Fish and Cherries Productions

If Terminator Genisys were a human being, it would be a highly skilled mariner, given that it has the ability to jump multiple sharks in one go. There are some nuggets of gold to be found, mostly in Arnold fitting right back in as the emotionless terminator and some funny lines here and there. That’s about where my praise ends, though; between the convoluted plot and the nonsensical roads it takes (some of which have no end point or resolution), it’s hard to tell what this movie’s biggest misstep is. Certainly a huge one is the rather ironic way they butcher Sarah Connor; while making her a strong action hero, they make her less capable and more dependent on the two men in her life. Also, she lacks any chemistry whatsoever with the man she’s destined to fall in love and have a child with. But hey, at least she’s not dead.

Among the plot holes and convoluted time travel ideas that make no sense, there are a lot of things that are just plain wrong in the Terminator movies. Kyle Reese was supposed to be rescued by John Connor from a death camp, but here John saves him from a lone terminator when he was a kid. Also, the heroes send two people forward in time with a reconstructed device (how they were able to build it with such precision is beyond me), but if the time travel device could send multiple people, why didn’t Skynet just have two hugging terminators or a dozen T-1000s sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor? Actually, that would be pretty cool. Stuff like that really takes you out of the immersion, especially if you’re a longtime fan and there are too many of these holes to list them all.

Also, I’d like to openly suggest that Paramount fire their marketing teams for the Terminator franchise because they have a bad habit of putting massive spoilers right in the trailers. SPOILER ALERT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND TERMINATOR DOESN’T! They did it in Terminator Salvation with the reveal of Marcus Wright secretly being a robot and they did it here with John Connor being converted into a terminator. SPOILERS OVER! You’ve gotta feel bad for the writers and directors who must work really hard to develop these legitimate twists and to have their efforts be undone by a simple trailer. But like Terminator Salvation, Genisys’ biggest Achilles heel comes down to four syllables: PG-13. I’m beginning to think that PG-13 and 80s movie reboots go together like oil and water (I may have to look at the Robocop movies later to prove this point) because these movies are not allowed to show or say as much that gave the originals their visceral investment and bite. Speaking of mistakes carried over from the last movie, they once again give Skynet a voice and face. I went over how much of a mistake it was last time and it stands true here, except it’s even worse with Skynet becoming a gloating evil mastermind, even in development when it was supposed to consider humans a danger to themselves. Even with a certain former Time Lord playing the part, the effect really kills the movie.

In my mind, these last three movies don’t exist and the franchise ended with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. While Genisys isn’t the worst Terminator film, it’s watered down, dumb as hell, and way too Hollywood for its own good. I suggest that you all take the first two films’ message to heart: “There is no fate but what we make.” Steer fate towards making sure that people stop trying to retool and reboot what was such a great action series and let it rest as the classic it was always meant to be.