Terminator Genisys

Before he became known primarily for doomed lovers and icebergs, and blue-skinned alien erotica, James Cameron was purely a kick-butt action film director.

His follow-up to Ridley Scott's astounding Alien, 1986's Aliens, smartly avoided the subversively creepy atmosphere of the original and instead gave us a full-throttle action flick involving a group of surly space Marines locked in mortal combat with a writhing mass of double-jawed, acid-blooded death mongers. The deep-water action thriller The Abyss also has its devotees, but his greatest achievement was undoubtedly the pair of Terminator films he made seven years apart ('84 and '91), which featured a cyborglike actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger playing to type as an unstoppable robot sent from the future to either kill or defend (depending on the film) a woman named Sarah Connor, who would eventually give birth to a son who would lead the successful revolt against the evil machines ruling Earth in a dystopian future.

The first film was a great concept in search of slightly better production values. The fully loaded Terminator 2: Judgment Day (at a budget of $102 million, almost 20 times more than the original) was taut, explosive and unrelenting in its drive and pace. The action was so absorbing, it helped distract viewers from some of Cameron's less-than-stellar attributes as a filmmaker -- specifically, characterization and dialogue, as better evidenced in the much maligned repartee between the doomed young lovers in Titanic.

After Cameron dropped his creative involvement with the franchise after T2, the immediate sequels -- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009) -- didn't do much to move the needle, and the series seemed destined for the kind of painful demise often bestowed on once-proud franchises by movie studios ever more desperate to milk every vestige of earning power out of their properties (see also, the loathsome Predator vs. Alien schlockfests).

This newest production, helmed by cagey action veteran Alan Taylor and working from a cobbled together script by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, happily reverses that trend, albeit along modest increments, but derives much of its capital in its homage to the first pair of films' well-attended iconography. I'm starting to feel actively guilty about the indulgence of Hollywood on the action films of my formative years. Star Wars sequels, Raiders sequels, a Jurassic Park revisit just a couple of weeks ago, and now this next saga of the Terminator franchise. But that's the way we roll these days, with Hollywood studios loath to invest hundreds of millions on a film without an already established audience.

The story plays out as a bit of dadaist word poem, with snippets of random words and ideas -- all culled from the first two films -- cut up and pulled out in random order. We begin, again, in our oppressive future with a world ruled by Skynet, a fully killer app whose army of gleaming robots (each with unnerving humanesque teeth) keep humans as prisoners, while hunting down stragglers to ensure order.

The war against the machines, led by Connor's son, John (Jason Clarke), and his right-hand man Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney, hoping for better results here than the last time he attempted to late-crash a franchise teetering on its last legs, the abominable A Good Day to Die Hard), are on the brink of finally defeating the machines and setting everything straight again, but just at their moment of triumph, Skynet releases its fail-safe device, sending a terminator (Schwarzenegger) back in time to ... you know how this goes.

Only here, when Reese is sent back in 1984 to protect Sarah Connor and stop the robot, he finds a very different past reality from the one he expected: For one thing, Sarah (Emilia Clarke) is no shrinking violet waitress in need of his protection, she's a trained warrior and survivor, adept with a gun and hard quip. For another, she's attended by "Pops" (Schwarzenegger, again), an aging T-800 unit assigned to protect her when she was a 9-year-old girl.

Time streams have slipped, you see, and even though the enemy remains largely unchanged (in place of Robert Patrick's impassive T-1000, we have our first Asian model, played by Byung-hun Lee), the playing field has largely been upended. Eventually Reese and Sarah jump up to 2017, years after the initial Skynet overthrow, but in this messed-up time stream, the days right before the assault of Skynet -- now dubbed "Genisys" and proffered as a do-anything mobile OS for everyone's smartphone devices. The ragtag team is convinced they can prevent the evil application from spreading because, it turns out, Reese once visited himself as a young boy and made himself memorize the date by which Skynet can get capped.

If it sounds complicated, don't get too worked up about it: Many times when the flappy convolutions of the script become too much, Pops' attempt to explain it in heavily accented nonsense jargon results in other characters rolling their eyes and grabbing a gun. At the end of the day, we're just here to see stuff all blowedup. Despite the crossing streams and far-ranging implications of future twaddle, the film isn't terribly concerned about how much sense it may or may not make.

That's largely because what it's really trafficking is the series' greatest hits. There's nostalgia bleeding out of the robots' assorted circuit boards, with characters re-enacting some of their most hallowed moments, and a near-constant retreading of iconographic bits of dialogue. At times, the film plays like a retrospective rather than a newly imagined narrative, the things you can get away with in time travel spiels.

No memorable bit from the first two films goes unrepeated, and the big dialogue moments are so often regurgitated, at times it's like sitting at the cafeteria lunch table with a group of pasty high schoolers during a free period ("I'll be back!," "Get out!", "Come with me if you want to live!"). Arnold appears here in three different forms: young 1984 version, older 1997 version, and positively ancient 2017 version. We are told his skin, like a human's, ages contextually. For all his time away from the franchise and his stint as governor of California, Schwarzenegger seems happy to go back to his roots, even allowing some comedy to sparkle through. Arnold plays up the T-800's attempts to "fit in" with a horrific fake smile, one which has him pulling his lips off his teeth as if receiving electro shock therapy -- an oft-revisited gag that never failed to slay me.

All of this was welcome enough, I suppose, but to pull a question from an undergraduate's writing workshop, how much here is really at stake? Every time we think we've sealed the future away from Skynet, the machines figure out a way to go even further back in time to change everything to their advantage all over again.

I suppose the thing Paramount can be most happy with here is, much like the T-1000, the franchise itself is nearly impossible to kill: It's able to reboot itself in a moment's notice and begin the whole narrative over with a different cast. In this case, it's mostly an amusing revisit, but like taking an old VHS tape and recording over it too many times, the ghostly patterns of former images and scenes keep intruding, making the whole thing feel at best redundant and at worst completely unnecessary. The T-800 model likes to say he's "old but not obsolete," but as long as Arnold can walk, you get the sense the studios will never let him completely rust.

MovieStyle on 07/03/2015