Terminator Genisys: Run, Don't Look Back!

In order to save the Terminator franchise, I want to go back in time and prevent this film and the last one from ever being made. Terminator Genisys was so bad that it made that last piece of crap Terminator film look like an Academy Award winner by comparison and it was clearly shit.

Possible spoilers ahead, but since the film sucks, don’t worry about it too much.

So in this film, Kyle Reese goes back in time to save Sarah Connor only to discover that a T-800 Terminator had already traveled back in time to save Sarah when she was 9. This Terminator, “Pops,” raised Sarah to be a badass and by the time Reese gets there, she has already devised a plan to destroy the T-1000 and save the future.

Basically, at this point I want to know two things. First, when will Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese get it on and conceive John Connor? The answer to this question BTW is never. It doesn’t happen in the movie even though it is the elephant in the room. Maybe they have sex after the film is over or in some future movie but who knows.

The second question which was even asked in the film is, who the fuck sent “Pops” back in time to save 9-year-old Sarah Connor? The answer is who the fuck knows? The film’s writers suck so they just decided to make a major plot change from the original story line not only without an explanation, but with no probable explanation even in sight. They could have just said that it was John Connor from T2 through some alternate timeline/continuum shit and I would have accepted that more than the lazy fucking writing of “beats me.”

Then there was the whole, now John Connor is evil shit. That didn’t make any sense and it didn’t advance the story because there was no fucking story! At least with the last Terminator movie they had some sort of story involving the Terminator who thought he was a human being. They were at least trying to say something about what it means to be human. This movie had none of that humanity stuff; just bad action and overused lines from previous Terminator films.

Honestly, I actually liked Terminator 3. I thought it was interesting to see John Connor fighting his inner demons. Still, I think the franchise should have ended with T2. The first Terminator film was a fun stand-alone action flick. It didn’t have a whole lot of depth, but it was fun and interesting and a product of its time. I wouldn’t have thought a sequel was necessary, but T2 was a masterpiece. It was more than an action flick. It had ground breaking special effects too. But more than that, it had heart and a message about how we live our lives.

I guess the only thing even resembling a “message” in this film was maybe the whole anti-cloud stuff but that seemed more like an afterthought than an actually story. It seemed like they were looking for a way to modernize the franchise and someone in the executive meeting picked up their cell phone to check their e-mail and bam! The internet is cool and hip. Those damn kids on their smart phones, let’s do something with that.

The special effects were about average for films today. They didn’t break ground and they didn’t keep me at the edge of my seat either. The writers must think that bridges are great for action since there were a lot of action sequences on bridges. In my mind, bridges are often a lazy way of adding suspense. With the right writers, directors, and editors bridge action can be great, but with the wrong team they just seem played out. Guess what? Genisys had the wrong team.

The action was stale and forced and it had no real message, heart, or even story. Hell, this film didn’t even have a brain. It didn’t even make sense. The whole premise of the film was that the T-800 was sent back to save Sarah Connor when she was 9 and that changed everything. How did that happen? Again, this was the key plot point and there was zero explanation and zero attempts at an explanation. It’s as if the writers are laughing at the audience and saying, “We don’t have an explanation; you figure it out.”

All that might have been forgiven if there were a few funny moments in the film that made it redeemable, but nope. None of that either. T2 had a sense of humor to it and some memorable one-liners. That is one of the reasons why it was one of the greatest films of all time. This film used those same one-liners but didn’t have anything new to bring to the table.

Skynet/Genisys wasn’t a cool scary villain. We don’t understand why it wants to kill everyone nor does it have an intimidating form. The thing about the first Terminator movie was that Arnold was fucking intimidating. He walked into a room and the music started playing and the audience shit themselves in anticipation. He is going to fuck you up and you better find a way to either run and hide or be real smart in kicking its ass.

In T2, Robert Patrick wasn’t as intimidating an actor, but his abilities gave the audience the same sense of fear and intimidation. The Terminators will keep on coming and they absolutely will not stop. But Jason Clarke as the new “Terminator/John Connor” did not scare me at all. Even as Genisys, Skynet didn’t intimidate me. Instead, the whole thing just made me angry. I am actually angry at this film because it was so bad. I am angry at the writers who wrote such crap and actually convinced people that it was worth spending millions of dollars to produce. It reminds me of how I felt after watching Hallie Berry’s Catwoman. Why didn’t someone somewhere in the production process say, “You know this movie is going to suck, can’t we do something about that?”