Terminator Genisys is a remake disguised as a reboot that's actually just a relaunch of a franchise that's now gone on three films too far with even more promised - or threatened, depending on your perspective.
The latest installment in the never-ending tale of How the Computers Destroyed the People Who Made Them pretends that the third and fourth entries (2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and 2009's Terminator Salvation) never existed. Instead, it stitches together James Cameron's 1984 original and '91 sequel, spawns a Frankenstein who looks a lot like an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger and sends it back and forth in time until up is down, day is night and black is still the same pile of green to which every summer blockbuster aspires.
This is the Star Trek-king of The Terminator: a wink and a nod to yesterday with both eyes behind 3-D glasses aimed squarely at the next installment. It's also an expensive, sturdy and wholly unnecessary piece of frippery constructed upon what LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy once referred to as "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s" in the song "Losing My Edge," which, come to think of it, would have been a far more appropriate subtitle.
At this late date, what's left to tell? The plot's the plot's the plot, only now with more chases, more exposition and more plot holes than ever before because that's what big budgets buy you in 2015. The characters remain the same; so too their proclivity for shooting at and driving away from mandroids who cannot die because, look, they're machines from the future, ya dig?
But once more, without feeling: Resistance leader John Connor (previously Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl and Christian Bale; now, Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (previously Michael Biehn and Anton Yelchin; now, Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect his mom Sarah Connor (previously Linda Hamilton; now Emilia Clarke) from The Terminator (Arnold forever!). There's even a cop made of liquid metal (previously Robert Patrick, now Byung-hun Lee) and a 1984 Arnold. One might even say ... they're back. Because, they'll always be back.
Only, something's way off: Kyle returns to 1984, only to find Sarah's Terminator is now her protector, a graying robot she lovingly calls "Pops." But the punch line to this one-note joke has been spoiled by its tell-all trailer and marketing campaign: John Connor, leader of the resistance in the future, is now the present-day villain. The only person who appears capable of making any sense of the plot is J.K. Simmons in an extended cameo as a veteran detective who in any other universe would be considered too insane to keep his gun and badge. Terminator movies aren't his tempo.
And Skynet's no longer a vintage game of Missile Command, but a computer program that links phones with tablets with TVs with ... NORAD. Or: "the ultimate killer app," according to one of 483 characters in this movie whose sole purpose appears to be to explain a movie that doesn't make any sense. Humans still bring about their own demise, only now we're too busy to look up from our smartphones to even notice it's the end of the world, for shame.
Directed by Alan Taylor (who did the second, way more hilarious Thor movie and many episodes of several prestigious cable dramas), Terminator Genisys plays like it was edited for basic cable - bloodless, gutless, spineless. The '84 original was squalid, grimy, a hard-R jagged edge that cut through bone and bathed in the muck. It hid its low budget beneath buckets of gore. Paper cuts are more gruesome than this tepid PG-13 blow-'em-up, which remakes entire sequences from the original but excises the profanity and the blood from each. This isn't your Terminator; this is your grandkids' Pops!
Here's everything wrong with the new Terminator in one NSFW clip:
Terminator Genisys (C)
Directed by Alan Taylor. PG-13 (sci-fi violence, partial nudity, language). 119 mins. In wide release.
