Terminator Genisys
(Warning: Includes ALL the spoilers!)
This movie, the fifth in the series but "officially" the third because the previous third and fourth are so bad that they don't exist, has pretty much split critics down the middle. It is either hated or loved (or, to lesser degrees, disliked or not minded). I thought it was great! Supremely better than three and four, not as good as one and two obviously, but good enough for me to agree with James Cameron that it is a worthy third installment. There are various dumb bits in it (including Jai Courtney), some messy parts of the script, some unnecessary extras, but overall really very good. I would recommend it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger returns to his iconic character and gets to fight the original 1980s T-800. Emelia Clarke actually looks really similar to Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton and plays the role very well. Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese... um, I think the best you could say is that you get used to him being there. He cannot act
at all, and worse he looks nothing like the original actor Michael Bien. In connection with that, one particular thing which gets me with this movie is that in the original
Terminator the human resistance were basically starving hobos with guns who were hiding in tunnels underground and eating rats; in this one, that same resistance is well-fed and apparently has ample gym time at their disposal.
Other things which grated with me included the physically-impossible bus flip in which even in the action-movie universe Kyle Reese would be dead several times over, not just have a little trickle of blood on his temple. The punks who the T-800 kills at the start of the original movie are also in this movie but played by different actors (of course) - yet they not only look like entirely different people but the make-up crew didn't even
try to match their hairstyles to the originals (and they seemingly deliberately reversed the roles of Brian Thompson and Bill Paxton for some reason). It was incredibly distracting because this is such a well-known scene (watch the comparison clip on Youtube to see what I'm talking about - the link is at the bottom of this review). One of the reasons this was so irritating was that they went to great lengths otherwise to recreate the arrivals of the T-800 and Kyle Reese (right down to getting the exact same clothing and even the 1980s-style Nike shoes that Kyle steals from the store), and yet they utterly mutilate the punk scene.
The basic story is that Kyle Reese is sent back to 1984 to save Sarah Connor, but when he gets there he finds that timeline has been altered - a liquid metal T-1000 had been sent back to the 1970s to kill Sarah as a nine-year -old girl but she was rescued by a reprogrammed T-800 who then raised her. Another (or the same?) T-1000 is waiting for Kyle Reese when he arrives, but he is saved by Sarah and her T-800 (and they have already destroyed the other T-800 from the original timeline - er, apparently there can be multiple timelines all running in the same place.... yeah, the movie doesn't make a lot of sense when you try to think about it but hey, it's time travel. It's all timey-wimey and stuff). There's a short re-enactment of the chases from
Terminator 2, then the T-1000 is destroyed with acid which when you're thinking about it afterwards makes the whole inclusion of the T-1000 seem a bit cheap and pointless. Almost like it was only in there as a cash-grab for the movie. Sarah and her T-800 have plans to go forward in time to 1997 to stop Judgement Day - they have built a time machine in a basement, as one does, but needed the CPU from the original timeline's T-800 to make it work. However Kyle has been having flash-backs of a childhood he never had in which he was talking to himself in a mirror saying that the Genisys programme would be going live in 2017 and that would be the rise of Skynet. (Again, don't really try to think about it too much!). So Sarah and Kyle go to 2017, and the T-800 stays behind because it has exposed metal from fighting the T-1000 so cannot use the time machine. Once they get to 2017 they meet up with the T-800, now 33 years older, and - Surprise! - John Connor is there too! Whaaaaaaaat!? Yeah, it turns out that John has become a new kind of Terminator, a hybrid man-machine, and he is evil. Actually it wasn't really a surprise - they gave the whole thing away in the goddam trailers!! Back to the
Terminator 2 "homages" now, where the final battle takes place in the Cyberdyne building. The T-800 and whatever the heck the John Terminator is called (T-John?) get destroyed in the time machine which John had built at Cyberdyne - there are time machines all over the show in this movie! - but luckily the T-800's CPU ends up in a pool of polyalloy and it is reborn as a liquid metal Terminator. So everyone is happy. Sarah survives. Kyle Reese survives. The T-800 survives and I guess gets an upgrade. Sarah's son and saviour of the resistance is dead.. oh, bummer for him then. And the world is saved! Yay! Except nobody - not even the T-800 itself - seems to realise that the T-800's very presence proves that nothing has changed at all and that sequels are always inevitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wU5VUa3sJM
), and they travel to space where they detonate a bomb into the sharkicane to drop air pressure. Cue lots of sharks flying through space and a bit of a cliffhanger featuring Tara Reid...
