By Preston Wilder
There’s no such thing as Fate, except what we make for ourselves, says someone in this fifth Terminator movie (the first in six years, since the forgettable Terminator Salvation) – and Arnold Schwarzenegger must agree with that sentiment, being the epitome of the self-made man. Arnie’s back, having skipped Salvation due to other commitments (he was running the world’s eighth-largest economy at the time), which comes as a bit of a surprise. “I’m getting out of this business, and so should you,” he told Sylvester Stallone in Expendables 3, which was widely taken as a real-life statement of intent – but it turns out the correct line is the one he speaks in Terminator Genisys: “I’m old, not obsolete”.
Anyway, yes: no such thing as Fate, says someone – it was probably Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), who’s been sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor, or it may have been Sarah herself (Emilia Clarke, from Game of Thrones) – which has always been the main source of tension in the Terminator franchise. These are films about trying to change the past, only to find that you usually end up reinforcing it. A cyborg was sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, so she wouldn’t give birth to John Connor and he wouldn’t lead the resistance against the Machines – but in fact the past ended up becoming the future, indeed the intervention only made it more certain (so there is such a thing as Fate). That was in The Terminator (1984), a big hit whose appeal could be broken down roughly as follows: 40 per cent action, 40 per cent ideas, 20 per cent Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Arnie’s charisma is still an asset 31 years later. Playing the good-guy T-800 cyborg from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (with CGI glimpses of his ruthless killer from the first movie), he’s now learned the rudiments of small talk – “Nice to see you” – and attempts a truly scary smile from time to time, but his hilarious stiltedness (which is also Arnie’s beefy immobility) is still the film’s trump card. The proportion of action to ideas seems to have changed in Terminator Genisys, though – or maybe it’s just that the ideas are a cop-out. The result is a noisy, hollow action film with a self-defeating stab at a deeper layer.
We’re heading into spoiler territory now – but let’s just say that John Connor (played by Jason Clarke) is a more ambivalent figure here, hijacked at one point by Skynet, a.k.a. the Machines. He comes back in time from 2029 to 2017, meeting Kyle and Sarah who’ve travelled there from 1984 (the T-800, meanwhile, has gone “the long way”, actually living through those 33 years). John threatens to kill Kyle and Sarah if they defy him – but Sarah is his mother and Kyle, as fans of The Terminator know, is his father; what’s more, they haven’t yet conceived him (despite Arnie constantly urging them to “mate”), so how could he kill them without also killing himself? The film is aware of this problem – but airily solves it by claiming that the three characters are “marooned”, or “exiles in Time”, presumably meaning they can act without consequences. What’s more, there are “nexus points” which create whole new timelines, so for instance Kyle somehow knows about a boy who’s the “alternate timeline version” of himself – which explains why they go to 2017 to prevent Judgment Day (the old back-story had it taking place in 1997), now linked to a ubiquitous app called Genisys: “Genisys is Skynet”.
All this makes sense, in its own way – but it’s arbitrary plotting with a hint of ‘Because I said so’, not the mind-bending logic one associates with Time-travel movies. The ideas aren’t much fun in Terminator Genisys, leaving only the action – but the action, it turns out, isn’t much fun either.
Our heroes fight assorted cyborgs, and persist in trying to shoot them even though bullets are patently useless against cyborgs. The endless action becomes a vicious circle where Kyle, Sarah and/or T-800 shoot machines full of holes, the machines fall down, our heroes cheer, then the machines get up and we’re back to square one. Everyone seems to be indestructible here – even the humans, who come out of a spectacular bus crash (the bus somersaults in the air, then smashes against the asphalt) with barely a scratch – which may be why the film runs an unnecessary two hours, or maybe they have to be indestructible so the studio can make even more Terminators. There’s a witty idea behind Genisys, revisiting the first film in the franchise through the prism of all the subsequent films, but the result isn’t witty, it’s tiring. By the end, you may sympathise – though not in the way intended – with Kyle’s anguished cry: “Time-travel makes my head hurt!”.
DIRECTED BY Alan Taylor
STARRING Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jai Courtney, Emilia Clarke
US 2014 126 mins
