Time crimes
Let’s not do the time warp again?
Terminator Genisys 12 Film HHHHH Extras N/A Out 26 Octo ber DIGITAL HD; 2 November DVD, BD
From lean, mean tech-noir thriller to garbled, spellcheck-averse disaster in just five movies: don’t mess with time, kids. Whatever the intentions behind Terminator Genisys, the result is a curious beast, riding roughshod over collective memories of the original (and its much-loved sequel) without the intellectual or emotional thrills to justify it.
The pitch was promising: a playful reworking of the original timeline, following Kyle Reese back to 1984 only to discover that everything has changed. Yet rather than examine the fall-out of this one change, suddenly it’s open season on the ‘Terminator: Greatest Hits’, with a new T-1000 randomly popping back so that everybody can do the lines, the walks, even the camera movements of James Cameron’s most iconic moments.
Enthusiasm quickly bests logic or sense, with a noticeable disconnect between the stylistic mimicry and the dramatic resonance. Director Alan Taylor should have been a smart hire – he’s the go-to guy for perfecting the house style on TV’s best shows – but why spend so long getting the aesthetic right when the performances lack any verisimilitude? Emilia Clarke misses Linda Hamilton’s hard-earned heroism as Sarah Connor. Jason Clarke gets only the briefest screen-time to essay John Connor’s dogged decency. Jai Courtney is miscast as Kyle Reese, especially since co-star Matt Smith (wasted in the role he gets) has the nervy mania required. As for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big comeback, he’s clearly coasting; the best casting is the startling CGI-assisted reprise of the ’84 vintage Arnie.
Bigger problems emerge when the film tries to innovate, hampered by the realisation that this franchise’s storyworld is so well mapped there’s little territory left to cover. Hence the running gag of postponing Judgment Day, or the continual, diminishing-returns reliance on the core trio of humans. In updating these key areas, Terminator Genisys suffers. This time, Judgment Day is scheduled for 2017. Setting the action in the present day was crucial to Terminators past; despite the topicality of recasting Skynet as a rogue operating system, the move to 2017 implies a lack of respect on the writers’ part.
Ditto the film’s treatment of a key character, an implausible ‘gotcha!’ that represents the modern blockbuster’s fan-based echo chamber at its worst. While the temptation to detonate the Connor/Connor/Reese family into new shapes is understandable, not only does the big twist betray decades of audience investment, but it was ruined by spoilerific pre-release marketing.
By its final act, you can feel Taylor trying to win over the audience with crowd-pleasing stunts and (often well-done) humour, largely revolving around mockery of a game Schwarzenegger. But to have this icon as the butt of the joke is a reminder of how formidable the character once was. Back then, he absolutely would not stop; now, we can but hope he does.
› TBC