The Terminator was always funny, whether he was a cyborg assassin sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor, or a reprogrammed good-guy robot protecting Sarah from more advanced and evil robots such as the T-1000 or the T-X. Of course, he wasn’t trying to be funny, which is why lines such as “I’ll be back” killed.
But he was also terrifying, and never cuddly. We don’t want a cuddly Terminator, do we?
In the admittedly well-made and action-packed but ridiculously convoluted and sometimes even off-putting “Terminator Genisys,” the fantastically entertaining Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as the old-school cyborg who never uses 10 words when five will do — but he’s actually called “Pops” by Sarah Connor throughout the movie.
She named him that because — well, I don’t want to give it away. All I’m saying is, “Pops” is a character in a Muppets movie, not a badass cyborg!
“Terminator Genisys” is the fifth installment in the movie franchise, and by now it’s clear they could have stopped after “The Terminator” (1984) and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) and we would have had one of the best one-two punches in modern movie history, end of story. Even though “Rise of the Machines” (2003) and “Salvation” (2009) had their moments, with each succeeding film, the events of the first two movies lose their dramatic gravitas, because that dang Skynet synthetic intelligent machine conglomerate keeps reaching into the past to rearrange everything.
SPOILER ALERTS coming, “Terminator Genisys” takes the “forget everything you’ve learned before” concept to a whole new level, and that’s what I mean about it being a little insulting and off-putting. You present us with this whole new timeline, this whole new set of circumstances for Sarah Conner and her son John, not to mention Kyle Reese (John’s father) and the Terminator, I mean, Pops? And we’re supposed to just forget all that happened in the first two movies?
What if we don’t want to?
“Genisys” jump-starts in 2029, where John Connor (this time played by Jason Clarke) is leading the human resistance against the machines. (Sidebar: The opening credits keep popping up for at least the first 10 minutes of the movie. I’ve always found that drag-it-out technique to be distracting, as if we’re being told the movie is STILL just starting.) It appears as if the humans are about to win, but Skynet has that fallback emergency plan — a giant time machine so they can send a T-800 cyborg back to 1984 to kill John’s mother Sarah before John can be born.
But of course John knows about that plan, and we see the moment where Kyle Reese volunteers to go back in time, and of course because we’ve seen the original movie, we know Kyle protects Sarah from the Terminator and falls in love with her and fathers her child and then, well, it’s curtains for Kyle.
Once we’re back in 1984, however, let’s just say the game has changed. Sarah (Emilia Clarke, your Khaleesi from “Game of Thrones”) has teamed up with the protective cyborg known as the Guardian, or as she calls him, “Pops” (Schwarzenegger), and yes, there’s an explanation for why this robot has aged. “I’m old, not obsolete,” Pops keeps telling Kyle Reese, as he eyes the lad like a protective father not sure his boy is good enough for his daughter.
We hop from 1984 to 2017, the plan being for Sarah, Kyle and the Guardian to destroy Genisys, a cloud-like operating system that’s really a Trojan horse for the evil Skynet. Soon we’re in “Back to the Future” territory, with characters hopping timelines, meeting future and/or past versions of themselves and generally getting brain freezes as they all try to make sense of the ever-bending rules of time travel.
Clarke is a charmer, but she doesn’t have Linda Hamilton’s ruthless determination. Jai Courtney makes for a bland Kyle Reese. (Michael Biehn rarely gets credit for his strong work as Reese in the original film.) Byung-hun Lee is a deadpan force as a new T-1000 killing machine, but even that performance pales next to Robert Patrick’s work in “Judgment Day.” J.K. Simmons livens things up as a “crackpot” cop in 2017 who witnesses some events in 1984 that convinced him time-traveling robots are real.
The best thing in the movie is Schwarzenegger, who delivers the Guardian’s lines with perfect timing and creates an empathetic character, because as we know, nearly all the best movie robots somehow become just a little bit human as time goes on. When bad things happen to the Guardian, we feel it. Not so much with the new Sarah and the new Reese and the new John Connor, who simply don’t resonate like their counterparts from the 1980s and 1990s.
Of course the special effects are more impressive than ever. But nearly every curveball offered up in this new parallel-universe version of the Terminator world isn’t as interesting or as original as the timeline we loved in the first place.
[s3r star=2/4]
Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by Alan Taylor and written by Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis. Running time: 125 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and gunplay throughout, partial nudity and brief strong language). Opens Wednesday at local theaters.
