He’s Back, Like He Told You He Would Be
By Paul Hall
Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) has always taught her son John (Jason Clarke) how to fight. Now, at the end of the battle with SkyNet and with the fight against the machines seemingly over, the machines have launched a last-ditch effort to prevent their extinction. They send a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah before the war. And with this we begin the journey in the new film Terminator
To fight the machines, John Connor sends back his long-trusted friend Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to protect his mother and preserve their existence. On his journey back to the year 1984, Kyle sees a different set of memories than anything he has known before. In those memories Kyle sees a target date of 2017 for the launch of an all-new amazing application called Genisys that will operate all of your mobile devices. But that app will eventually allow the machines to control all and thus it must be stopped. Sarah and Kyle are just the two to stop SkyNet, but first they must survive the Terminator attacks in 1984, with a little help from “Pops,” the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator — he told you he’d be back!
Fending off the machines and finding a way to the year 2017 won’t be easy, and even if Sarah believes Kyle’s story enough to go there, bypassing what she knows, what dangers await in this near future? Can they stop SkyNet and the machines from turning the world into an apocalyptic wasteland? Twists and turns along the way will bring John back into Sarah and Kyle’s life, and the revelations that will be made could be future-changing.
The Terminator franchise has seen its share of films. From the early film that really made names for Arnold Schwarzenegger and some “little” director named James Cameron to this recent film that brings us back to the start again, this franchise has been a standard-bearer for action films.
In this iteration, we look to a new Sarah Connor in Emilia Clarke. She is attractive and spunky and finds a way to handle the weight of the world that has been placed on her shoulders. She may not have the physical toughness that Linda Hamilton once brought to the part, but Clarke is just used wrong more than anything else.
Schwarzenegger’s return shows that, while he may not move like he once did, he is definitely 100 percent the embodiment of the Terminator. We experience a large amount of the “machine” aspect of his character, and that is refreshing.
My problem — and it’s a big one with this film —is that the story is not at all comprehensible. If it felt like words were stumbling over each other to get on the page at the opening of this review, they were. But how does one write a synopsis of a movie that folds time on top of itself so many times that it feels like you are spinning in a black hole? Suspension of belief can and doeshappen during many films, but this one goes too far, and instead of being clever it’s just scrambled.
Visually, a number of the sequences exploded on the screen and were satisfying, even if they felt like simple rehashes of previous films. I enjoyed the look and feel of much of the experience. But oh, that story.
This may be the start of a new generation for the Terminator franchise, but when you start folding time on top of itself a million times over, you start to lose your way. Here’s hoping that the producers can find that light in the darkness if they want to reestablish their dominance in the genre. Refocus on that clarity of story, otherwise this franchise will just find itself terminated.
Terminator Genisys
PG-13
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emilia Clarke
Director: Alan Taylor
Grade: C+
