To: Hollywood studio chiefs
CC: James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Subject: the Terminator movies
Just stop, OK? It’s simply not working. Terminator Genisys is the fifth film in the series, not counting the short-lived Fox TV series a few years back, and it’s like you’re all trying to bring a broken laptop back to life by frantically jabbing at it with a cattle prod. The last time you made a Terminator movie that was truly awesome, George Bush was president. The older one! Ever since then, the movies have become increasingly self-serious and decreasingly memorable in terms of action or special effects. Now your latest one is a completely nonsensical affair that whizzes around in circles and yet still manages to feel too slow by half. Tell us, when is this getting better? You’ve had decades to think of a good story involving these characters, and nothing. How are we supposed to think anything other than that the well has run dry?
As you know, the story begins in 2029, when the humans led by John Connor (Jason Clarke) narrowly fail in their efforts to defeat Skynet, so he uses a time machine to send Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect John’s mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) all over again. However, events work to change the past, so now Sarah is a robot-destroying orphan who knows all about the coming revolution and has been raised by the T800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whom she has nicknamed “Pops.”
Where do I begin with this horror show? Once Kyle and Sarah time travel again to 2017 to keep Skynet from coming online, it spawns all manner of problems. You’ve got multiple copies of Kyle running around. You’ve got John Connor, or at least a version of him, turning into the bad guy of the piece. You’ve got no romantic chemistry between the leads. (And by the way, stop trying to make Jai Courtney happen. He’s starting to look like the next Taylor Kitsch.) You’ve got Oscar-winning J.K. Simmons marooned in a thankless role as an alcoholic crank of a cop who has a theory about the Terminators. You’ve got yards and yards of expositional dialogue untangling all the time travel threads, delving into electromagnetic physics and explaining why the T800 now looks like a 60-year-old man. That’s not even mentioning the Skynet-owned version of John droning on about how a robot future will be better. No wonder director Alan Taylor can’t make sense of it all. Worst of all, you’ve got at least three bulletproof, self-regenerating robots wandering around looking to kill someone or something. One would think that everybody would eventually realize that it’s pointless to fire guns or explosive devices at them, and yet it doesn’t seem to stop anyone. How are we supposed to get invested in the action? Oh, and we’re supposed to believe that one solitary security guard is meant to protect a giant Silicon Valley campus whose servers house an app with a billion pre-orders. If humanity has become that stupid, maybe it deserves to be destroyed.
The Terminator series once offered intellectual fodder and mind-blowing effects, but now, let’s face it, it has served its purpose. The best thing to do is to let it fade into tech history along with the Apple IIe and the SNES gaming console. The companies that made those things prospered later on by thinking of new things to do. You should, too.
[box_info]Terminator Genisys
Starring Jai Courtney, Emilia Clarke, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Directed by Alan Taylor. Written by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier. Rated PG-13.[/box_info]
Terminate deez nuts.
To be fair, there were at least three security guards that we see on screen. Two of them run outside to check out the helicopter crash.