Terminator Genisys - From Failure to Farce

when i think about the great pantheon of movie franchises that have been butchered over the years with unnecessary sequels failed reboots and disastrous remakes it's tough to think of a series that's fallen from grace quite as hard as terminator the first movie was a tightly paced perfectly cast sci-fi action thriller that did a lot with a pretty limited budget and was far better than it had any right to be the sequel expanded on the original's ideas upped the budget and ultimately delivered one of the greatest sci-fi action movies ever made the problem is that each subsequent film has been nothing but an increasingly futile attempt to recapture the magic of t2 continuing a story that had already reached its natural conclusion and spinning out a premise that the series had effectively outgrown by 1991. rise of the machines was a lackluster third entry that added little of value and arrived about five years too late while salvation was a bold but doomed attempt to move the series forward to the war against the machines and as for dark fates well i feel like i'm gonna throw up but if you were to ask most fans where the terminator series crossed the line from faltering franchise to internet wall cow most of them would probably direct your attention to genesis genesis and it's not hard to see why this movie is an absolute [ __ ] of bad ideas terrible casting choices convoluted and ridiculous narratives and shameless attempts to kickstart a new cash grab trilogy from the ashes of the old one but what the hell at least is frontal laughats so grab your sunglasses and leather jackets and let's begin shall we no problemo the movie kicks off in the dying days of the apocalyptic war against the machines where john connor is leading the final offensive against skynet stronghold needless to say the humans win the day but there's no time to break out the champagne because it looks like the machines have just sent a terminator back through time to kill john connor's mother in 1984. oh no who could have seen this one coming so naturally kyle reaches volunteers to go back and protect her and what the [ __ ] this is supposed to be kyle reese i mean damn i know michael bain is too old for the role now but couldn't you have found someone that at least vaguely resembles him jai courtney looks like kyle reese about as much as i look like [ __ ] black panther anyway whatever i guess that's what we have to work with here so he strips off and hops into the time portal thing but oh no doctor who shows up and injects some weird stuff into john connor i'm sure that won't become relevant later flashback to 1984 and the t-800 rocks up to borrow some clothes from a bunch of street punks just like in the original movie except everyone looks different and weird now and the t-800 is fake as [ __ ] but never mind because another one shows up and they have a good old-fashioned fist fight wait why are there two of them and why are they fighting i've been waiting for you oh you clever movie you just subverted my expectations didn't you anyway naked t800 gets the better of middle-aged t-800 but before he can finish him off he gets taken out by a convenient sniper and middle-aged t-800 gives him a thumbs up yeah i i see what you did there now you may be wondering what's become of jai courtney well he arrives across town and breaks into a clothing store to grab himself some trendy 1980s threads but then he gets caught and arrested man this guy's kind of [ __ ] useless to be honest but before the cops can take him away they get ambushed by a t-1000 which also looks completely different now for some reason i mean would it really have been that difficult to de-age robert patrick for this scene he can't be that [ __ ] expensive these days i love how jai courtney doesn't seem even slightly fazed by what's happening here i thought the t-1000 was some kind of advanced prototype that never went into full production but jai courtney's just like yeah it's a shape-shifting terminator made of liquid metal what can you do things are looking pretty bad for our main man but then a truck crashes through the storefront and who should be driving but this small child impersonating sarah connor why do i get the feeling this entire setup was constructed just to facilitate this one line come with me if you want to live come with me if you want to live come with me if you want to live i understood that reference so jai courtney and the sarah connor impersonator escape in the van and end up destroying the t-1000 by dissolving it in acid which is kind of a cool idea i guess anyway the sarah connor impersonator explains that her parents were killed by a different terminator when she was still a child but the middle-aged t-800 saved her life and since then he's been kind of a father figure for her now she calls him pops because it's cute i guess i feel like i'm gonna throw up anyway now she's planning to travel forward in time to 1997 to blow up skynet before it can unleash judgement day haven't we done this [ __ ] already also couldn't you just find miles dyson in the present day and convince him not to take up a job at cyberdyne but jan courtney's like nah we have to go to 2017 instead why you might ask because when he was in the time portal thing he had a vision of himself as a kid being told to go to that specific year well i'm convinced seems totally legit and definitely worth altering your entire plan for however keep this whole childhood vision thing in mind because it'll be important later and by important i mean dumb as [ __ ] so somehow he convinces the sarah connor imposter to listen to him and because the middle aged t800 got damaged earlier he's forced to stay behind while the others jump forward to 2017 and if this all seems like a totally contrived and clunky way of getting these two characters from the 1980s into the present day then rest assured you're not alone anyway they jump forward and appear in the middle of a highway and immediately get arrested by the police for public nudity i guess but then who should arrive to break them out of jail no way wait what the [ __ ] what's john connor doing here well for a start he's not actually john connor because then the t-800 shows up and because it's been 30 years since we last saw him he's graduated from middle age to just being old as [ __ ] anyway he shoots jon and demands the others come with him what exactly is going on here you may ask well it turns out that future john was infected by [ __ ] nano machines or something that have taken over his body and turned him into some kind of weird terminator human hybrid i'm doing my best to piece this one together because even the script seems kind of hazy about what the hell he's supposed to be i mean he seems to retain jon's memories and emotions and basic personality so i guess there's something of him in there does he still have free will is he being compelled to do this stuff or is skynet completely taking over his minds i don't [ __ ] know anyway the upshot here is that machine john traveled back in time and found a job with cyberdyne systems where he's overseeing the launch of a brand new global operating system named genesis which if you remove the g and the i and one of the s's add in a k and a t and swap all the remaining letters around leaves you with [Music] no way so basically nano machine john is about to unleash skynet on the world and it's up to our plucky band to stop him so there's a bunch of chases and explosions and they all get rested again because jokes but then one of the police officers that tried to arrest jai courtney like 30 years ago shows up and helps them escape wow what are the odds so they make their way to cyberdyne systems and set some bombs to blow the place up because you know it's not like we've ever done this before and nano machine john shows up and tries to stop them but old t-800 pulls him into a time vortex thing that conveniently happens to be there and it blows up and kills nano machine john but old t-800 lands in a big vat of liquid metal which he uses to regrow his damaged body so everything's fine i guess because i guess that's the thing you can totally do that's like putting a playstation in your car and expecting it to turn into a self-driving vehicle also what the [ __ ] is that stuff even doing there did nano machine john develop it if so why it would serve no functional purpose at this point in history when his only mission is to get skynet up and running and why is it just lying there in big open vats like you'd think stuff like this would have to be contained in a sealed environment just in case like what if a plant worker fell into it or it became contaminated with other materials or it [ __ ] escaped anyway whatever the point is that the bad guy's dead the good guys are all fine and judgment day has been prevented again now remember when i told you to keep jai courtney's childhood vision in minds you know the thing that basically drove the entire plot well here comes the payoff so they go to young jai courtney's house and grown up jai courtney tells his past self to remember the date and time he needs to know to make the rest of the plot happen and then they all just kind of say [ __ ] it and leave to collect their paychecks and that's it that's the shambolic plot for terminator genesis i feel like i'm gonna throw up really it's difficult to know where to begin with a movie like this where pretty much every aspect of the production is so disastrously wrong but i guess i should get the obvious stuff out of the way first for a start the plots it's a convoluted fragmented nightmare relying on ridiculous coincidences nonsensical contrivances and worst of all pointless sci-fi techno babble and it's so out of place for a terminator movie see the early films were smart enough not to play too much into the whole time travel thing because it's basically a logical rabbit hole that your entire script can easily disappear down really it was just a convenient setup to facilitate the rest of the story a killer robots come back from the future to assassinate someone and they have to be protected at all costs it's simple and easy to follow and you immediately understand the stakes involved you weren't supposed to think too much about the actual mechanics of time travel and t2 left it kind of ambiguous as to whether or not it was actually possible to alter the future now we've got all this weird [ __ ] about temporal nexus points time streams alternate realities and paradoxes and it all just feels like a really [ __ ] episode of star trek rather than a terminator movie the fact that the plot basically erases or alters the events of every single movie in the series doesn't exactly endear itself either if you're going to have the balls to erase terminator 2 you'd better have something pretty [ __ ] incredible to replace it with and well genesis just isn't it speaking of which the whole skynet revelation thing was basically the same [ __ ] they pulled in rise of the machines only not as smart or impactful back in the heady days of 2003 it was at least kind of interesting and creative that the true enemy no longer had a physical form that could be attacked it played on the rapid expansion of the internet which was still kind of a novelty at the time and the idea that something as dangerous as skynet could be floating out there in cyberspace everywhere and nowhere all at once but that's a card you can really only play once and genesis felt trite and predictable by comparison also i have to question the wisdom of revisiting the love story between kyle and sarah in the first place their relationship was compelling because it was cut so tragically short it was a doomed romance because everyone knows that they're the best kind and having them live happily ever after just takes away the very thing that made them so interesting but a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts the casting was also a textbook example of what not to do in a film like this iconic characters like kyle reese and sarah connor need strong competent intense actors to effectively bring them to life but what we got instead was a pair of generic performances by generic actors that really could have been anyone jai courtney doesn't exactly radiate charisma at the best of times and like i said before he doesn't look talk or act anything like michael bain who invested his kyle reese with toughness resilience and vulnerability and he actually looked like a scrappy soldier that's just barely survived in a desolate future emilia clarke meanwhile is shaping up to be just another entry in the growing list of actors that tried and failed to parlay their game of thrones fame into a successful movie career the thing is there's a big difference between doing 10-minute segments alongside veteran actors in a big ensemble tv show and driving a two-hour movie all by yourself just ask sophie turner it gives me no pleasure to dunk on her because she comes across as a genuinely nice person that probably didn't know what she was getting into but i think even she would recognize that she was horribly miscast here she doesn't have the screen presence or the physicality to be an action star and half the time she looks kind of afraid of the weapons she has to use linda hamilton really put in the work to prepare for t2 she looked lean and tough and able to take care of herself while clark just looks like your little sister dressing up as a soldier chick for halloween i didn't exactly have high hopes for arnold in this movie either and well they definitely weren't exceeded don't get me wrong i love him like the crazy austrian father that i never had and the man still has the kind of charisma that most so-called stars today can only dream of but he was almost 70 years old when he did this film and he looks it's he seems kind of bored and disinterested most of the time like he knew this movie was just an easy payday and he was happy to take it for what it was the idea that a terminator like him could be living and working amongst humans for decades just seems kind of ludicrous and the script makes a few too many jokes at his expense for my liking you think they would have learned that particular lesson from t3 but nope there he is clowning around like this is a two-hour snl skate i've said before that the terminator really isn't a concept that can support big ongoing franchises like this it's not like star trek where you've got unlimited scope to explore the most fantastical ideas imaginable basically all you can do is keep recycling the same idea again and again with diminishing returns and the fact of the matter is that the story was effectively closed off by the end of t2 by trying to mine iconic moments in the series for nostalgia value all genesis really does is invite really unfavorable comparisons the question people often ask me is which movie is worse this or dark fate and honestly it's a tough one to answer i mean dark fate seems to be more intentionally disrespectful to the series legacy and the political overtones certainly didn't help but i actually think genesis did more damage on the whole ruining both sarah connor and kyle reese's characters killing off pretty much everything that was once cool and awesome about the franchise and kicking off the unwelcome trend of retcon in past events and even entire movies out of existence and all from the selfish desire to squeeze just a little bit more money out of the terminator brands [Music] hasta la vista baby anyway that's all i've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 982,044

Keywords: sarah connor, jai courtney, arnold schwarzenegger, emilia clarke, feminist, review, kyle reese, john connor

Id: XIn_kj52-P0

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021