator Genisys

Rebooting a series that’s grown stale or been dormant for a while is one thing. There’s a whiff of arrogance, however, to the recent trend of selective sequels that pick and choose which previous entries they want to follow, as if saying to certain films and the people who made them that they’re not good enough to even be acknowledged. Such hubris is risky, for if a movie can just pretend like predecessors it deems lesser never happened, it’s certainly fair to think that it, too, will be forgotten if it’s anything less than a worthy successor to the franchise’s best efforts. 

Terminator Genisys, the fifth Terminator movie but acting as a direct sequel to Terminator 2, surprisingly pulls it off. It doesn’t measure up to the skill, imagination, and pure thrills of James Cameron’s first two installments, and we’ll have to wait and see if its box office intake gives it staying power in the franchise going forward. But solely on its merits, it’s a solidly fun and entertaining follow-up, more so than any other entries in the series in the nearly quarter-century since T2 (though I still contend that Terminator Salvation, the last attempt at a reboot from 2009, was not bad).

The original Terminator ended with an interesting time-travel twist, but every successive entry made a bigger and bigger mess of continuity. Each new sequel pushed the apocalyptic future a few years later and later, and seemed to just hope the audience wouldn’t notice. Since we’re now well past the initial dates the films predicted the Terminators would take over, Genisys makes the wise move of resetting the whole timeline, à la X-Men: Days of Future Past. It still leaves some things unexplained (some of them deliberately, planting seeds for more sequels), but it works for the most part, and is not too complicated and confusing to just enjoy the flick.

The film opens with John Connor (Jason Clarke) leading the human forces to victory against the machines of the evil Skynet in the year 2029. Afterward, as in the original 1984 picture, soldier Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent back in time to protect John’s mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from a Terminator sent back to kill her. Upon arriving in 1984, however, Reese finds that the timeline has changed, and Sarah is not a damsel in distress but a warrior fully aware of her destiny. Also, her closest ally is an aged Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who was sent back in time to protect her as a child. The new mission is for the three to travel into this new future (a 2017 that looks little different from right now) and stop Skynet’s latest plan for world domination.

One might recall that in T2, in addition to making a sequel, James Cameron took the opportunity to recreate parts of the first film with the blockbuster budget he didn’t have the first time around, from the overall plot to specific sequences and lines of dialogue. Genisys takes the same approach. The opening finally gives us the big final battle between man and machine Cameron envisioned but never produced. Also, since the visual effects T2 introduced have long since become commonplace, the main villain is similar to the liquid metal T-1000, only several steps ahead in terms of CGI (a seperate T-1000 is also thrown in the mix, with Lee Byung-hun taking over the role from Robert Patrick). One could dismiss it as derivative, repetitive, or unimaginative, but then, what reboot or sequel isn’t?

The problem actually isn’t the things that stayed the same, but that the film tries new things. Mostly, it’s the villains. I won’t reveal much about the main bad guy (though—SPOILER!—the trailers already did), just that their subplot and characterization, which aim to add a new element, are merely superfluous. The secondary antagonist, a personification of a malevolent computer program played by Matt Smith, is exhaustively chatty instead of threatening. Neither are as effective as the icy, stone-faced baddies of Terminators past. Also, recent Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons is randomly inserted as comic relief and really doesn’t fit. He’s funny, to be sure, but he only seems there as a way to plug holes in the plot, to bail out the screenwriters where they wrote the script into a dead end.

The main protagonists do their jobs better. Courtney, a reliable action movie role-player, is convincingly soldierly, and Clarke more than respectably carries the torch for Linda Hamilton. But, even though the character dynamics try to relegate him to a secondary wisecracking old man role, Schwarzenegger is still the one who makes the movie. Even at his age, he sells it well, brandishing a shotgun and wearing sunglasses, dropping terse, hilarious one-liners, and even taking part in some grueling combat. After a series of flops since he left the Governor’s mansion, it’s great to see him back in top form, and he reminds us to have fun even if the picture’s stretching our limits of believability.

Most importantly, the one element where no Terminator product has ever disappointed is the action department, and Genisys has some great chases, shootouts, and explosions. It all makes for a good time at the movies, even if towards the end it gets a little muddled in CGI. The best sequences are the ones early on, which recreate and alter specific scenes from the very first film. It’s here that this somewhat kid-friendly PG-13 picture comes closest to recreating the intense R-rated suspense from the Terminators of old. In fact, one foot chase through a dark sewer probably contains the most tension the series has had since Schwarzenegger played the bad guy 31 years ago.