Sample this: Terminator 2 (Judgement day), till date,is the only sequel to win an Academy award when the previous movie was not even nominated!
You have this movie & then you have Terminator Genisys (2015)…The Terminator promised us 24 years back that “I’ll be back”. Without venturing into the 2003 & 2009 trainwrecks, he is, inevitabily back. He stumbles back from the mess of the previous “sequels”& tries to salvage another trainwreck. Does he manage to do it?Well, not really.
Here is how the story goes. At least I think so…
After three decades of movies (and The chronicles of Sarah Connor TV series), the franchise is simply a confusing and convoluting mess of timelines. After (yet another) assault on a Skynet facility by Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) and his friend / Son, John Connor (Jason Clarke), someone must travel back in time to 1984 to save John’s mother, Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke / Khalisee), from a Terminator. So far,so yawnworthy. However, this time Sarah Connor isn’t a waitress carrying humanity’s savior in her womb. This time she’s been living with a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who was sent back even earlier to protect her from anotherT-800 (also Arnold Schwarzenegger)—one who had been sent to kill her exactly at the point Reese travels back to in the Genisys timeline.
Confused?? Don’t be, It doesn’t matter. The plot of every Terminator sequel has been absurd. And that’s because the plot of The Terminator itself (the future comes to the past to change the future, but that means the past is changed, so the future is changed??) was absurd. All this culminates in Terminator Genisys, which erases the scars of the last two movies and fundamentally retells the first. It relies on time travel and computer technology to explain how people (or machines) could know things they don’t know how they know, but not know other things that the movie doesn’t want to bother explaining. Terminator Genisys is a plotless, aimless, meandering, unclear, unpleasant mess. While I have tried to put together somewhat of a plot-line above, I do not really any clue what objectives the characters (even the villain) are pursuing, how they are pursuing them, or what will happen (or not) if they fail.
The sequel that comes closest to this movie is Dabangg 2. Not kidding!! Just Like Arbaaz Khan replicated the template of the original, here Alan Taylor recreates Cameron’s style of filmmaking. This is the most risk-averse sequel ever made (well,just forget Transformers for a moment). You have pretty much the same story-line,an old Arnie pretty much doing & saying the same things that he has done in the previous installments.
Coming to the rest of the cast, the fans of the franchise are pretty much going to be unhappy with everyone. The current crop who get to play Sarah, John & Kyle are no match to the people who played them in the past.Fans of Game of thrones would walk in expecting Khalisee to kick ass, but all you get is a middling, baby- faced Sarah connor who is… I do not know. I just could not accept watching her as Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton, you spoilt us.
Kyle Reese, played by Jai Courtney , is mildly irritating,largely boring. The fact that you remember him from the super bad Die Hard movie does not work either. He plays Kyle Reese in the MOST boring fashion ever.
As the trailer has already made us realize that John Connor is no more the savior of humanity, the twist does not come off as an “oh-my-god”moment. Well, he gets to say the same things about going back in time and then gets his own 15 seconds of CGI fame. That is that. No more.
At this point,I cannot even get started about how bad the rest of the cardboard (characters) are. They just make up for the numbers. The machines at least look better.The rest of the cast is just a waste. There is J.K.Simmons in the film as well.He gets a 3 minute part !!
One more thing that has not changed is the CGI.. It doesn’t look to have evolved much from Judgement Day. The film feels soft and phony. When the movies is full of time travel mumbo jumbo, you expect the action to be kick-ass. You cannot blame someone for expecting a terminator movie to have a few good action moments. Alas, what you get is a set of completely unimaginative, “been there-seen that”, boring action sequences to make up the time. That said, they have checked almost all boxes. You have humans hitting cyborgs, cyborgs hitting cyborgs, humans shooting at cyborgs (3 decades worth of knowledge has not made them aware that bullets are of no use!), car chase, helicopter chase, exploding vehicles, exploding buildings etc etc..Nothing you have not seen since the evolution of cinema. Yes, we saw better action in the movie made 24 freaking years back! Arnie flipping that shotgun still looks cool.
This is the worst movie of the franchise. That is something, as we have seen some bad, bad movies so far in the same franchise!! Arnold’s Terminator keeps saying,”I’m old, not obsolete”.. Well, truth is that he is both old & obsolete.
Know what is worse??There is talk of 2 more sequels. They are under production!! Our future is indeed bleak.
#Note: This review first appeared in www.madaboutmoviez.com . You may find my reviews here - http://madaboutmoviez.com/author/joinshri/
