Terminator Genisys review: Come with me if you want to see a really average movie. The very average fifth film in the series fails to live up to expectations.
Terminator Genisys review
Six years on from the mess that was Terminator Salvation comes the fifth movie in the franchise, Terminator Genisys, the film that sees Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to one of his most iconic roles. ‘Genisys’ kicks off with a voice over from the future, and Jai Courtney’s Kyle Reese. It’s post Judgement Day and Jason Clarke‘s John Connor, now in his mid-thirties, is celebrating another victory against the machines and the infamous Skynet. When the human resistance come upon a time machine, they must send Reese back to 1984 to protect Connor’s mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from a vicious Terminator, the classic T-800 from the original movie, which of course is played by Arnold. However, Sarah isn’t the scared waitress that Reese expects, but a hardened warrior that has a familiar sidekick in the form of a slightly aged T-800 named ‘Pops,’ also played by the Austrian Oak.
There lies the initial plot for the film, and Terminator Genisys starts out with realitively good intentions. The opening is fine, and very reminiscent of the Judgement Day scenes in T2. Clarke opens the film well as the seasoned, scarred warrior Connor and Courtney gives a positive impression. The whole time-travel thing in any movie is tricky, and ‘Genisys’ goes the Back To The Future Part II way of things with this, and here is where the film starts to fall down. The Terminator and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day were classics, and they were so good because of their simple structure and story. The first movie was simply about a Terminator that was sent back in time to kill the mother of a future leader of a team of rebels that threaten to wipe them out, and then the sequel revolved around the teenage Connor, though this time the Schwarzenegger character was one of the good guys who find himself up against a highly effective new threat. Here, there is too much going on. Alternative timelines, too much in the way of CGI, multiple Terminators and a plot that is simply overly complicated and all over the place.
Let’s start off with the positives though. Schwarzenegger is the stand-out, and I can kind of get what they were trying to acheive with the character. His history of being Pops with Sarah Connor works and I liked that element of the film. His relationship with Clarke’s Sarah Connor is bang on, and he even gets most of the comedy quips in the film which don’t seem out of place. The way that the filmmakers get around his ‘being older looking’ is well done though I could potentially have done without the corny lines that seems to be the done thing with ageing action heroes over the last few years. Emilia Clarke is great as Connor in her new alternative form and Courtney is fine as Reese, something that I wouldn’t have expected to say leading up to the film’s release.
Onto the more negative aspects. I’m a huge fan of Jason Clarke, particularly with what he did in Dawn of the Planet Of The Apes, and he’s a decent John Connor, though what spoiled it for me were the really rather early spoilers about the character that we’ve seen in promotional trailers and even some of the one-sheet character posters. The big ‘reveal’ doesn’t really happen until over an hour in, and if I didn’t know what was about to happen, I think the film would have been a slightly better experience. They’ve seemingly focused all of their energy around this twist, and the film suffers because of it. Then there’s Matt Smith‘s character, which I won’t reveal here, but the guy has about two lines in the movie and you can’t help but think that his relatively high-profile appearance is only there to set-up future movies, something that is evident as the filmmakers go all Marvel with a mid-credits scene at the end. Oh, and the presence of J.K. Simmons? Well, he is in the film, but massively underused and his character is essentially pointless.
The big problem with the movie is that I just didn’t care about what I was witnessing. I didn’t care about the characters, about what was happening to them, and what was in store for them. I didn’t care for the heavily CGI-ed action sequences or the over-complicated and really quite average plot devices, and I didn’t really care about Schwarzenegger either. He’s clearly the best thing about the movie, but in something so mediocre, that’s not saying much at all.
Terminator Genisys review by Paul Heath, July 2015
Terminator Genisys opens in cinemas worldwide from Thursday 2nd July.
