John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time, to the year 1984, to protect the woman that is going to become his mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from harm.
When things go wrong during his time travelling, Reese finds himself in an alternate history, where Sarah already knows her future, having been protected nearly her whole life by an ageing Terminator she calls Pops (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
We say, “Forced restart fails to boot up.”
TAYLOR: Terminator Genisys feels like it was born into this world backwards. By this I mean, someone thought it was a good idea to have Arnie have one last kick at this tin can, so they came up with a way to, for instance, age the Terminator. It is just skin, after all. I’m not complaining. I thought Arnie was pretty cool, reasonable, for a Terminator that is. I even enjoyed the twisted time line, where it’s 1984 but everything is different.
Young Arnie is there fighting Old Arnie. There were fun callbacks to the first film. Time lines get crossed, things are wrong, it’s messy and confusing, as time travel movies should be.
HOWE: Can you really see this as being Arnie’s last Terminator role? I can’t. They always find a way to bring him back to life or online.
I’ve only ever seen the first two films. I watched half of the third film before I switched it off because the storyline was so ridiculous and confusing. I found Terminator Genisys to be no different. Maybe that’s because I hadn’t seen all the other Terminator movies to help me understand what was going on. Perhaps it was just a crapshoot of a movie and the writers thought, “Hey if we make it so confusing nobody will understand or care what goes on, it will work as long as it has explosions, fighting and Arnie uses his cheesy lines.”
TAYLOR: What I didn’t like is that a lot of the same material was used from the previous films such as the dialogue – “Come with me if you want to live!” – and stunts – another motorbike flies, another school bus spins, another spear thrust through a catwalk under which our hero crawls. There’s more coagulating metal, more expressionless police officers running smoothly after our vehicle. Still, it had enough going for it that I can say I wasn’t bored. But I might be being a little forgiving, nostalgic even. I might have been in the mood. Seems you weren’t…
HOWE: I’m all for nostalgia, but when you mesh the first two films together and reboot them nearly 30 years later it’s not really a new Terminator movie. Yes, there’s a few twists in this, but they don’t help the cause, it just makes it more confusing. Overall I found the storyline terrible, the acting wooden and we’ve seen the action scenes before. Terminator Genisys doesn’t have much going for it.
TAYLOR: This is true.
– Howe gives Terminator Genisys 2 microchips out of 5.
– Taylor gives it 2 cyborg smiles out of 5.
– Reel Reviews with Brian Taylor and Peter Howe appears in The Morning Star every Friday and Sunday.
