Monday 20 July 2015

Terminator Genisys

Take a look at the image you see before you, taken from a scene in the new Terminator film. Take a good look. I mean really - soak it in, realise what it means. This is what the Terminator has become. It's not a joke; not an alternate universe where dreams are crushed and audiences made to suffer a decades-long drawn-out death of their once all-conquering anti-hero. No. This is 2015, for real, and Terminator Genisys exists.

I could end this review right here; the image, horrifyingly, speaks for itself. But I'm too incensed at the state of what can pass for a hundred and fifty-five million dollar movie these days. I'm not adverse to a bit of daft expensive fun; take Jurassic World, another franchise rebirth that could have gone horribly wrong - for some nit-pickers it did, but I along with a great deal of other people enjoyed it immensely. I went to see it twice in one weekend. Sue me. No, big silly blockbusters aren't dead. But Genisys feels at best like fan fiction - uninspired time travel lunacy that uses Back to the Future II's 'go back into the first film' gambit as a jumping-off point, then slowly hurtles to its death over the course of two hours. To say it's tripe is being too kind.

So utterly bonkers is the story (if you can call it a story) that it pains me to even begin to explain it. When you struggle to follow what's going on pretty much from the get-go, you know you're in a world of shit. The basic idea being Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent back in time as usual, but ends up in an alternate past. There's good Terminators (Arnie is referred to as 'Pops'), bad Terminators (just in case you'd forgotten about the liquid metal one from T2), and a bad-ass Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones' Khaleesi, Emilia Clarke) knocking about in 1984, all much to the surprise of Reese.

Things get worse when it turns out that John Connor has become a Terminator himself, somehow infected by Skynet in 2029 then sent back to 2014 to make sure Skynet still exists, in the form of Genisys (an all-seeing eye of an operating system that everyone in the world is waiting to download). All this apparently negates the 1997 Judgement Day timeline, Reese and Sarah sending themselves forward in a makeshift time machine (I'm not kidding) to 2017 to meet up with the older Pops, in order to destroy Cyberdyne Systems by blowing up the new time machine that John Connor is helping to build.

It also turns out Skynet is actually the Matt Smith version of Doctor Who.

None of this is made up.

It is utter fucking nonsense.

Throw in a pointless turn from recent Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, recycled lines from the first two films to please rabid fanboys, and THAT mugshot scene (soundtracked by Inner Circle's Bad Boys - no really, it is) and you have what some people are calling the true sequel to the first two films, erasing the memory of the tepid third and fourth outings. Well, those people are idiots. Terminator 3 is pretty poor, and Terminator Salvation is far too po-faced for its own good, but by god they at least tried to be narratively cohesive. Genisys ties itself in so many knots it's laughable; by the end I neither cared about nor wished to know the fate of anyone involved. For characters as beautifully complex as Sarah Connor, it's a sad indictment of franchise dead-horse-flogging when you realise you no longer give a shit what happens to her. Ever.

Maybe, perhaps, in the infinite cosmos of possibilities and outcomes that life unfurls for us, there's an alternate universe where Terminator Genisys doesn't exist. Maybe, perhaps, the people in that universe go about their days never knowing two beloved genre films have been massacred by jobbing directors and money-hungry studios, keen to exploit Schwarzenegger's signature role beyond any reasonable stopping point. "Give the people what they want" James Bond once said (no really, he did - Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997. Check it if you like). Well the people don't have a fucking clue what they want half the time. Look at Indiana Jones. Look at John McClane. And now look, once again, at the Terminator. Go on, that photo at the start of this review. Look at it long and hard.

What a fucking disgrace.