Terminator: Genisys': Film Review

Arnold Schwarzenegger once again declares, "I'll be back," in this fifth installment of the Terminator franchise, but enough already. Spending half its time showing unkillable cyborg characters getting shot up only to quickly heal themselves and the other half trying to explain a plot that rewrites the entire series, Terminator: Genisys will serve as a good litmus of how keen the public is to see basically the same old thing in a new (but very similar) bottle.

At one point, Schwarzenegger's lifelike robot tells his cohorts, "I'm old, not obsolete," but that will be up to audiences to decide; the sorry track record of the star's six post-gubernatorial features means that a lot is riding on the box-office of this continuation of his most popular franchise. Thanks to the visual effects equivalent of expert plastic surgery, the actor, who was 37 when the first series entry was released in 1984 and is now 67, more or less convincingly spans that time frame in terms of looks as he helps Sarah Connor and her son John try to save humankind, along with themselves, from the victory of the machines.

How many times have we seen the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed in a big budget movie over the past years? Has there been time to rebuild it since San Andreas a few weeks ago? And let's not forget Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, Godzilla and Rise of the Planet of the Apes just before that. Well, it happens again here as part of the nuke attack that's part of the back-story that must be altered if humanity is be given another chance.


Series fans will relish the care with which director Alan Taylor and his team have, in the flashback, recreated the feel of James Cameron's original; Reese arrives, naked, in the same dark and grungy downtown L.A. alley to be greeted by a homeless derelict. Assaulted by the sleek and determined new terminator (Byung-hun Lee), Reese in short order is joined by the original edition (you know who, looking very young), giving Sarah (Emilia Clarke) the protection she needs until they all make the jump back to the future, one in which son John looks older than Mom.

This time-jumping contrivance plays well enough, but what actually goes on in the scenes set 14 years hence feels rote and unimaginative. Action scenes are accumulated as if mandated by a stop-watch and almost invariably seem like warmed-over versions of stuff we've seen before, in Terminator entries and elsewhere. The first three films in the series were R-rated and viscerally benefited from it; this one is rated PG-13 and its action scenes feel like diluted rehashes, obligatory and devoid of visual creativity in the way the violence is staged and photographed.

That leaves it to Arnold to save the day, but age has given him a vocal in addition to physical stiffness; he's still imposing and amusing up to a point, but he can't dominate the way he did thirty years ago.