Terminator Genisys

Terminator Genisys reminded me of one those old Universal horror movies: Dracula! The Wolfman! Frankenstein! All in one film! The fifth Terminator movie, it has appearances by all the Terminators: the T-1000, the bad T-800, the good T-800. It even has recycled lines from the other films, like "Get in if you want to live," and "I'll be back."

Released in 2015, this Terminator film is wholly unnecessary and pretty bad, with some awful acting. When your movie's best performance is by Arnold Schwarzenegger doing deadpan, you know you're in trouble. I remember back when I saw T2 and the visual effects were so amazing, and now they're old hat.

Terminator Genisys is something of a remake of all the other Terminator movies, while ignoring the events that have happened in the other films. The premise is the same: in the future, machines have taken over the Earth and a small band of resistance fighters, led by John Connor (Jason Clarke) battle against them. The machines send back a Terminator to kill his mother (this time played by Emilia Clarke). Now, we've seen this several times. In the first Terminator, this was the same plot. In T2, they send back another Terminator to kill a young John Connor. Every time they fail. Why not send back a Terminator to kill Connor's great-great-great-great-grandmother or something? Send them back to medieval Ireland, when there were no automatic weapons. He can could just kill the person in their crib.

Anyway, this film is a complete mess. I suppose it was made because Schwarzenegger was back in films after his stint as governor of California, and why not another Terminator movie? The film did great business, showing that the public will watch anything. The hero this time is Jai Courtney, playing Reese (who of course is Connor's father, though he doesn't know it), and it's a horrible performance. Emilia Clarke is also pretty bad--the two just kind of shout their lines at each other.

The only bit of ingenuity in Terminator Genisys is that we have new technology that James Cameron didn't have back in 1984--smartphones, tablets, etc. It's kind of amusing to see how Skynet, the evil machine network, takes over so easily in 2017 because everyone willingly turns themselves over to computers who run their life.

I sincerely hope that this is it for Terminator movies.