Remember the Back To The Future series? With that crazy amount of going back and forth in time? So that’s basically what director Alan Taylor does with the film. He’s thrown in a couple of altered timelines in the movie. Just for kicks. There are three Arnold Schwarzeneggers in Terminator: Genisys . My favourite is the computer generated (CG) hottie from 1984. Obviously. It helps that when he first walks he is butt-naked (like the rest of the time-travellers making their way from the future).
Rating: ***
Cast: Three Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, Byung-hun Lee, J.K. Simmons
For some strange reason, there is a lot of timey-wimey going on. Waste of time (travel), if you ask me . So, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) and Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) travel to the future (Connor’s future, for Reese it’s his past) to San Francisco, in the year 2017, to stop Skynet from launching its extermination of mankind — Genisys (This whole let’s-spell-everything-wrong-thing-just-to-sound-cool-has-to-really-stop).While we are all rooting for the apocolapyse, t here are all kinds of terminators taking up screen time. A lot of morphing too.
This time, Taylor has annoyingly rewritten much of the apocalyptic saga of cyborg assassins built to annihilate the human race. But he does offer us an unassailable reason to sit through essentially the same plot as the original: 67-year-old Schwarzenegger’s senior-citizen reprise of his iconic robotic character, which he hasn’t inhabited since 2003’s regrettable and forgettable Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines . This is Arnie’s fourth go-round of the Terminator series, which began in 1984. He wisely sat out the last the episode of the series. But now he’s back. As Sarah Connor’s ‘Pops’.
FYI: Sarah Connor, played by Emilia Clarke kicks arse.
Of course, Clarke is no Linda Hamilton. Nor is she Lena Headey. But then she is Daenerys. (Where are the dragons, khaleesi ?) Headey, who has a knack for portraying tough mothers — making you both despise them and desire them simultaneously, played Connor in the television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Reese is not yet in on the joke that he just happens to be his childhood hero Jack Connor’s father. So, there’s plenty of sexual tension to the bickering between him and Sarah Connor. But all in good fun. (PG-rated, remember).
Reese is prepped to go back and protect a ‘weak’ and unsuspecting woman. But with the turn of events, this timeline’s Sarah Connor is anything but. In fact, Clarke makes for a badass Sarah Connar. She’s funny, tough, capable and a fantastic sniper.
So, instead of Reese having to save Sarah Connor from the Schwarzenegger-Terminator, the killer robot has been guarding Sarah Connor since she was nine. This sets a completely different timeline in motion where a universal program under the control of Skynet will prove disastrous if allowed to launch. JK Simmons has a very amusing turn as a cop that saw something he shouldn’t have a couple of decades ago and believes 100% in the robot apocalypse, despite drawing laughter from his colleagues. PS: The “I’ll be back” catchphrase is showing its age. Just like a certain someone’s kneecaps and fingers.
Those yellow school buses always scare me. We have a couple of Speed- like scenes a la carte Keanu Reeves. But they are nothing compared to the insane helicopter ones. One time, I was half-expecting one of the helicopters, skidding on roads, to do a wheelie. Slightly disappointed. You would probably need a guide to get your terminators right, because the director has thrown in a ton of them. From your regular T-1 To T-3000. My favourite remaining the T-800 model 101. Though the holy grail of visual effects — a CG digital human — is a close second.
Terminator: Genisys is an OK movie with good effects. Of course, without Schwarzenegger , this movie wouldn’t be half as good. So, y eah, it’s a reboot and basically wipes away the timelines from the previous films, but so did the Star Trek reboot and that worked out alright, in my opinion. Terminator: Genisys is not super great. But, at least it is better than the dire experiment that was 2009’s Terminator: Salvation .
