Review of “Terminator: Genisys”

It’s mediocre. Go for Schwarzenegger, or don’t go at all.

There are a bevy of issues with Genisys, and there’s so many to get through that I don’t think I’ll have time to put them in a proper, well-formatted order. Instead, here they are as they cross my mind.

1.) The CGI is garbage

I cannot believe a high-profile movie like Terminator: Genisys has the worst CGI I’ve seen so far this year. Fucking Spy did special effects better. SPY.

2.) Emilia Clarke was baaaaad

Of course Schwarzenegger was going to be a boss, no one expected any less. Jason Clarke was awesome, just like he always is. Even Jai Courtney was good. JAI WAS GOOD. If he can be good for once, how could anyone possibly be bad? Well, Emilia Clarke showed us how. She played a Sarah Connor unintentionally suffering from bipolar disorder. One moment she’s acting like a wannabe stoic heroine, the next she’s crying naked in the locker room as Jai sweet-talks her. Honestly, while I haven’t seen Game of Thrones, from what I’d heard Emilia was supposedly really good. She doesn’t show it here, at all. But then again… in that show you got to see her tits, so maybe that is warping peoples opinions? Here there was just a lame push-up bra scene and one hilarious moment where they tried to show her full boobs but you could actually see her wearing pasties. Christ, the poor camera work.

3.) There’s no reason for this movie to exist, going by its own plot

The plot has a MASSIVE flaw right from the get-go. The machines have this secret weapon that can instantly win them the war right from the beginning, yet they only use it, once, when the humans are about to overcome them. This is literally just to set up a save-the-world plot, with zero accountability on the writers’ part. The machines could’ve used this weapon a thousand times over years before the human strike team attacked their top secret facility and erased every timeline where a rebellion survived, all before the first five seconds of this movie began rolling. But nooooo, just because the words ‘time travel’ are thrown around a lot, we’re expected to overlook this fact.

4.) It’s just a series of events

Not in the nice, flowing way certain movies pull off. Here, it’s just ‘thing happens, cut to next thing, big thing segues this thing’. It’s like they just made a two hour collection of trailer shots and called it a movie. Cool idea, not at all acceptable execution.

5.) While I’m yelling about the writing and plot, might as well point out the dialogue here is atrocious

I feel like a small fraction of the reason I tore Emilia’s horrible performance to shreds up above is because the writing is god-awful. I at least applaud her for not cringing every time she said something, because if it were me I’d be vomiting after the first table read. This dialogue is some of the worst, most immersion breaking dialogue I’ve ever heard. Seriously, it’s like the writers just looked up “shit ten-year-olds hear in action movies and think sounds cool or emotional” and compiled the top fifty quotes from that list into this movie.

6.) Stupid cliches up the ass

Why, why why why why why does every movie have to have some dramatic, emotional dialogue while the immediate threat is, like, five hallways away? At one point Emilia Clarke is giving this kid some long hand-holding cuddle session on a stairwell to make him feel good or something, while the terminator is marching towards them ready to slice and dice their squishy human flesh. This is the dumbest cliche on the planet. In real life, would you hold a little stairwell circle-jerk session right as a MORPHING ROBOT OF DEATH is on the same floor and coming to kill you and everyone you care about? No, you wouldn’t!

7.) Movie includes the star child from Mass Effect 3

You remember that little glowing blue piece of shit kid that ruined the end of Mass Effect 3 for you? He’s here at the end of Terminator: Genisys to ruin it as well (in case everything else listed here didn’t already). Seriously, star child is in this movie. Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh.

8.) The trailers really DID spoil the best part

Usually, over-marketing doesn’t bother me. I’ll watch the main three trailers for a movie, and maybe a TV spot or two, but otherwise I’ll hold off specifically because I know movies love to put half their runtime up on Youtube these days. To be honest, The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s trailers didn’t ruin that movie for me. Avengers: Age of Ultron, while still a shit movie, was not preemptively ruined for me because of the three main trailers. Yet Terminator: Genisys decided to include the ONE COOL TWIST IN THIS MOVIE in the second trailer. Not even the third. The second. Trailer. And, having now seen the flick in its entirety, I can say that it was in fact the absolute single clever twist this movie had going for it. Sigh.

9.) This movie can’t suspend disbelief for shit

There’s a helicopter chase where Jai Courtney is being hunted by Jason Clarke, and it’s horrible. The helicopters, besides being constructed of sloppy CGI, handle better than an Iron Man suit; making INSANE turns and whipping around faster than Superman ever could. It’s ridiculous and totally takes you out of whatever experience kind of existed before this scene.

10.) No, really, you don’t understand how bad the CGI was

Within the first five movies you see electricity effects and a CGI recreated younger Arnold, and they ACTUALLY look like assets plucked out of an animated movie. Seriously, the lightning from the finale of Back to the Future was better. That movie is 30 years old. This movie is three days old.

Aaaaand that about sums up everything I have to say about Terminator: Genisys, as far as gripes go. In terms of compliments… well, like I said above, Arnold was boss. Jason Clarke is my main man through and through, and definitely puts on the best show (besides Schwarzenegger). He also gets the best scene (it’s the one where he’s getting sucked into a thingy, but you can see that IN THE TRAILER). Other compliments… um… some of the action was cool. Hans Zimmer does an okay job composing a score, for someone whose music is starting to sound like a collection of factory-produced “bwaaaaahs” rather than meaningfully crafted soundtracks.

THIS is the cool scene from the trailer that I mentioned in the paragraph above.

Who am I kidding, just don’t go and see the movie. As Schwarzenegger might say, “I’ll be back”. To which I might respond: hopefully not, Arnold. Or at least, not like this.

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