Audio By Carbonatix
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car — that cut through the CGI like scratches on the tape. Genisys is haunted by ghosts of old movies, a cyborg whose entire DNA is déjà vu.
Time is meaningless. Judgment Day has rained nuclear hellfire in 1997, 2003 or 2017, numbers intoned with the transient gravitas of Powerball-winner announcements. When Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “I’ll be back,” the line echoes in the brain. Is this 1984 or 1991 or 2015? Or have we stumbled into the alt-worlds of Total Recall, Last Action Hero or Expendables 2, where he also grunted his catchphrase, or one of Arnie’s gubernatorial stump speeches — from a period that now, four years after he left office, feels as fictional as his films? But at least Schwarzenegger is consistent. Sarah Connor has been played by two actors, Kyle Reese by three and John Connor by four, and the screenwriting team’s efforts to get all of the leads in the same room suggest the bittersweet exhaustion of a Van Halen tour. But, hey, can we really blame them? We’re the ticket buyers who keep rewarding Hagar and Schwarzenegger for parroting their greatest hits.
Genisys boots up in 2029, a generation after the robot rebellion, where scarred rebel leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) leads a final assault against Skynet. Those of you with flow charts will recall that as the year when Connor sent his young foot soldier, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), back to 1984 to rescue and impregnate his mother, Sarah.
When Reese lands in punk ’80s L.A., he’s greeted by one thing we expect: a young, naked Arnold, recapturing the physical perfection that first got him cast as a computer man, now with computer help. And one thing we aren’t expecting: a warrior Sarah Connor, who, in this timeline, has been waiting for his arrival since 1973. And, yeah, she already knows they’ve gotta mate like racehorses to save humankind. This Sarah (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke) has a sweet-looking candy-cartoon face, but the wrong kind of feminist spunk. She takes offense when Reese unlocks her handcuffs, when earlier iterations would have tersely nodded and grabbed a gun.
Genisys starts with a mystifying war montage in which it’s hard to decipher whether Reese and John Connor are in peril or showing off their highlight reel. Then it maintains that furious confusion. Everyone is shooting and punching, but no one knows how or why or even what year they should time-travel to next. Audiences will have seen four of these movies, and might be just as disoriented. (Whatever happened in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines seems to have never happened at all.)
The most clever thing Taylor and the screenwriters have concocted is an excuse to rehire Arnie as is, wrinkles and all. In this parallel universe, Sarah Connor has been palling around with his T-800 since the summer she turned nine. She calls him Pops, and his skin, it turns out, can age — though Arnie has a new catchphrase: “I’m not old, I’m obsolete.”
Of course, the whole motivation behind Genisys is to prove that nothing is obsolete: not 67-year-old movie stars, not 31-year-old sagas, and certainly not mankind’s perpetual paranoia about the end of the world.
