Hollywood's lusty obsession with reboots, retools, reloads, recasts and regeneration falls with a loud thud in Terminator Genisys, a clunky, messy, analogue-minded science fiction thriller that's hardly scientific or thrilling. If this is what the post-millennia Gen-Z audience have in terms of pop-cultural marquee, those above 35 can revel in the nostalgic romp of James Cameron's 1984 original, a far more intelligent and terrifying film about our fear of technology, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his star-making role, elevating robotic poker-face into a kind of acting scholarship.
And in this new reboot that lacks star magnetism — Emilia Clarke, aka Daenerys Targaryen of Game of Thrones, is industrious yet flat, and Jai Courtney is lacklustre — Schwarzenegger remains the sole point of enjoyment in this benumbed chaos, his aura and self-knowing cheekiness almost (just almost) salvage the whole enterprise. There is a telling scene at the beginning when Arnie plays two Terminators facing off each other — one is the 1984 version, young and fierce, the other is the present Schwarzenegger (68) — and the passages of time, generation, technology and movie sensibility that come between these two models of the same pop icon evokes a strange existential quality on this side of the screen.
That's perhaps the only resonating moment in the film that's nothing but hollow surface. Genisys strings together crude, bullet-crazy set pieces in between mind-bending (and for the large part hogwash) explanations about time-travelling, and the story that takes place in 1984, 1997, 2017 and beyond. I would be lying through my teeth to say I understood what's going on in alternative timelines, alterable pasts and future imperfect, or who actually sent the old Arnie back in time to fight with the young Arnie, who's also been sent through time (by who, in what version of the future, etc.)
At about 15 minutes in, I believe most people would stop trying to make sense of this. The gist of the narrative is that mankind has to stop the fascistic network of machines, called Skynet, from obliterating the Earth on Judgement Day. Taking the backbone from the original — though things are different in this alternative past — the film hinges on the effort of Kyle Reese (Courtney) and the good terminator (the senior Schwarzenegger) to save Sarah Connor (Clarke) from the bad terminators — the unkillable aluminium assassins — sent to zap her and thus prevent her future child, John Connor, from leading a rebellion against the homicidal machines.
In the 1984 Terminator, James Cameron plays with our fear of technology the same way horror films play with our fear of ghosts — as a dark, unruly force that we can't negotiate with. Cameron's sense of timing, thrill-seeking, and the pre-smartphone zeitgeist intensified the confrontation between human and machine, whose chief terror is ironically embodied by a specimen of bodybuilding perfection, a slab of fat-free human flesh (from Austria to boot).
Terminator Genisys doesn't have those deep layers of dread, and its brief warning about our addiction to digital screens feels like an afterthought. What undercuts it so badly is that it is not trying to be a thriller; this is a conventional action film, a high-budget B-movie whose choreography of mayhem and destruction is cluttered, and without much sense of clarity and timing (the cliffhanging on the Golden Gate, which is perhaps the film's most ambitious, pales in comparison to, say, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes). Beefy men battling with bullets and bombs, while the liquid metal shape-shifters trying to impale humans with their arms — all of this seems bulky, obsolete and old-school in an unpleasant way.
Sarah Connor — played by Mother of Dragons herself — announces early on that she doesn't need protection from men (and father-like robots), but of course she does. Linda Hamilton, in the original, somehow came across as more feminist in her desperate survivalism than Clarke's gun-crazy butt-kicking heroine, which looks more like a show than a human instinct to stay alive. So it's left to Schwarzenegger to chip in his mixture of brawn, deadpan dialogue and winking self-mockery. The actor has been around long enough to know that he doesn't have to believe in everything he does here — and yet he's the most convincing cyborg in a film that's supposed to champion humans.
In 1984, Arnie's Terminator lands on Earth naked. It was a killer entrance that can't be repeated in its awe and ridiculousness, and that was the age when popcorn flicks were more original and the glut of sequels hadn't yet dominated Hollywood's creative assembly line. Terminator Genisys' homage to that scene, with Jai Courtney falling to Earth naked instead of Schwarzenegger, feels phoney and bland. My complaint isn't based on nostalgia or generational grumbling; it's a fair demand for creativity in a blockbuster sea when movies seem to have taken the audience, unfairly, for granted.
