Movie Review – Terminator: Genisys
I wanted to be sure I watched Terminator: Genisys before I heard anything about it. I didn’t want to see a review, a Facebook comment, or even someone on Twitter saying, “OMG Mother of Cyborgs so amazeballs!” or whatever. Every once in a while I have a really bad feeling about a movie that I am hopeful for and I find it important to see it before my opinion can be tainted; positively or negatively.
I really like the first movie. It’s hard, gritty sci-fi and it effectively makes us care about the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in a very short period of time. Arnold is fucking scary. I probably watch this once a year.
I loved the second movie when it came out, just like everyone else did. Now I don’t. I find it hard to get through. The story is great and the action sequences are epic, but Edward Furlong is intolerable and I do not like the cornification of the T-800. I don’t mind that Arnold is a good guy, it’s the jokey stuff that I don’t like. Robert Patrick and Linda Hamilton are great, though.
Terminator 3 is really bad. The acting, the story, many of the effects. I think I liked it, initially, as well. But I tried to watch it again recently and had to turn it off. I was embarrassed to be watching it (please note that I openly admit to loving Sharktopus). Not even the presence of two of the most gorgeous women on the planet could keep me from turning it off.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was excellent, and I’m still angrier about its cancellation than any other show that I’ve watched. It handled time travel well, the characters really felt like deeper, more interesting extensions of the movie versions, and the cast was absolutely fantastic. The season 2 cliffhanger finale was incredible and we will never know what happened.
I enjoyed Terminator: Salvation. I thought it made some mistakes as far as continuing the franchise was concerned, but it was a very good action/sci-fi movie. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it sold me that the story and the characters were real and existed in the Skynetverse.
Which brings me to Genisys. I didn’t buy it. The acting was terrible. I loved Jai Courtney on Spartacus, but he has been vanilla pudding in everything else I’ve seen him in. Emilia Clarke is beyond fantastic on Game of Thrones, but as Sarah Connor she has no gravitas whatsoever. I didn’t buy her for one second and part of the issue was that she looked exactly twelve years old. The shift from Daenerys to Sarah should have been jarring, but somehow the shared traits of independence, survival at all costs, and organic toughness got lost. Not for one second did I buy Ms. Clarke as a competent, hardcore character in the way that I did Linda Hamilton and Lena Headey (my gosh, Headey’s Sarah was phenomenal – I didn’t even like the character at first and I wasn’t supposed to).
Jai Courtney in no way captured the damaged, haunted man that Michael Biehn portrayed in The Terminator. He was a big, dumb sack of beef that made snarky comments from time to time. He never felt like a hero or savior, only a big goof that managed to not get terminated.
I can’t discuss the rest of the characters without spoilers, so hang in there. I’ll get to them in a bit. For now I’ll say that J.K. Simmons and Matt Smith were great and Lee Byung-hun did a great Robert Patrick impersonation.
The movie was dumb. The story was overly convoluted and had massive plot holes. Some of this may have been due to the intention to make this a trilogy or new franchise or whatever (dear God, no), but that’s no excuse. When the credits rolled there were major plot questions left unanswered and I’m not okay with that.
The effects looked good. There were some terrible helicopter scenes that also involved absolutely moronic decision-making from the characters (seriously – if these dum-dums are in charge of saving the world, we’re all fucked). The shots with T-800s and the various other flavors of Terminators looked good, but things faltered a bit when they showed Skynet’s larger killing machines.
I did think that the music was great. There was a lot of new stuff that was reminiscent of Brad Fiedel’s powerful score, as well as straight-up reuse in all the right spots.
There are some bits of fan service – the “I’d like to see this happen” sort of stuff – and when they’re plot points or visuals rather than awkwardly delivered lines of dialogue they work.
I can’t recommend Terminator: Genisys. There were a few rewarding moments, but I just did not care about the characters or their situations. I kept thinking, “Is this almost over?” and if I hadn’t been with friends I would’ve gotten up and left, not one bit curious about what had happened afterward. As a matter of fact, the second the credits rolled I walked out of the theater, but my buddy stayed behind just in case there was an after-credits scene.
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