Terminator Genisys - Review Thread

I don't care about spoilers, I'll never watch this movie but I'm curious. In order for John Connor to still exist in this alternate timeline Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor would still need to hook up at the exact moment that they did in the original film. How do they go around that?

Well...I liked it.

It looks like it's doing pretty well overseas. Probably still up in the air whether they make another one.

People trash a movie so badly on every site and the wonder why its making poor Box Office Numbers. People making this movie should have just rebooted everyone and made a new T-800 character left arnald behind in his final part 3 entry. Like i said people and Sci Fi have ruined Alien, Predator now its Terminator. Thank you hollywood for killing the big movie scifi ideas from the 80s besides Star Wars.

There's a difference between ideas and execution. I loved all the ideas in Terminator Genisys but the execution was really bad. It wasn't awful. It was just really really bad. If you've seen the trailers and TV spot, you have already been spoiled. There's not much else to the plot, so I won't bother with a summary. The only thing I'll add is that Arnold Schwarzenegger was wasted. He's in a lot of scenes and is a MAJOR part of the action scenes, but he's not important to the main story. He's crucial to the backstory and the new version of Sarah Connor but that's small stuff in the big scheme of things. Sarah, John Connor and Kyle Reese are the focus of the movie. That's probably the biggest mistake they made. Schwarzenegger needs to be the center of attention. This is HIS franchise.

D+ says Doomsday

They tried to make him Sarah's father and the scenes where he's messing with Kyle Reese - cause that's what father's do with their daughter's boyfriends - were very amusing, but they got lost in the clusterfuck. I also didn't care for Jason Clarke as John Connor. Call me crazy, but they should have just thrown money at Christian Bale. Despite his hilariously over-the-top performance in Salvation, he's still the best John Connor. Edward Furlong was annoying in T2. Whats-his-face in T3 was forgettable. I never watched the TV show - so MAYBE that kid is the best. I don't know. So... Bale is really the best as far as I know and could have added some needed talent to the movie. 

I disagree. This is Hollywood. They can reboot, re-invent, and revive any franchise they want, as many times as they need to, until they get it right, just as often (or less) as they get it wrong. Although I was entertained by Genysis, I agree it wasn't up to the standards the first two films set, but it was also better than the last two. This is The Terminator franchise, a brand still carries a lot of weight. You put it in the right hands and you've got a goldmine. Fast & Furious was ready to die with Tokyo Drift, Jurassic Park 3 was a mess, even the last of the Brosnan 007s were laughable... but they all came back in a big way. We might not see the Terminator film we're waiting for anytime soon, but it's out there waiting to be made. In the meantime, I'll enjoy my cheesy throwaway sequels.

Hey I'll do casting if someone will help me write this thing. Trust me we could come up with better ideas and ending in our sleep then most of the bad movies that end up being done.

Or in a nutshell, the movie messed up by being a reboot that didn't really change anything. They renamed Skynet "Genisys" and more or less, it was the same stuff.

It's difficult to walk away from "Terminator Genisys" without feeling a great sense of disappointment, deja-vu, and boredom all rolled into one. No one should be expecting the film to be on par with James Cameron's knockouts, but was it too much to ask for it to at least be better or on par with "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"? Apparently, yes, and as the film plods along throwing one repetitive element at the viewer after another it becomes clear that this is not the jolt of life that the once mighty franchise needed. In fact, it's anything but.

The story starts off pretty much as you'd expect it to you, operating essentially as a film ignoring the previous two entries in the series and firmly latching itself to Cameron's films. We're shown a brief glimpse into the war of the future through an opening credit sequence before Kyle Reece (Jai Courtney) is plunged into familiar territory for the franchise: Los Angeles, 1984. Here the viewer is taken down an amusing journey of nostalgia as entire scenes from "The Terminator" are recreated, though in one of the few intelligent shake-ups to the original plotlines, we're thrown a curveball when Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) saves Reece and informs him that she's been preparing for this day. Backing Sarah in both protection and information is the T-800, with Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to his signature role. Arnold is terrific as the T-800, but is mostly wasted and reduced to either being the butt of or spouting off jokes. The T-800 is annoyingly referred to as "Pops" by Sarah since the T-800 essentially fathered her at an early age, and if you think it sounds silly the first time you hear the nickname, it only gets worse when you hear it 20 more times throughout the film's duration. I understand what they're trying to do, anyone that's seen "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" gets it, but it all comes off as annoying and weird and doesn't generate the laughs I'm sure the writers were going for. I'd even argue that it makes the T-800 less menacing, even T3 didn't stoop Arnold down to this level of guard puppy. Arnold, along with Jason Clarke who plays John Connor, are the only actors in the film that bring any intrigue to their characters, and a meat-and-potatoes script that's filled with one convoluted plotline after the other doesn't give them much to work with. T2 had it's funny moments to be sure, but they worked because the film had a hardened, gritty edge to it that the comedy breaks up nicely. In Genisys the jokes land around a quarter of the time, with the rest being eye-rollingly bad or so breezy they don't even warrant a reaction.

The film attempts to reinvigorate the franchise by throwing several different time travel plot arcs at us, and while the initial time change works as an interesting shake-up to the plot we're all very familiar with, each subsequent one just muddles the already murky plot with more holes and less impact. There's nothing worse than a dumb movie that thinks it's really smart, and "Terminator Genisys" is a glaring example of just that. And for all it's time-hopping, it's pretty bland and boring. The set pieces aren't interesting, the CGI is all over the place is consistency, and the action consists of repetitive gun play and Terminator brawling. The beats essentially go drop the characters into a new setting, fill the dialogue with tons of useless exposition to reexplain all the new absurdity we find ourselves in, throw in some bad jokes and even worse romantic dialogue, and then have a bad Terminator pop up to chase them until they do it all again. As the film nears it's climax, I honestly couldn't wait for it to be over. For all their shake-ups to the plot, everything feels awfully familiar and unoriginal, and we're left with a watered down version of far superior movies with a plot that isn't nearly as interesting as the ones it's grabbing from. None of the plot works, from the poor decision to to the overexplanation of EVERYTHING. I can excuse a movie like "Jurassic World" to an extent because it's good, dumb fun. In the case of "Terminator Genisys" though, there's very little fun and a lot of dumb generated from it's failed attempts at being unique and smart. Everything feels very PG-13 and scaled back, and the scope of this film is the worst of the series, even below the stepchild of the franchise "Terminator Salvation". As the film drags along you stop admiring any attempts at throwing some needed jolts and twists to the franchise and just grow more and more soured by all the unnecessary exposition and generic action sequences.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, aside from Arnold and Jason Clarke, everyone feels very miscast. Emilia Clarke is great to look at and isn't annoying as Sarah, but she's not believable either. Now, one can argue that she lacks the fierce determination and cynicism that Linda Hamilton portrayed in T2 because she's had the T-800 as her guardian this whole time and has been prepping for these moments, but the point still remains that Clarke is too peppy and sarcastic when she should be hardened and more calculating. Jai Courtney is just awful as Reece. He was awful as McClane's son in the bombastic "A Good Day to Die Hard", and he's just as bad here as Kyle Reece. He doesn't work well with Arnold, their banter often feels forced on his end, and his cornball dialogue to woo Sarah Connor grows worse as the film plods along. It's a lot of ideas, none of which are good and most teeter on downright ill advised, and all the talking and speculating grows tedious. The filmmakers, in all their attempts to charge new energy into the franchise, forgot how to make it fun and unique and don't even lean on the film's main attraction, Arnold, as much as they should have. Throw in your generic after credits sequence that is another cheap hint at more films to come, and you have a film that's slightly better than "Terminator Salvation" but actually worse than T3. Take that for what it's worth.

5/10

Yeah that's a great point Ian, it did feel like a fan film. For all their endless exposition, nothing that they're attempting to explain really makes sense, and if the action wasn't so dull and the characters weren't so bland I could've ignored the gaping plot holes and silliness of it all. And yeah, I hated that they attempted to make Skynet into a humanlike personification, like what? Oh, and all that stupid nonsense with Reese as a kid and having all these dumb flashbacks that are made even worse when we actually visit them and see them in context. You nailed it, this is a fan film made by "professionals", and it stinks.