Terminator Genisys - From Failure to Farce

When I think about the vast pantheon of film franchises that have been butchered over the years with unnecessary sequels, botched reboots, and disastrous remakes, it's hard to think of a series that has fallen from grace as hard as Terminator. The first film had a perfect cast and a tight pace. Sci-fi action thriller that did a lot on a fairly limited budget and was much better than the sequel had any right to be, expanded on the ideas of the original, increased the budget and ultimately delivered one of the best sci-fi action films never made. The problem is that each subsequent film has been nothing more than an increasingly futile attempt to recapture the magic of T2, continuing a story that had already reached its natural conclusion and developing a premise that the series had effectively outgrown by 1991.

The Rise of the Machines was a mediocre third entry that added little value and arrived about five years too late, while Salvation was a bold but doomed attempt to move the series towards the war against the machines and, as for the dark fates, well, I feel like I'm going to throw up, but If you were to ask most fans where the Terminator series crossed the line from a faltering franchise to a cow wall of the Internet, most of them would probably direct their attention to Genesis Genesis and it's not hard to see why this movie is an absolute shitload of bad ideas, terrible casting choices. convoluted, ridiculous narratives and blatant attempts to start a new cash-grabbing trilogy from the ashes of the last, but what the hell at least are the up-front laughs?

So grab your sunglasses and leather jackets and let's get started. No problem? The film begins in the Last Days of the apocalyptic war against the machines where John Connor leads the final offensive against the Skynet stronghold. Needless to say, the humans win the day, but there's no time to open the champagne because it looks like the machines just sent a

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. It's time to kill John Connor's mother in 1984. Oh no, who could have seen this coming? So naturally, Kyle looks for volunteers to come back and protect her and what the hell is Kyle Reese supposed to be?

I mean, damn, I know Michael Bain is too old for the role now, but couldn't you have found someone who at least vaguely resembles him? Jai Courtney looks like Kyle Reese as much as I look like Black Panther. Anyway, whatever it is, I guess that's what we have to work with here, so he strips naked and jumps. in the time portal, but oh no doctor to show up and inject some weird stuff into John Connor, I'm sure that won't be relevant later, flashback to 1984 and the T-800 gets up to borrow some clothes to a group of strays. punks like in the original movie except now they all look different and weird and the t-800 is fake but it doesn't matter because another one shows up and they have a good old fashioned fist fight, wait why are there two and why what are they?

They're fighting, I've been waiting for you, oh, clever movie, you just subverted my expectations, didn't you? The naked t800 defeats the middle-aged t-800, but before it can finish it off, a convenient sniper takes it out. and the middle aged t-800 gives him the thumbs up, yeah i see what you did there, now you might be wondering what happened to jai courtney. Well he gets to the other side of town and breaks into a clothing store to buy some trendy 80's clothes but then he gets caught and arrested, to be honest this guy is a bit useless but before the policemen can take him away, they are ambushed by a T-1000 that also looks completely different now, for some reason, I mean, would it really have been that hard to spot?

Robert Patrick's age for this scene, it can't be that expensive nowadays. I love how Jai Courtney doesn't seem the least bit fazed by what's happening here. I thought the T-1000 was some kind of advanced prototype that never went into full production, but. Jai Courtney says, yeah, it's a shape-shifting

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made of liquid metal, what can you do? Things are looking pretty bad for our main man, but then a truck crashes into the front of the store and who should be driving, but this little girl pretending to be Sarah Connor, why? I have a feeling this whole setup was built just to facilitate this line, come with me if you want to live, come with me if you want to live, come with me if you want to live, I got that reference, so jai courtney and sarah connor.

The impersonator escapes in the van and ends up destroying the t-1000 by dissolving it in acid, which is a good idea, I guess anyway the Sarah Connor impersonator explains that her parents were killed by a different terminator when she was still a child , but the middle-aged t-800 saved her life and since then he has been a kind of father figure to her. He now calls him dad because he is cute. I guess I feel like I'm going to throw up anyway. Now she plans to travel forward in time to 1997 to blow up Skynet before she can trigger Doomsday, haven't we already done this?

Couldn't you just find Miles Dyson in the present day and convince him not to take a job at Cyberdyne? But Jan Courtney says no, we have to do it. Instead go to 2017, why you might ask because when he was in the time portal he had a vision of himself as a child and was told to go to that specific year. Well, I'm convinced that it seems totally legitimate and it's definitely worth modifying his entire plan. However, keep this whole childhood vision thing in mind because it will be important later and by important I mean dumb, since he somehow convinces the imposter Sarah Connor to listen to him and because the middle t800 age was damaged earlier, he's forced to stay behind while the others move forward to 2017, and if this all seems like a totally contrived and clumsy way to bring these two characters from the 1980s to the present, then rest assured, it's not Just, anyway, they jump forward and appear in the middle of a road. and immediately be arrested by the police for public nudity, I suppose, but then who should come to get them out of jail?

No way, wait, what is John Connor doing here? Well, for starters, it's not really John Connor because then the T-800 shows up. and because it's been 30 years since we last saw him, he's graduated from middle-aged to just being old, as he shoots Jon anyway and demands that the others come with him. What exactly is going on here? You may ask yourself. Well, it turns out that future John was infected. by nano machines or something that has taken over his body and turned him into some kind of strange human terminator hybrid. I'm trying my best to piece this together because even the script seems a little confusing about what the hell it's supposed to be.

I mean it seems to retain Jon's memories, emotions, and basic personality, so I guess there's something of him in there. Does he still have free will? Is he forced to do these things or is Skynet completely taking over his mind? I don't know anyway. The result here is that John, the machine, traveled back in time and found a job at Cyberdyne Systems, where he oversees the release of a new global operating system called Genesis, which if you remove the g, the i, and one of the s, add a k, and a T. and swapping all the remaining letters doesn't leave you with no way so basically nano machine john is about to unleash skynet on the world and it's up to our brave gang to stop him so there's a lot of chases and explosions and everyone rests again because jokes, but then one of the police officers who tried to arrest Jai Courtney 30 years ago shows up and helps them escape.

What are the odds? So they head to the Cyberdyne systems and plant some bombs to blow up the place because you know it's It's not like we've done this before and nanomachine John shows up and tries to stop them, but the old T-800 drags him into a time vortex that conveniently is there and explodes and kills the nanomachine John, but the old one. -800 lands in a big vat of liquid metal which he uses to regenerate his damaged body, so I guess it's all good because I guess that's what you can do, it's like putting a Playstation in your car and expecting it to turn into one same.

Driving the vehicle and what that thing is doing there. Did John develop the nano machine? If so, why would he have no functional purpose at this point in the story when his only mission is to get Skynet up and running, and why is he just there? Big open vats, as you might think, things like this would have to be contained in a sealed environment just in case, as if a plant worker were to fall into them or become contaminated with other materials or escape anyway, whatever. Be the point is that the evil guy is dead, the good guys are all fine and judgment day has been averted again.

Now you remember when I told you to keep Jai Courtney's childhood vision in mind. You know what basically drove the whole plot. Well, here comes the reward, so they go to young Jai. Courtney's house and the adult jai Courtney tells her past self to remember the date and time she needs to know for the rest of the plot to happen and then everyone just says it and goes to collect their paychecks and that That's all, that's what's chaotic. Plot for Terminator Genesis I feel like I'm going to throw up It's really hard to know where to start with a movie like this where almost every aspect of the production is so disastrously wrong, but I guess I should get the obvious things out of the way.

For starters, the plots are a convoluted, fragmented nightmare that relies on ridiculous coincidences, nonsensical inventions, and, worst of all, nonsensical sci-fi technological babbling and is so out of place for a Terminator movie. Look, the early movies were smart enough not to mess around too much. into the whole time travel thing because it's basically a logical rabbit hole that the entire script can easily disappear down. It was really just a convenient setup to facilitate the rest of the story. Some killer robots come back from the future to kill someone and they have to do it. being protected at all costs is simple and easy to follow and you immediately understand what is at stake.

You weren't supposed to think too much about the actual mechanics of time travel and t2 left something ambiguous about whether it was actually possible or not. to alter the future now we have all this weird stuff about temporal nexus points and time streams and alternate realities and paradoxes and it all feels like an actual Star Trek episode instead of a Terminator movie, the fact that the plot basically erases or alters the events. of each film in the series also doesn't endear itself to itself if you're going to have the guts to delete Terminator 2, you better have something pretty awesome to replace it with and well, genesis, isn't it about which one?

The whole Skynet reveal thing was basically the same thing they did with the rise of the machines, just not as smart or impactful in the heady days of 2003, it was at least interesting and creative that the real enemy no longer had a form physics that could be attacked was based on the rapid expansion of the Internet, which was still a novelty at the time, and the idea that something as dangerous as Skynet could be floating in cyberspace everywhere and nowhere at the same time, but that's a card you can really only play it once and Genesis felt trite and predictable in comparison.

I also have to question the wisdom of revisiting the love story between Kyle and Sarah. First of all, their relationship was compelling because it was cut short so tragically that it was a doomed romance because everyone knows it. that they are the best and that living happily ever after just takes away what made them so interesting, but something isn't beautiful because it lasts. The casting was also a textbook example of what not to do in a movie. Thus, iconic characters like Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor need strong, competent, intense actors to bring them to life effectively, but what we got instead was a couple of generic performances from generic actors who really could have been anyone.

Jai Courtney doesn't exactly exude charisma. at best, and as I said before, he doesn't seem to talk or act like Michael Bain, who invested his Kyle Reese in toughness, resilience, and vulnerability and actually seemed like a fighting soldier who barely survived in a desolate future. Meanwhile, Emilia Clarke. is shaping up to be another entry in the growing list of actors who have tried and failed to turn their Game of Thrones fame into a successful film career. The thing is, there's a big difference between doing 10-minute segments alongside veteran actors in a large cast. TV show and host a two-hour movie alone, ask Sophie Turner.

It gives me no pleasure to immerse myself in her because she gives the impression of being a genuinelyNice that she probably didn't know what she was getting into, but I think even she would recognize that she was horribly miscast here, she doesn't have the screen presence or physique to be an action star and half the time she looks a little scared of the weapons he has to use. Linda Hamilton really put in the effort to prepare for T2 she looked slim, tough and able to take care of herself, while Clark just looks like your little sister dressed up as a soldier for Halloween.

I also didn't have high hopes for Arnold in this movie and well, he definitely didn't. over it, don't get me wrong, I love him like the crazy Austrian dad I never had and the man still has the kind of charisma that most of today's so-called stars can only dream of, but he was almost 70 when he did this. movie and he seems a little bored and disinterested most of the time, like he knew this movie was just an easy payday and he was happy to take it so was the idea that a Terminator like him could live and work among them . the humans for decades seem a little ridiculous and the script makes too many jokes at their expense for my taste, you think they would have learned that particular lesson from t3, but no, there it is.

Clowning around like that is a two hour snl skate. I've said before that Terminator really isn't a concept that can support big franchises like this. It's not like Star Trek, where you have unlimited scope to explore the most fantastical. ideas imaginable, basically all you can do is keep recycling the same idea over and over again with diminishing returns and the fact is that the story was effectively closed at the end of s2 by trying to mine iconic moments from the series for nostalgia value . All Genesis really does is invite really unfavorable comparisons. The question people often ask me is which movie is worse or Dark Fate, and honestly, it's hard to answer.

I mean, Dark Fate seems to be more intentionally disrespectful to the series' legacy and political undertones. It certainly didn't help, but I actually think Genesis did more damage overall, ruining Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese's characters, killing off almost everything that was once great and awesome about the franchise, and starting the unwanted trend. of the retcon in past events and even entire movies have disappeared and all because of the selfish desire to squeeze a little more money out of the Terminator brands see you, honey, anyway, that's all I have for today, go away now.