If, like a lot of genre fans and straight-up geeks, you revere the first two Terminator movies, it’s a strong bet you’ll dislike Terminator: Genisys, the fifth film in the Terminator franchise (it just opened today on a metric crap-ton of screens). And if you don’t give a proverbial rat’s ass about the film series that made Teutonic cyborgs and the one-liners they spout an indelible pop culture fixture, it’s a strong bet your already-low expectations will still take a nosedive.
Let’s amend that. Hatred should be reserved for something that’s at least vigorous enough to arouse a polarizing extreme reaction of some kind. Terminator: Genisys, by contrast, runs its course with such rote apathy, it makes that ‘samba’ rhythm setting on an old Casio keyboard sound like gritty, to-the-bone Delta blues.
The movie’s opening minutes essentially replicate the 1984 original’s setup, in case anyone needs the catch-up. It’s the post-apocalyptic future, and the Earth’s ruled by Skynet, an implacable computer network whose army of machines have all but crushed mankind. John Connor, leader of the last ragtag vestiges of the human resistance, sends one of his lieutenants, Kyle Reese, back in time to protect Connor’s mom Sarah and to—ideally—destroy Skynet before it’s created.
The world Reese slingshots back to, though, doesn’t quite skew to expectations. The Sarah Connor now occupying the year 1984 isn’t a victimized, uncomprehending normal mortal: She’s a fully locked-and-loaded badass who’s already been on the run for years from Skynet’s Terminator cyborgs, her only companion being a benevolent Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who’s become her de facto father figure and protector. From there, it’s up to Sarah, Reese, and ‘Pops’ Terminator to hopscotch across time to save the world.
In a bit of irony surely not intended by its makers, Terminator: Genisys plays like a Skynet computer simulation of the first two movies. That lingering feeling’s telegraphed almost from the get-go. Virtually shot-by-shot recreations of the 1984 original drive the early portion of the movie, only with every trace of the first Terminator’s visceral, grubby immediacy antiseptically smoothed out.
Along the way, plenty of Big Action Special Effects setpieces surface: A T-1000 played by Korean actor Byung-hun Lee gets all liquid-metal stabby and smashy. Numerous cars pursue each other and crash with numbing regularity. There’s a big helicopter chase, and the apparently required-by-blockbuster-law trashing of the Golden Gate Bridge occurs twice, sorta (only the 1950s Tokyo of the Godzilla movies has been abused as relentlessly by filmmakers). It’s all bigger, louder, and explodier than any of the preceding movies, but there’s precious little inspiration or soul inside the threadbare screenplay. Yeah, picking on a summer popcorn blockbuster is like lifting a Tootsie Pop from a 4-year-old, but Mad Max Fury Road proved that an action movie can be as smart and resonant as it is exhilarating. The stakes on this type of movie have been raised, and as a result Terminator: Genisys feels like a factory job through and through.
Most of the human components in Terminator: Genisys just amplify the movie’s sense of mechanical indifference. There’s a feral intensity in the eyes of Michael Biehn, the original film’s Kyle Reese, that clearly betrayed the frayed edges of someone who’d spent their entire life fighting and running. The Kyle Reese of Terminator: Genisys is blandly acted by Jai Courtney, whose straight-arrow earnestness runs totally at odds with his guerrilla resistance fighter character (has this guy ever experienced anything worse than maybe losing his starting place on his high school football team?). And the grunting, earthy, no-bull Sarah Connor represented by Terminator 2’s Linda Hamilton has been replaced by Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, who looks like a more superficially-pretty computer sim of Hamilton and acts like a CW TV version of a living, breathing Female Action Hero. The attempted chemistry between these two feels clunky and rushed, as though director Alan Taylor couldn’t wait to get past the mushy stuff and straight to the explodey bits.
Not surprisingly, the only figures in this movie possessing staying power beyond a wet napkin are the old guys. Character actor J.K. Simmons lends rumpled believability and charm to his role as a cop whose path intersects with the Terminator twice in three decades. And Schwarzenegger proves to be pretty damned terrific. His features weathered to bracing distinction, he plays Sarah’s guardian as equal parts Pinocchio and protective papa. His awkward reconciliation of paternal love and conventional human behavior with his programming comes agonizingly close to giving this big, loud, explode-y assembly-line movie something resembling a heart.
