Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars
Bottom Line: Convoluted plot. Little explanation for time travel decisions. Dull action scenes. Absolutely zero wow factor.
Do you know what would have made this movie better? Terminator dragons sent from the future to kill Daenerys Targaryen. Or anything else. Sorry, Emilia Clarke.
Terminator has jumped the shark. Or maybe they’ve time travelled the shark back in time to kill what was left of the first two movies. It’s hard to tell because the time travel aspects of this movie made about as much sense as my previous sentence. The biggest problem is that everyone and their mother seems to have a time machine. The “future” has a time machine. Ok, fair enough, someone has to have a time machine to make any of this make sense. The “past” has a time machine cobbled together from parts you can find in a junk yard. The “present” has a time machine which does just about everything except time travel. It’s a complete mess.
Time travel is time travel. It rarely makes sense. It always bothers me, but if there’s something to wrap around it, I’m willing to forgive the inconsistencies. “Terminator Genisys” has the thinnest veneer of a plot and a bunch of clunky action scenes all tied with a ribbon of nostalgia. It isn’t even worth regifting. I tried to enjoy it for longer than I should have, but when terminator #1 jumps from one helicopter and dive bombs another helicopter containing terminator #2 and somehow missed the rotors but still caused the helicopter to crash-land and roll to its destruction stopping right on the helipad that everyone was heading towards, I gave up. This is what passes for storytelling these days.
You completists are going to go see this movie regardless of what I say, but I’ll say it anyway. Skip this movie. Or at least wait until it’s on your movie streaming service of choice. “Terminator Genisys” is not worth the time or the money to see in the theater. Luckily, it looks like it’s pretty much bombing.
Reading your review, I actually wanted to see the movie more than I originally did (No offense. Also if it helps your conscious, I had already purchased tickets to see it on discount for tonight). I had thought your distaste for the film stemmed from your low tolerance of Time Travel plots, and I LOVE time travel plot devices.
I can look past the CGI heavy fights, because I have to. Every action movie looks the same any more, and it isn’t really heart pumping. The casting was terrible. I never felt like John Conner was the ‘Leader of Men’ or that Kyle Reese had any chemistry with Sarah Conner. And then there was the plot…
The second biggest sin, IMO, was the humanization of Skynet and it’s right hand Terminator. The original films worked precisely because they were fighting against an unknowable, unfeeling, unstoppable killing machines. They felt more like an inevitable disaster that was definitely going to happen, which fed into the classic time travel conflict. Are things like fate and destiny inevitable, or can you in fact change the future? That’s gone, and in its place is a Terminator who can “think like a human”, only if that human has no idea what he is doing which makes ZERO sense.
The biggest sin for me though was the time travel plot. I was all set up to have my mind blown by some secret time travel shenanigans that may or may not have been done before in movies like Twelve Monkeys, Looper, Donnie Darko and the like….but by the end of the movie the BIGGEST DANGLING PLOT THREAD is left completely unresolved. I didn’t need to see some end of credits scene to know that the victory our heroes secure doesn’t actually work, because they clearly have something unresolved in this movie that they wont tell you what it means until a later movie where they try to extract more money from you. And let me tell you, this isn’t some question in the back of your mind, but some big mystery they hit you over the head with in Act 1. Then they bring it back up in Acts 2,3,4 and 5 and its RIDICULOUS. Anyway, I’m with JP. Avoid this one until its only TNT or something.