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I know youâre really worried about this, so Iâm just going to say it up top: Yes, Arnold Schwarzwhatever says âIâll be backâ in this movie. Isnât that a relief?
We were all sitting there going, "Will he say the one thing he's known for more than anything else in his career, including eight years as governor of the most populous state in the nation?" And then he did, and we all sighed contentedly and ignored the fact that Terminator Genisys makes no goddamn sense.
The fifth movie in the franchise is part sequel, part reboot, selectively ignoring or reimagining stuff from other parts of the series, which it can do because of two magic words: alternate timelines.
There's a great tragedy in life; time-travel movies are super-fun, and time travel doesn't make sense. What's a filmmaker to do? Just say "alternate timelines" and boom, you've explained away the Grandfather Paradox and you've allowed yourself to change a couple of specifics while essentially making the same movie all over again.
But at least Arnold is still fun. It was a brilliant move in the first place; here's an actor incapable of sounding human, so let him play a robot and don't give him many lines. That trick still works. But the other characters, not so much.
New Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones) is 28, but she looks 12 and talks like it too (like, you know, all the time), so it's hard to believe she's a badass ninja about to become pregnant with the savior.
The new version of Kyle Reese, the guy sent back in time to protect Sarah—and to have unprotected sex with her (Jai Courtney)—is a big pile of boring. He and Schwarz have this weird scene where they're supposedly bonding, but neither moves his face enough to show any feeling. If you walked in on the movie at that point, you'd have no idea which was the robot. Apparently, in this timeline, acting is much harder.
The thing that made the first Terminator work was its simplicity—one idea, relentlessly pursued to incredibly good effect. Genisys replaces that with dumb science and big, corny action scenes like a motorcycle driving on top of a bus exploding on the Golden Gate Bridge.
And while the original focused on the result of time travel, Genisys goes to unfortunate lengths to explain the why and how. That's a huge mistake. Once you try to explain how the timelines work (something about "nexus points" and magnets), you've already lost. Instead, why not explain some of the myriad insane things in the movie that get no attention?
Why is everybody constantly shooting at robots repeatedly shown to be immune to bullets? And why do the characters say "hurry up" before they get into the time machine, as if the future will be miffed they kept it waiting? And why the fuck do the robots have human teeth? Not just the terminators in disguise, but the fully robotic robots walking around made entirely out of robot parts except they have human teeth. Explain that! And don't just say "magnets."
By far the silliest part is that Skynet isn't a DARPA program in this timeline. Now it's an app called Genisys that everybody wants. But what does it do to make everybody want it sooo badly? It's "links my phone, my tablet, everything seamlessly into the cloud." Holy shit! When can I get this Trojan horse that enables the robot uprising? I will pay any price!
It sounds like a Microsoft keynote for a program that will completely flop, but according to the movie, 1 billion people preordered it. And that's where the movie really lost me. It's harder for me to believe that you could sell a billion copies of that app than to accept that a super-genius robot could invent time travel and yet never think to send two fucking terminators at the same time and be done with it.
I'm sorry, obviously you couldn't do that. It'd disturb the magnets.
SEE IT: Terminator Genisys is rated PG-13. It opens Wednesday at Pioneer Place, Lloyd Center, Eastport, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Bridgeport, Vancouver. GRADE: C
WWeek 2015