There is one good joke in the new Terminator Genisys, demonstrating the rule that you can walk into any room in any building in the world if you’re carrying a four-foot-tall teddy bear.
It’s a good joke, but it goes on for too long. The other jokes in the movie are not funny, which is all right, because Terminator Genisys isn’t a comedy. What it is, is the fifth in the endless Terminator series. And oh yes, the current movie is the first installment in a new trilogy, so there is, apparently, no escape; deliver us.
Terminator Genisys could have been anything it wanted to be, but it unfortunately wanted to be just like the four previous movies. As you no doubt recall, they’re all variations on the End of the World As We Know It, brought about by super-intelligent machines that humans, in their arrogance, created. There is your theme, and fair enough, if jaundiced and hackneyed.
The so-called plots all revolve around time travel, with the machines trying to go back in time to kill the woman who will give birth to the man who will defeat the machines.
The machines work through Terminators, unstoppable self-repairing androids made of really cool shiny liquid metal. The Terminator who keeps popping up, first on one side and then the other, is of course Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, who should have known better on all counts. As usual he lumbers and lurches through various guises and disguises and keeps trying to make you think he’s someone he’s not: i.e. an actor. I’m probably being too hard on the old guy, who shows us that even at his advanced age (the same as mine – ouch) he’s still capable of some pretty impressive stunts, and can deliver his monosyllabic lines with the self-deprecating twinkle he learned sometime after Conan the Barbarian.
The rest of the movie is predictable CGI bombast, the more predictable because there is not a single effect that hasn’t been showcased in the earlier movies. Every time you look there’s a Terminator closing up its aluminum-y-looking bullet holes, or reconstituting itself from a puddle of mercury (excuse me, a mimetic polyalloy that just looks and acts like mercury), or striding out of a huge explosion. The excitement is generated by non-stop fights with the Terminators, and if we can’t kill them with bullets, why are we still shooting bullets at them?
The plot is generated by a set of time-travel conundrums that are so muddled and inexplicable they will make your cheekbones hurt, and which result in everybody, maybe, changing sides every time you see them. Or something. Everybody keeps getting nekkid so they can travel back and forth in what is described as the First Tactical Time Weapon. I am a sworn enemy of Time Travel as a plot device, and the appearance of Matt Smith in a walk-on role makes me wonder why the producers didn’t emulate the recent adventures of the Eleventh Doctor, the only tall time-travel tale that comes close to making sense, and is so exciting you don’t mind the parts that don’t. As soon as you see Matt Smith you know he’s going to do something important, and he does, and then he’s more or less forgotten, which shows terrible judgment on the casting director’s part.
The only recurring small role that has any heft is J. K. Simmons as an alcoholic cop who had a run-in with a Terminator thirty years before and has been on their trail ever since. It’s fun to watch his exasperation as all the other cops treat him as a conspiracy-theory nutcase, while the audience knows he’s really a very fine actor.
The constant time travel means you get to see large parts of the West Coast in various stages of destruction from just a little bit to total annihilation. In fact San Francisco – and especially the Golden Gate Bridge – is demolished in the first scene, even before the title. I know, it’s a traditional trope, going back to It Came From Beneath the Sea in 1955, but show a little imagination, guys, fer cryin’ out loud.
The ideal audience for Terminator Genisys is one that hasn’t seen the first four movies, because then at least some of the wholesale retreads might come as a surprise. As it is, this dismal, noisy, murky slug-fest may leave you not caring a flip what happens to John Connor and his mom, or for that matter the human race.
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