[N.B. This review contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to watch it first before reading this. You have been warned.]
It’s sad to witness great ideas being run into the ground but that’s exactly what you get in Terminator Genisys. James Cameron’s cool, iconic, anti-hero android assassin is reduced to a grandfatherly irrelevance spouting boring exposition in the background (“You’re a relic from a deleted timeline!” says the villain to Arnold at one point and it just about sums up how he and his character are treated in this). It reminded me of the last Indiana Jones film where Harrison Ford was literally a backseat passenger most of the time while the younger Shia LaBeouf did all the action. Here Jai Courtney is the younger man given much more to do. It just doesn’t work. The movie is called Terminator for a reason.
It starts well, we finally get to see the moment Skynet gets defeated in a future war prologue and their Terminators, tanks and aerial machines come to a screeching halt. Except, if you’ve read the novelisation of Terminator 2, all of that was in there. James Cameron even planned to film the segment himself in Terminator 2 but ran out of time and money. So that’s a lift from T2. So is Arnold’s fake cyborg smile. Oh and the whole plot about the destruction of Cyberdyne. The first movie gets pilfered too even down to trite lines like “I’ll be back” and “Come with me if you want to live.” It’s time to park those lines and try to come up with new ones or better yet leave us with our memories.
James Cameron got the casting of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese so right in Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, they brought so many different things to the role. The same can’t be said of the tiny Emilia Clarke and Aussie Jai Courtney in the same roles here. There’s no charisma or spark between them. It’s like the makers wanted a slice of the Marvel audience. They reckoned there’s a generation of kids who’ve never seen a Terminator movie. So they took the best bits of the other movies, recast it with young actors and made sure it got a kiddie-friendly 12-rating (there’s no random murders of women called Sarah Connor or bloody massacres in police stations here, just look at the way they rewrite the scene where The Terminator kills three punks who won’t give him their clothes. They wimp out and go for the soft option. The Terminator has lost his edge completely.) It’s also a great shame that neither Christian Bale nor Edward Furlong returned as John Connor, he’s played by another Aussie and the second Clarke in the movie (not related), Jason Clarke. He’s okay even though he bears an uncanny resemblance to the wrong Sarah Connor shot by Arnold back in the 1984 original.
On the positive side, we do get to find out that the mother of Kyle Reese, the father of the saviour of humanity, is Irish (knew it! He he.) Plus, there’s a nice reference to The Addams Family when one of the cops sees Arnold and asks: “Who’s Lurch?” (Sarah Connor’s pet iguana in the first Terminator film was called Pugsley, also a nod to The Addams Family.) These flashes of inspiration are few and far between. The jokey dialogue doesn’t really work either.
James Cameron has given Terminator Genisys his blessing but I think he’s being kind to his old pal Arnold Schwarzenegger to help him have a big opening weekend (even so, it’s made $10 million less than predicted at the US box office in its first three days). Paramount had hoped to do two sequels in 2017 and 2018 before the rights automatically revert to James Cameron in 2019. Arnold Schwarzenegger is nearly 70 years old now. It might be best to finally throw The Terminator onto the scrapheap. The thrill has most definitely gone.
© Stewart Stafford, 2015. All rights reserved.
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