Movie Reviews - Terminator Genisys

I saw the first Terminator movie when I was probably too young to see it, but I enjoyed it. I saw the second movie not long after, and I loved it. It was just a spectacular movie, with great effects and action, and a really fun dynamic between the three leads. I've followed the franchise (the movie side of it at least) since. I liked Terminator 3, and I enjoyed things about Terminator: Salvation, but I always considered the second film to be the definitive installment, encompassing everything that made the franchise fun to begin with. This movie wasn't better, but I really feel like it gave the second movie a run for its money.

Warning: Reviewing this movie does sort of demand a certain number of spoilers, so spoilers ahead.

If there is one thing that I feel hurts this movie for a general audience, it is the mythos that it is built upon. There are nods to past installments of the series throughout, as well as Easter eggs, and the building blocks for an all new Terminator multiverse. It ignores the third and fourth movies without actually ignoring them, because they instead happened in a different timeline. We are now witnessing a new timeline, where the launch of Skynet is pushed to 2017, and where John Connor, the savior of mankind, had been corrupted and converted into a Terminator by the malevolent program. I won't go into detail in regards to this. Firstly this is because I don't feel like you need to know the intricacies of the multiverse idea to enjoy the story, and secondly, because other can do so a lot better than I can. In fact if you want to learn about this new expanded Terminator multiverse, check out the article here. It does a wonderful job of including all of the pertinent details while still presenting them in a way that they are easy to understand.

No, I'm not going to mess with any of that, because there is so much more to talk about in this movie. From characterization, to action, to just the self-contained story of this movie, to the set-up for the next, there was a lot to like here, and a few things that I'm not sure that I liked, I'm going to talk about that stuff instead.

Firstly, let's talk about casting. Once again we see Arnold Schwarzenegger again as the Terminator T-850 model 101, called Guardian this time by the credits, and called Pops by the characters in the film (I'll be calling him Guardian, because I mean seriously, that is so much cooler). He slips into this role like one might slip on an old, well-worn shoe. This version of the classic Terminator is aged considerably, and it is starting to show. He isn't as strong or resilient as he once was, and he has been around humans long enough that he has begun to develop his own brand of emotions, so he sometimes shows worry in regards to his condition. If any other actor were playing this character, this would seem silly, but the governator makes it work. This is, by far, my favorite version of the good ol' 101, which is why I'm so excited that this is the first version of the character to survive past the end of a film, and even get an upgrade at the end!

Arnold, however, wasn't the only member of the principal cast. We also had Game of Thrones veteran Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor who, despite what the other characters say about her son John, is the real hero of the Terminator saga. This version of Sarah has been raised almost entirely by Guardian, and trained from a young age to fight. She is a good blend of the immature girl from T1 and the badass warrior from T2, and I loved it. Clarke is a great actress, and she slipped into the role so well that I stopped seeing her as a replacement for Linda Hamilton after too long. The replacement actor who I didn't quite feel ever became his character was Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese. Courtney played Reese as a much more aggressive and confident character, and Courtney is just has much more of an athletic build than Michael Biehn. This isn't a bad thing, though. This may sound blasphemous to other fans, but I never liked Reese much in the original movie. It was cool that he was portrayed as a realistic soldier with this soldier's baggage, but I just never took to his personality. There is no denying that Courtney isn't the strongest actor (he was just so bad in A Good Day to Die Hard), but he was serviceable, and his chemistry with Clarke made up for most any deficiency.

There was great attention to detail in this movie as well. Care was paid to the strengths and weaknesses of each model Terminator which appeared, effects for the T-1000, which first appeared in T2, were kept consistent with that film, and entire scenes from the first movie were lovingly recreated as this movie began. We even get to see Guardian fight the same T-800 that came back in time in the original film! My inner fanboy is still squee-ing over this. However, once the homages ended was when the movie really took off in my opinion. We get a new version of Skynet, which doubles as a clever commentary on our modern society's over-reliance on personal computers and handheld devices, much as the original movie was a cautionary tale about allowing technology to eclipse us, and then moments later we get a new Terminator who not only has the face of John Connor, he literally is John Connor, and he's more resilient than any Terminator that we've seen in the past. This makes the conflict in the rest of the movie even more intense. We know that the heroes have little chance of overcoming this enemy not only because he is superior to them in every way, but because he knows them. Not to mention that Skynet gets a new face and voice in this movie, in preparation for its larger role in the sequel (if the credits scene is any indication), and I could not be more happy with who it is.

The action in this movie was one of the few areas where I felt let down. It was great, don't get me wrong, but it was really just a lot of the same stuff that we've seen in other Terminator films. We have stoic robots blasting each other with high-powered guns without flinching, cars being used as weapons, hand-to-hand combat between super-powered machines, and a regenerating villain. There are only so many variations of these things that you can do before they start to become stale. They did mix it up a little at the end when Guardian fought the John Connor-nator directly, but a lot of what we saw there we've still seem before, from Connor's body reforming itself, to him being able to reverse the orientation of his torso for a quick attack. It was good, but none of it really sticks out from everything else, save for the early scenes of Guardian vs, the original T-800, which was too short by a lot, as far as I'm concerned. It wasn't really good, or really bad, it just was.

This leaves the set-up for the next movie/movies to talk about. I went into this movie knowing that these things were present, so I was prepared for them and had fun spotting them. If someone went into this movie expecting it to self-contained, however, I can imagine that they might be disappointed. There are many questions left unanswered by the end of the film. We still don't know why the timeline changed again and caused this new branch of the timeline to occur, or who sent Guardian back to train and protect young Sarah. These are really the only things, though. Everything else is wrapped up satisfyingly by the end using the standard time-space mumbo jumbo that is present in every film in the series. I have faith that the sequel will answer these questions, and with the Marvel movies being what they are now, I'm used to blockbusters casting loose threads. In other words, I wasn't bothered by these unanswered questions, but I can get why many others were.

This review has been kind of complex and disjointed. I'm sorry for that. It could have been a lot worse, but it didn't need to be even this bad because the good and the bad in this movie can be summed up pretty easily. The return of Arnold, the casting of Emilia Clarke, and her chemistry with Jai Courtney, along with some great throwbacks, and a fun revitalization of the story made this movie a lot of fun. However, the loose threads left to be tied off by the sequel, and the kind of general and conventional action are a bit put-offish. Still, I think the good outweighs the bad, and that even the bad has elements of good, and so I give this movie a solid 7.5 out of 10.