(Watch out for spoilers!)
First
things first: Genisys (2015) is not the worst film to carry the franchise
name Terminator.
That
(dis)honor still goes to 2009’s Salvation, and by some distance too.
But
one shouldn’t celebrate much about this sequel, either, for Genisys
abundantly lacks the visceral impact of the first two Terminator films (helmed
by James Cameron) and the ambition/courage of Rise of the Machines (2003)
which -- love it or hate it -- at least attempted to move the franchise in a
new direction, beyond Judgement Day and into the Future War. That movie did
more than inch John Connor toward his destiny, and showed audiences that his fate had
not been changed, just delayed.
Terminator
Genisys, by
contrast, is yet another “we’ve got to stop Judgment Day before it happens”
movie, much like the 1991 sequel. But it
undertakes that familiar quest without Cameron’s skill or acuity in terms of
humanity, action, and even humor.
It’s
intriguing to note those places where Genisys falls down on the job.
It
isn’t necessarily in the twisty-turning narrative, which features a grab-bag of
great ideas, even if half-realized.
Rather,
it is in the unexceptional execution.
The
entire film moves by at the same clip or pace -- a steady heart-beat -- and
there is no real quickening or slowing of its pulse. Without any hills or valleys to accentuate the
action, Genisys indeed feels relentless, but never exciting, nor
particularly thrilling. There isn’t a single action scene here that feels
distinctive, memorable, or like a meaningful addition to the franchise.
Instead,
this movie is an entertainment machine on autopilot.
In
concept, Genisys is actually a “side-quel” to the original films,
meaning that it takes place in an alternate but connected reality (think: J.J.
Abrams’ Star Trek [2009]).
But
where that side-quel by-and-large got the characters and joie de vivre right, Terminator Genisys misses most of
its marks, and falls flat. The re-cast actors -- Emilia
Clarke as Sarah Connor and Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese -- aren’t bad in those familiar roles, but there is no force or momentum behind their performances, thanks to
Alan Taylor’s listless, generic direction.
Arnold
Schwarzenegger does his able best to carry the movie, but the supposedly
humorous call-backs to T2, with his cyborg character
practicing a smile, are generally dreadful, and largely unfunny.
Even the emotional connection between his
aging cyborg character, named Pops, and young Sarah Connor doesn’t feel as
powerful as it should.
So
this Terminator
is, like its namesake, an infiltration unit of sorts. It arrives in our theaters looking and
sounding like the other films in the franchise, but underneath the exterior, it’s
a stealth machine, all grinding gears and motors and calculated surfaces, but no soul.
In
other words, Genisys is a crushing disappointment. Not because it’s authentically terrible (like
Salvation), but because it can’t hold a candle to the other Terminator
flicks.
“We’re here to stop
the end of the world.”
In
2029, at the end of the war with the machines, resistance leader John Connor
(Jason Clarke) must send soldier Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to
protect his mother, young Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from a Terminator, a
relentless cyborg built for infiltration.
But
as he steps into the time field, Reese sees John attacked by a stranger (Matt
Smith), and as he travels through time, accesses a different time-line’s worth
of memories.
In this time-line, Judgment
Day did not occur in 1997, but in 2017.
And Skynet is a Trojan Horse in a new app from Cyberdyne, called
Genisys.
In
1984 Reese is rescued from a T-1000 by Sarah Connor, who has been raised since
age nine by a Terminator she calls Pops (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Now,
Reese, Connor and Pops must get to 2017, prevent the rise of Genisys, and
battle its protector: John Connor, who has been reborn as a “phase-matter”
Terminator.
“You’re nothing but a
relic.”
Although
many critics have complained about it, I believe the Terminator Genisys story
actually possess a great deal of potential.
A new
time incursion, basically, has scrambled the official (and familiar) time-line, shuffling all the old
familiar cards, and giving the audience a new hand, so-to-speak, to play.
Characters who were once heroes are now
villains. Characters who were once
protectors are now in need of protection, and so on. It’s an explosion, basically of the 1984 and
1991 films, with a high unpredictability factor involved.
Some
of the early scenes in the film -- particularly those that recreate Kyle’s landing
in 1984 -- are a lot of fun for the fashion that they play on our familiarity with Cameron’s
original film. Some of the shots used in
these sequences are identical to Cameron’s, but the precise characters details have changed in
ways that are surprising.
Now Kyle
arrives in an alleyway only to be pursued by a T-1000, not a Los Angeles cop. Now Sarah says to him, Kyle's own immortal line: "Come with me if you want to live." Now Kyle is the one who must play catch-up about the past, not Sarah.
But Terminator Genisys is so keen on playing up its (admittedly smart...) twists and turns that, at times, it doesn’t
settle down enough and pursue a single good idea.
For example, here
are two good -- even great -- ideas in the film, and neither is touched on for more than two
minutes.
First,
in the course of the action, the aging Pops (who possesses aging human tissue
around his robotic shell…) injures his hand, and can’t get it to function
exactly right.
We see his hand shake as
he loads bullets into a clip, and he attempts to right the error. And for a moment, the
film is actually about something: the ravages of age.
An old injury has given Pops the equivalent
of arthritis in that hand, and he must “adapt” so that it isn’t a
weakness in combat.
The
movie desperately wants the audience to love Pops, and feel his bond with Sarah. Indeed, much of the film's climax depends on us being moved by that father-daughter relationship.
One way to enhance that aspect of the characters' relationship would have been to
feature three or four occasions when Pops' programming/body starts to fail,
and he must use ingenuity, rather than brute strength, to stop his machine
opponents.
Had those moments occurred, we would have felt invested
in Pops in a deeper way. He would have had some flaw he was fighting against, namely rapid obsolescence. Since many of us have been watching The Terminator films since 1984, that flaw would have reflected our own lives. We too are aging.
But instead, the movie
gives the idea of an aging, slowing-down Terminator precisely one scene, and then has Pops jumping into propeller blades,
smashing into windshields and committing other dangerous (and circuit damaging…)
behavior without harm or commentary.
The
opportunity here would have been to depict how a Terminator -- an infiltration
machine -- grapples with completion of its mission while being, essentially “old."
Instead,
it’s just a great idea, tossed up momentarily, and then largely dispensed with.
Secondly,
Skynet is played to great effect in the film by none other than Matt Smith…here
billed as Matthew Smith.
At one point,
prior to his upload to the Cloud, Skynet notes that humans only give lip
service to peace, and are committed, actually, to violence. Now consider, Skynet is essentially an infant
here, and so his meeting with Sarah and Kyle represents the A.I.'s first encounter
with our species.
Now,
imagine if -- all along -- it was this very experience – meeting Connor and Reese on their crusade of destruction -- that
made Skynet murderous in the first place.
What if Skynet had no intention of launching a nuclear war, come upload,
except for the fact that humans tried, on his birthday, to kill him in the
crib?
Such a scenario would represent a surprising twist on the entire franchise. Sarah
and Kyle would be responsible for Judgment Day, not Skynet, who is simply
defending himself.
Again,
this movie (barely) gives this idea lip-service, and Skynet’s comments about
humanity is meant only as general, villainous disdain for our breed. But it could have been so much more. The whole story -- the whole franchise story -- could have been about how, in
a way, mankind’s downfall occurs because of aggressive efforts to avert that
downfall.
Terminator
Genisys possesses a lot of great ideas, barely enunciated (like John Connor’s
destiny, post-war…) but shunts them all asides for action scenes that have
approximately zero impact.
We get an
extended battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, but it feels like a pale imitation of
a confrontation in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). And a night-time
helicopter chase around San Francisco seems so gravity free that
it could be happening inside a cartoon.
Basically,
the action scenes in the film lack not only any kind of punch, but any significant grounding in reality. As a
result, it feels like every character in the film must be a terminator. Kyle and Sarah keep surviving incident after
incident with just mere scratches. At one point, they are hit -- naked, mind you -- by a speeding car on the freeway, and just need some stitches. Similarly, the T-1000 (Lee Byun-hun) is dispatched with
surprising ease, especially given how difficult Robert Patrick’s model was to
kill in T2.
Overall the
action is underwhelming, and the lack of real-world results for those involved in the chaos only worsens that
problem.
For a movie about the way our choices impact our future, Terminator
Genisys boasts surprisingly little impact.
Long
story short: Alan Taylor had hundreds of millions of dollars and 2015 era
special effects technology at his disposal to make a good Terminator movie, and yet his new model possesses
only a fraction of the thrills -- let alone emotional engagement -- of James Cameron’s
low-budget 1984 film.
That film accomplished so
much more, and with so much less.
At
one point in Terminator: Genisys, Sarah Connor hugs Pops, and he resists the emotional overture. “It is a meaningless gesture. Why do you hold onto something you must
let go?”
He
may be right, at least in terms of this aging franchise.
If the next two films (already assigned
release dates in 2017 and 2018...) aren’t a marked improvement over Genisys,
they may be but a meaningless gesture.
And thus it may be time for all its fans to let The Terminator go.
Your revue is spot on.I like the term "side-quel" to describe where this movie fits into the franchise. One technical detail that made the story hard for me to follow was that Sarah and Reese travel to the future. If Sarah leaves 1984 where does the John Conner they encounter come from? Two more of these you say? Wow...can't wait.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteThis is one case where I wish your review weren't so spot-on accurate.
I enjoyed much of this film while I was watching it, but like so many by-the-numbers films of the past few years, it falls completely apart upon introspection.
Lots of great ideas that never seem to gel into a cohesive whole for reasons you mention.
And why, why, why was a major spoiler revealed in all of the marketing for this film? They truly took away what could have been an amazing moment for the viewer.
I give the writers a lot of credit for trying something new, at least. You could see that they had enthusiasm and were fans of the franchise.
However, I agree with some fans who wished for a third season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles instead of this film.
If you haven't seen the television series, John, I urge you to do so. I believe it's right up there with T2 as the best part of the Terminator mythos.
Steve