The first challenge you face in decoding Terminator Genisys, before you even get through to the multiple tangled-kite-string horrors of the company's plot, is doing exercises who on the planet the thing is for. To anyone with no reasonable working understanding of the initial two Terminator films, will probably be nigh-on incomprehensible: the super-fans, meanwhile, will realise that everything here runs counter to your chrome-plated directness of James Cameron’s original vision.
In short, the objective audience is very much people who know the initial two Terminator films thoroughly and also hate them. The other 99.9999+ percent folks are in for just a bumpy ride.
Genisys, chapter one, verse one: to start with, the planet earth is a formless void and darkness covers the face area of the deep. Or in simple terms, there’s a post-apocalyptic prologue, while using last tatters of humanity scrapping together with the evil robotic forces of Skynet somewhere within the murk.
John Connor (Jason Clarke) is leading the Resistance, with Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) tagging on puppyishly behind him within a string of brownish battle scenes, none that come close to matching the majestic visual uppercut that opened Cameron’s 1984 original: a drift of human skulls being ground to dust beneath a robotic caterpillar track.
It’s this confrontation that prompt the events of this film – and sure enough, we percieve Connor and Reese going to Skynet’s time travel device, soon after the T-800 robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger) provides it to jump back in 1984 with Sarah Connor, the helpless mother-to-be from the Resistance’s mighty leader, presents itself his to-kill list. Reese volunteers to search after him and save the morning, stopping simply to take off his clothes first. In the Terminator films that’s precisely how time travel works: probably the founders of Skynet were fans of Magic Mike.
What happens next would be the strangest and the majority wince-inducingly effortful passages in modern cinema: a shot-for-shot and prop-for-prop recreation from the opening of The Terminator, assembled using a tweezer-like awareness of detail. However, as it transpires the events are playing out in a very parallel timeline, none actually count for anything, which becomes clear as things learn to veer dramatically off-course. (As sequels go, Genisys is slavishly disrespectful, that could be a first.)
Initially, the diversions are diverting – including of all when a mature Schwarzenegger-model Terminator turns up to do grapple with his younger self, who’s meticulously recreated with digital voodoo. In this timeline, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke, from Game of Thrones) continues to be raised from the T-800 because the early 1970s, and calls him ‘Pops’: a casually astonishing twist that this film doesn't have any apparent appetite to educate yourself regarding.
Couldn’t director Alan Taylor have at the least given us a flashback to Arnie doing the college run, or dividing up a mug of spaghetti bolognese into freezer bags, in order to give himself more time within the evenings? Instead, he just ploughs on towards the upshot, which is that this brutal T-800 has become an amusingly incongruous good guy, and Sarah Connor, in lieu of Kyle Reese, will be the avenging angel. If Cameron hadn’t already done just that in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 24 a long time ago, it would have really felt like something.
Next comes a rise to 2017, where trio must defuse the titular Genisys programme: a scarcely defined social networking app (it requires pictures of clouds) which Skynet is applying to bring about Judgement Day on this altered version in the near-present. But the ongoing temporal hijinks are equal parts tedious and indecipherable, and how the characters speak about parallel timelines feels like studio executives thrashing out a franchise within a boardroom. (It’s never explained, however in Genisys-world, neither Terminator 3: Rise in the Machines nor Terminator: Salvation have the symptoms of happened: again, a studio exec’s dream.)
For the many agonised complexity of Genisys’s storyline, nothing surprising ever actually occurs in it: it’s the usual ugly helicopter chases and fistfights on metal gantries, with Matt Smith generating a late (and negligible) appearance as the eye of Skynet itself.
Emilia Clarke will be the closest the film concerns having a saving grace – she gets the Linda Hamilton pout down pat, no less than – but Courtney and Jason Clarke make machines look warm-blooded, and Schwarzenegger like Welles playing Falstaff. One on the film’s running jokes will be the T-800 – sorry, ‘Pops’ – smiling awkwardly so that they can ingratiate himself to humans, and it’s never very clear if the creaking noise that accompanies the expression is often a sound effect or you cannot.
“I’m old, not obsolete,” is Schwarzenegger’s plaintive refrain, however the film contains the opposite problem: it’s a totally new-fashioned blockbuster, obsessive about sustaining the franchise as an alternative to telling an article. That renders it obsolete on arrival.
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