In a world where humans are the minority, and our own technology has united against us in the mission to rid the earth of organic life for good, it seems that only defeat lies ahead for these once powerful nations. It’s just a few years after Skynet, a highly intelligent computer program integrated into every facet of society, wiped out billions of lives in a single moment. Known to the few survivors as “Judgment Day”, this devastating event marked the time when hope seemed all but lost for the future of humanity. Then came John Connor. A powerful leader characterized by perseverance and scars that suggest he’s been down in the trenches, Connor is a revolutionary in a time of passive resistance; a man who took it upon himself to rally what was left of the humans to fight for survival, urging his fellow men to defend themselves, and declaring the war far from lost. A shining beacon of hope, John leads the human resistance in the fight against Skynet and its army of artificially intelligent killing machines. However, the more battles he wins against the machines, the more impervious their plans become, as Skynet develops a way to win this war before it ever started. By using their advanced technology to send a Terminator back to 1984 to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah, before she ever gives birth to John, they seek to end the timeline of the man who could possibly put a permanent halt to Skynet’s plans.
Luckily, John has a counteractive plan of his own. He’ll send one of his own men back to stop the Terminator, and save Sarah so that she may live on to give birth to humanity’s only hope. Kyle Reese, a man that John took under his wing when he was only a boy, seems best suited for the job, not only for his courageousness, but for his innate loyalty to John and the resistance. (Little does Kyle know, but in the end, his life will play a much bigger role than that.) John tells Kyle that when he returns to 1984, the Sarah Connor he meets will be nothing like the one that he has spent hours recalling; the strong, independent Sarah that taught John how to fight back against the machines, and how defiance is one’s greatest weapon in the face of persecution. The Sarah Connor from 1984 is not privy to the path that lies ahead of her, and will appear more like a damsel in distress than the fierce warrior that John has spent so many nights describing. Kyle feels prepared for his journey, but when he arrives in 1984, it seems that Skynet has bested him once again, prompting the timeline to speed up after they send a Terminator to kill nine-year-old Sarah Connor, shoving her into a harsh, survivor-driven adulthood long before she should have known the realities its struggle.
Terminator Genisys mixes The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day together to create its new, updated timeline that ignores both the third and fourth installments in the series. Like its predecessor Terminator 2, this entry also pins Terminator against Terminator. However, it differentiates itself by managing to remain relatively bloodless throughout the entire 126 minute runtime. There are some pretty ludicrous fight scenes that entertain simply because they are so elaborate, but it soon becomes clear that most of this Terminator-on-Terminator action is for the benefit of the PG-13 rating; an incentive that didn’t hold back the R-rated source materials from which the film so heavily borrowed. This rating becomes glaringly more obvious during the Genisys time travel sequences (of which there are many), which feature time travelers who are forced to shed their clothes to ensure a safe passage, only to be captured by awkward camera angles that desperately try to hide any nudity that would send the film’s sin quota over the edge into R-rated territory. It’s strange to call a film that features a helicopter swerving through the chains of the Golden Gate Bridge “watered down”, but that’s how this addition to the Terminator franchise honestly comes across; a 2015 film that feels safer than its thirty-year-old originator.
Another thing that seems off about the new Terminator is the message it sends about Judgment Day. Despite the fact that this concept was originally created from a place of inevitability, Genisys seems to say that humans have doomed themselves, and that they are getting what they rightly deserve. James Cameron showed with concerned compassion how our need to progress often coincides with the need to conquer, and how our push to make machines intelligent and integrate them into our lives would eventually backfire if we weren’t careful. Genisys shames its viewers for being too obsessed with their cell phones. Although the message is oddly fleeting, it’s a rough one. It also plays into the rest of the film, which feels cold and distant, as the characters constantly talk about the fate of the future, and not the genocide that awaits the present; billions of innocents caught in the wake of Skynet’s destruction, and it seems that the only life that matters in this movie is John Connor’s. Despite solid performances from Emilia Clarke and Arnold Schwarzenegger, their moments of bonding are limited and reserved for build ups to action sequences. Perhaps if we had seen more encounters between the two, or between the Schwarzenegger and Jai Courtney their characters would elicit more sympathy, but the truth is, the feeling of being helpless against a massive, indestructible force like Skynet and knowing that you can’t do anything to save the countless lives around you is a state of mind that is simply absent from the latest entry in the series.
Aside from its mean-spirited, albeit brief message blaming humans for their own destruction, and its failure to add anything new to the three-decade-old franchise, the timeline just does not make sense, and the ending undoes all of the work that has been achieved throughout the film. But most importantly, Terminator Genisys lacks the heart and humor of the original Terminator films, which, ironically, is what made them so human. Every moment of dialogue is just a predecessor for the action. The dread and frustration of knowing the future and not being able to stop it, the “us against the world” mentality, and the desperation to save mankind — these emotions that saturated the original entries take a back seat to perfectly poised, attractive actors. This is a story that relies so heavily on appearances that its villain removes his physical flaws as soon as he reveals himself. It’s unfortunate that a movie about saving humanity goes through the blockbuster motions so much that it winds up feeling robotic, but that’s the case here. Terminator Genisys is one of the most action-packed, busiest films of the summer, and yet…nothing really happens.