The newest entry to the Terminator franchise, strives with towering efforts to reclaim the glory of its two James Cameron-directed predecessors, but miserably fails to deliver even a faint hint of wit and sense, in the wake of its convoluted confusion-infested time-travel narrative.
In this fifth installment, ill-wittedly conceived and called “Genisys”, The Terminator is definitely back, but his legacy is dead, butchered to bits of rusty metal junks through lazy and uncreative reinvention of its original source material. The timeline is set back to 1984. Skynet sends its own terminator from 2029, to kill Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future subversive leader of the resistance, John Connor (Jason Clarke). Consequently, a human, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is also sent to stop the terminator, in humanity’s desperate hope to save their species. At the time, Sarah is already being protected by her guardian terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose reasons of arriving in her time, is seemingly set to be never known.
Time-travel has always been a fascinating subject, and it in such fashion that “Terminator: Genisys”, attempts to build its own stronghold in the mold of the first two films. The take assumes an interesting onset, depicting an apocalyptic future where machines lord over the human minority, but it spirals down to fatal loops of nonsensical uncreatively-staged retreads when the what can be considered the inception of human salvation (Schwarzenegger’s Terminator’s arrival), begins.
Once the deadly cat-and-mouse chases spin out of control, confusion begins, and the film itself, can’t be bothered to clear off heads as it totally busy itself to trying to awe-inspire spectators, with elaborately-constructed action setpieces, teeming with CGI-mastered explosions, pursuits, and fight scenes.
There’s no denying that such attempt is carried out with colossal success, but the audience would inevitably find appreciating the feat, difficult and pointless . The proceedings are sutured into recreations of some iconic scenes of the original movies, while also devising its own, at the same time.
But even with all these efforts, “Genisys” still fails to generate sustained interest. The result of its motives manages to hit some of the nostalgic beats of the franchise, but tepid one-liners and confusing paradoxes would drag down its capacity to last.
It is also by these narrative defects that interest is being stripped off its key players, making the audience barely care about the characters and the imminence of their extinction. This is why “Genisys” is way below the glory of its predecessors–the dread is barely present, and fear is forced, thus ineffective.
There is a screaming irony that bursts at the heels of this attempt to reinvigorate the sagging Terminator series: The Terminator (Schwarzenegger) returns to the past to save the whole of humankind, but the mess that is “Genisys”, murders the franchise.
RATING: 5/10 (JE)
