Film

Terminator Genisys’ looks to the future by rewriting the past

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The Governator is back! Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Terminator Genisys.

Two and a half stars

Terminator Genisys Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Directed by Alan Taylor. Rated PG-13. Now playing.

Series creator James Cameron has hailed Terminator Genisys as “the third film” in the series that began with Cameron’s 1984 The Terminator and 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the movie itself also acts like the third in the series, essentially ignoring everything from 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and 2009’s Terminator Salvation. While Genisys spends its first half flattering the story that Cameron created in his original film, it doesn’t do much to capture the character depth, emotional impact or philosophical ideas that made Cameron’s movies such iconic touchstones of sci-fi and action cinema.

Cameron’s actual involvement in Genisys is limited to saying nice things about it. Like Rise of the Machines and Salvation, Genisys was directed by a competent journeyman (TV veteran Alan Taylor, who also helmed Thor: The Dark World) rather than a visionary like Cameron. Taylor and screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier do more than pay homage to Cameron, though, as the movie opens with the same setup as the original, and for a while proceeds along the same lines: In the future, a self-aware computer network known as Skynet has wiped out much of humanity, and in order to defeat human resistance leader John Connor (played this time by Jason Clarke), it sends a cyborg known as a Terminator back in time to 1984 to kill John’s mother Sarah (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, replacing Linda Hamilton) before John is born. John is able to send back his trusted lieutenant Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to protect Sarah from the Terminator.

Taylor does an amusing job of replicating and then subverting the beats of Cameron’s film, as Reese travels to 1984 only to discover that the timeline has been changed, and Sarah is already a warrior badass thanks to a reprogrammed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger, making his franchise return) who’s been protecting and training her since she was a kid. The film incorporates Schwarzenegger’s advanced age by explaining that the Terminator’s human flesh ages normally, and the longer the cyborg is around, the older it looks. From 1984, the movie jumps ahead in time as Sarah, Reese and the Terminator try once again to stop Skynet and avert the impending apocalypse.

It’s when Genisys breaks from the remixing of previous movies and starts to tell its own story that things go awry, with a convoluted plot that’s full of holes and a self-consciously shocking twist that ends up invalidating a core thematic element of the series. Genisys often feels like a glorified piece of fan fiction, playing around in the margins of a great movie. As an overblown blockbuster, it’s solid but forgettable, with mediocre action sequences and performances that range from lifeless (Courtney, as usual) to mildly disappointing (Clarke, who is much more compelling on Game of Thrones) to hammy (Schwarzenegger, coasting but clearly having fun). Familiar characters like the liquid metal T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) and cybernetics pioneer Miles Dyson (Courtney B. Vance) are reintroduced and then largely wasted. The movie’s chief purpose seems to be reminding audiences of what they enjoyed in the previous movies, but the best way to enjoy those is to just go watch them again.

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