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    Terminator Genisys

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
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    And the award for the worst advertising campaign I’ve ever seen for a movie goes to “Terminator Genisys”, a film that would have been much more enjoyable if the trailers didn’t spoil every cool twist and development. Seriously. I know that statistics show that people are more prone to go see a movie when they know more about it, but you would have thought that someone would have learned their lesson after “Terminator Salvation”. That film featured revelations about the main character in nearly every trailer released and the film suffered a lot for it. I cannot stress enough that if you are interested in seeing this film, you should just go in cold and avoid all publicity for it. I even think the posters in the lobby give away too much! Someone needs some sense slapped into them for this blunder. With that point addressed, I’m going to be honest and say that I really thought this movie was going to suck. Most of the reviews I saw were not favorable, but since I’m such a big fan of the franchise, of Arnold Schwarzenegger, of time travel and of robots, I had to see the movie anyway. Overall, I enjoyed it; I think there are a lot of good things about this fifth installment. Where it drops the ball is in the scale of the film (I’ll explain that in a bit) and in the ending, which is downright ridiculous.

    The film begins with some familiar scenes. Kyle Reese (J'ai Courtney) is sent back in time to prevent Skynet’s cyborg assassin from from killing Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) in 1984. If Sarah Connor dies, then the leader of the human resistance, John Connor (Jason Clarke) will have never been born and the machine’s victory will be certain. The familiarity stops when Reese’s arrival has been anticipated by another Terminator (played by Lee Byung-hun) and he finds Sarah Connor in full military gear, partnered up with a reprogrammed and familiar T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) With the past no longer as it was when Kyle was sent on his initial mission, the possibilities are endless.

    Let’s begin with the problems with this film. We have a story that deals with time travel in a scale unlike any of the other films in the franchise and it feels like it’s just too big for its own good. If we eliminate the sometimes enjoyable, but mostly pretty bad “Terminator Salvation”, all of the other plots deal with people being sent back into the past to ensure that something happens, to prevent something from happening or to try and alter the future, only to find that the future cannot be altered. The same applies here. The difference is that in the first three movies, the time travel element isn’t really that complicated. You don’t need to draw maps and diagrams to understand how the actions of the characters lead to the developments in subsequent movies or in the future of this storyline. In “Genisys” there is so much time travel, so many people are moving in different directions and on top of it all, the revelation that the past can be altered to the point where it becomes unrecognizable that it’s very difficult to keep track of what elements of the continuity are still applicable and which ones are not. It’s overwhelming to the point where I just threw my hands up in the air and figured that I’d just have to sit down with the Blu-ray once it gets a home video release, draw my own maps and figure out how all of this makes sense on my own time. That’s assuming that it all fits neatly together, which I suspect it does not.

    This leads into the issue that the scales in “Genisys” are simply too big for its own good. It’s now so far removed from reality that I’m not sure if anyone in charge of making the film really understood the full ramifications of these events. If you look at a movie like “Godzilla”, you’ll find a wild concept, but when you break it down, you can still relate to it on a human level. Godzilla is a creature that topples buildings, but he might as well be a hurricane moving through a city. We’ve seen building fall down and millions die at the hands of natural disasters before, so you can understand the emotional impact of the actions and picture how you would react to everything that’s going on. Even when there’s talk of superweapons to get rid of Godzilla, you can still recognize that as a living animal, you could kill the dinosaur in order to prevent the natural disaster-like destruction that it brings. I have no idea how to connect to some of the developments in “Terminator 5” anymore because the scale of it all is so big. With the revelations about Skynet; the previous ideas about time travel being completely thrown out of the window; people travelling through time, only to find that multiple people have been there before them and that the future they have been living doesn’t even exist anymore (or does it? ); and big confrontations to either rectify the timeline, or change it completely it just makes your head spin. It’s not that this movie was difficult to understand, it’s that I don’t really know what a lot of the consequences to the plot points mean in the grand scheme of things. I could understand perfectly what was going on in all of the previous “Terminator” films. They all felt epic because we cared about the characters and the action felt impactful. There was no need to have say… Skynet send a cyborg Tyrannosaurus to destroy the moon back to 1492 in order to prevent Christopher Columbus from discovering the Bahamas. I’m exaggerating, but there is so much going on in “Genisys” that something feels like it’s been lost.

    I also feel like with the power creep of these movies (the previous Terminators always seem to pale in comparison to the new model that’s sent by Skynet) it’s come to a point where the only reasons why the movie doesn’t end in 15 minutes with Skynet winning is because the writer is on the side of the humans. There seemed to me that there were an awful lot of times where the minions of Skynet made some dumb mistakes or somehow forgot what they were capable of really doing until a very specific scene where it would play out for maximum excitement. The plot is dictating what is going to happen to these characters, and not the other way around. The humans are guilty of this too, but I can somewhat forgive people making mistakes. I can’t recall my computer ever adding 1+1 and getting the wrong answer, so why does Skynet make foolish mistakes?

    With all of that said. There are some very well done and very exciting/entertaining aspects here. The film begins with recreations and callbacks to Terminator 1 & 2 and they are done perfectly. I don’t know how they did it, but somehow they have re-created a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and put him on-screen. It’s not one of these things where they have the original Terminator with his human face for just a few seconds before it gets burnt off either. We’re talking about some dynamite special effects where a young Schwarzenegger is battling a younger version of himself and it’s seamless. I really want to check out the special features on the Blu-ray/DVD to figure out how they pulled this off. The beginning of this film is very exciting and unpredictable as familiar elements are given a whole new spin and many loving callbacks are honored. I mourn the fact that it looks like writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier either didn’t care for, or couldn’t find a way to incorporate elements of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” here, but the good news is that this movie pulls a “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and straight up eliminates all traces of “Terminator Salvation” from its continuity.

    There are some fun twists on the characters we’ve come to love over the years and I particularly enjoyed what they did with Schwarzenegger’s character. The way they rationalize that he looks older, the way they use him for genuinely dramatic and comedic effect when he isn’t defending Sarah and Kyle from huge threats are very inventive and well executed. In fact, I thought all of the protagonists were well handled. Sarah Connor is still a tough-as-nails survivalist that is perfectly capable of handling herself and Reese is really interesting as the avatar for the audience that knows as much as we do, but is thrust into this situation that is impossible to predict. We still have the staples of the franchise present throughout, with great special effects and solid action sequences. When the movie works it’s a lot of fun and to me, it does deliver what I expected to see in a new instalment of this franchise on a whole. The ending makes no sense and in a way almost feels like a betrayal of everything we’ve come to know up to now, but a sequence halfway through the credits manages to balance that out enough. I truly feel like there’s more good than bad here, it’s just that the bad moments stand out because they’re positioned at some key points in the running time (like the ending for example)

    I probably like this movie more than I should. Maybe it’s because my expectations were low, maybe I’m just so excited to see Schwarzenegger say “I’ll be back” and to hear the immortal lines “Come with me if you want to live” one more time. Because of a few questionable logical points and an ending that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (even if they do set it up well in advance and within the movie’s own sense of anti-logic, it does work) I can’t give it the high recommendation I was hoping to be able to shell out because it really should have been tighter. I liked it, I’ll see it again sometime in the future and while I don’t think anyone is going to be calling this one a classic, or even a film that’s close to the league directly under “T1”, “T2” or even “T3”, I feel like 3 out of 5, a mild recommendation is more than fair. I think with that number, people will be pleasantly surprised more than they won’t. Don’t expect to be blown away, but I feel like I can safely say that you will enjoy “Terminator Genisys” for what it does right. (2-D Theatrical version on the big screen, July 14, 2015)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  16.7.2015 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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