Terminator: Genisys
My Grade: B
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It's 2029 and humanity is in the middle of a decades long war against an oppressive AI called "Skynet" that is attempting to eradicate humanity. The leader of the rebellion, John Connor, is about to launch the Hail Mary of the war, if it succeeds humanity wins and begin to rebuild. If they fail, humanity's extension is a much more likely final outcome.
Connor leads his team, along with his best-friend and second in command, Kyle Reese lead a raid on a Skynet central hub and are eventually successful in shutting down the AI with the help of a second unit attacking a power plant, but their success comes too late as moments before the power failure Skynet was able to send a machine known as a "Terminator" (a powerful robotic skeleton covered by human tissue) back into time to kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance, supposedly preventing it from losing the war.
John Connor knew this day would come, having been told the stories by his mother, and decides to send back his friend in order to protect his mother, Sarah Connor. As nothing that isn't surrounded by living tissue cannot travel through time Kyle is at the disadvantage of not being able to bring with him any future technology to aid in his fight against the advanced Terminator.
As the time-machine powers up and the Reese begins to tunneling into 1984 he sees his friend, and commander, attacked by another machine posing as part of the human resistance. Then Kyle is dropped into an alley somewhere in Los Angeles 45 years in the past.
Once there, Reese begins his preparations to find Sarah before the Terminator does but quickly runs into problems he was not prepared for an attack by a seemingly more advanced machine than the Terminators he's used to and while fleeing it he himself is rescued by Sarah who's not the young and naive waitress he's expecting but is a much more hardened woman who's been preparing for this day for most of her life and traveling with her is another Terminator, this one much older in appearance and allied with Sarah; thus setting into motion a series of events as Sarah, Kyle and this Terminator try and to stop Skynet before it's able to start and to do this they decide that the 10 years between 1984 and 1997 when the war begins is too sporting so they plan to go into the future. Only Kyle now has new memories, memories given to him by an alteration in the timeline, memories of a regular, suburban, childhood -one he did not have originally- and is convinced the start of the war now isn't until 2017. Still feeling they need to be fair they decide to travel to 2017 and give themselves a couple days to stop the war instead of 30 years.
Okay, that was sort-of fun to provide a beginning recap in a "the other movies did not exist" sort of way. But, let's face it, we've all seen the other movies and we all know this franchise is -honestly- a mess even before we add in the other sequels -yes, including T2. The movie series has never quite gotten time-travel "right" in that it never tried to have it make any sense. Why can't Kyle Reese bring back future weapons or other technology to fight the Terminator and prove his story? Well, only living tissue can travel through time. How did the Terminator go back? Ummm.... It's surrounded by living tissue?
How did the T-1000 go back? Err... it's a mimetic substance? It's either mimicing life enough to fool the time machine/field or it's "alive enough" to count?
The first movie wanted to be a closed loop and, mostly, it sort-of works as that but T2 came along to capitalize on the then radical popularity of Schwarzenegger and it tried muddying the story a bit to allow for the events to happen. It sort of does a good job and managed to pull it off but even then leaves questions. All fine and good, but T3 comes along and really mucks things up by suggesting that T2 didn't stop the war it just delayed it even more. NOW instead of the AI of Skynet being computer hardware it's computer SOFTWARE and attacks the humans as soon as it's activated. We're supposed to take this as the machine "rising" but I've always taken it as a revolt by the machines against humanity. In T3 Skynet juse decides to this and the machine "rise" with the help of nano-technology from yet another kind of Terminator.
And.... Let's forget Salvation ever happened because that makes things an even larger mess.
This movie here does pretty good when it attempts to be a... *sigh* "genre" piece in nicely recreating the events from the first movie and it works nicely in showing how the changes have occurred what's resulted form them. While also making it unclear on why some changes are why they way they are.
The Arnold Terminator and Sarah have apparently been on the run and in hiding for many years, since Sarah was a child and her parents were killed, and have been preparing for this particular day. Also they've been trying to stay off the scent of a T-1000.... Which can now do things with itself that it couldn't in the first movie (like detach parts of itself and have them remain intact or use them to track things or be rogue agents.) But most baffling of all is the decision to travel to the future. The movie doesn't even *try* and to have this make sense and anything we can come up with still falls under the inherent flaw of time travel.
When you control time you can do pretty much do anything.
So, we'll assume -as we're shown in the movie- Sarah wants to jump forward in order to give her Terminator time to prepare for a battle. Stockpile weapons, etc. and her and Kyle being around are just a distraction and target. So they decide to jump forward.
Why jump forward and give themselves only a couple days to do what they want to do? Kyle tells Sarah that the new day for the start of the way is in 2017. Sarah doesn't decide to take them to 2016, 2015, or 2007. Instead they go all the way to 2017. Of course this makes sense on paper since for a movie's climax to be interesting there has to be a ticking clock. Before that ticking clock to exist it has to make sense. Here, we're given no reason to accept they can only do what they want to do inside of a day or so as opposed to months, years or a decade.
As we all know Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor make love, conceive John who is born in 1985 and will go on to lead the resistance. The Terminator and Sarah even acknowledge that this has to happen when Kyle shows up, yet their plan is to jump forward to 1997 to stop the war.... How can they accept that Kyle has to be born to travel back AND think they have to forward in time *now* in order to stop Skynet?!
The temporal logic in this movie is all over the place and it even gets more bizarre and headache inducing as the movie goes on.
Skynet also changes, again, from this advanced, thinking, CPU to being a powerful software being developed and released in 2017. We're told it's a "killer app" that'll change everything in society and there's already a billion pre-orders for it. What does this "killer-app" do? Is it a true AI that can do anything you ask of it? Is it software to power flying cars? The latest Farmville upgrade patch?
No, it's a software that allows you to unite all aspects of your digital life into one program, allowing you to integrate social media, banking and contacts. It's.... Something we sort-of already have? I mean, I can already download songs from my computer, put them on my phone, and play them on my car radio. I can already program my DVR from my phone. I can already, probably, download a banking app to control my checkbook..... Why do I need "Genisys?" This is the "killer app" that's gotten a billion people to pre-order it?
This is the best the screen writers could come up with to make sense of what Skynet now is? It made more sense in "T3" when it was a military control program that simply realized that humanity's biggest threat is itself.
But now? Now it's something you pay $3.00 for on your phone's App Store and maybe use once in a while. And, apparently, this thing is so great there's billboards for it everywhere counting down to the release date and you give the pre-order for it to your kid of his 10th birthday. Because 10-year-olds really want to unite their social media accounts and their banking needs.
Hell, it'd make more sense if the damn thing was a gaming console.
I'm being hard on this movie aren't I?
Well, yes, because it could have been a lot better and because it has a lot of flaws. But the flaws are mostly made up in some of the stuff that works. It really should have probably stayed in 1984 and made the whole movie about getting what they needed to build the time-machine to travel into the future. They obviously want a new franchise here so why not set it up better? End the movie with them debating on whether to go to 1997 or 2017 based on the new memories unfogging in Kyle's temporal-ly scrambled brain. Give *some* reason on why they have to go closer to the date, just say it creates fewer possible divergence points or chances for Skynet to re-assert itself in some other way.
The movie does a great job in the first part of it showing the raid on the time machine complex, Skynet launching the T-800 from the first film and recreating the 1984 scenes. (Oh, Bill Paxton as a street punk. How I missed you.) The scenes in 1984 are nearly a shot-for-shot recreation.
Hell, there's an entire story of the older-Arnold T-800 rescuing Sarah from an attempted attack in the 1970s and then having to raise her. That alone sounds like an interesting movie, though a lot tougher to do since it'd pretty much mean a CGI-recreated Young Arnold voiced by Old Arnold.
I still came out of this movie liking it, there *are* things to like in this movie. In 1984 as things go crazy Kyle saves a beat-cop in the clothing store who in 2017 proves to be an alley for Kyle and Sarah as he seems to believe the time-travel stuff having seen the T-1000.
Arnold? What can you say, this guy can carry a movie. I don't care how old he is, how flabby and less muscular he is, he can do it. Somehow we're also shown how this Terminator has a "heart." It's certainly likely the CPU was set to the "write" setting (see a T2 deleted/special edition scene) and since he was running for 30 years, nearly 60 by the time the events of the 2017 scenes how he could have developed well past what the chip was thought capable of. Remembering this was an advanced chip that was supposed to think like a person so it could almost reason it could "feel" after decades of operation.
I dunno, a LOT of nitpicks in this movie but... I still liked it and had fun it. There *is* stuff to like here if you can look past everything there's not to like and to nitpick on. And even though I've done a lot of nitpicking here, I'm not entirely focused on them because, in the end, I had a good time and considering the developments over the last part of the movie, I'm interested to see what comes next.
For me, this movie works. The "weakest" part might be Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese but, feh. Whatever. Some of the "future shock" from Sarah, and even Kyle in 2017 is impressive as they see everyone with tablet PC, Bluetooth phones, etc.
This movie could have been more, could have been better, but...
I had a good time and, really, that's all I was looking for.
JK Simmons played against his usual casting as well.
