2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for relentless sci-fi violence and gunplay, partial nudity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.3.15
Not since the original five-cycle Planet of the Apes films, between 1968 and ’73, has a franchise attempted to
cycle itself so intricately. Terminator scripters Laeta Kalogridis and
Patrick Lussier deserve credit for an ambitious attempt here, tackling multiple
time periods — and alternate timeline realities — in an effort to slot this
newest entry into What Has Gone Before, while also (more or less) re-telling
the whole wild ’n’ crazy story from the beginning.
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| Surrounded by an impressive cache of military weaponry they'll never get to use, our heroes — from left, Sarah (Emilia Clarke), "Pops" (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Kyle (Jai Courtney) — concoct a half-baked scheme to destroy an evil master computer complex before it can wreak havoc on the entire world. |
Sadly — and as often is the case,
with sloppy time travel sagas — things get so convoluted that the result
becomes confusing and, ultimately, pointless. The situation clearly has gotten
out of hand when characters spend the entire third act explaining each new
twist to each other (and, by extension, to us). Rarely has a film indulged in
so much blatant, tedious said-bookism.
Part of the problem is the
labyrinthine degree to which this franchise has been expanded (often not for
the better) by outside parties, most notably extended story arcs by six
different comic book publishers, dating back to 1988. No single new film could
satisfy a mythos that has grown so convoluted.
On top of which, director Alan
Taylor has absolutely no sense of pacing. He simply yanks his cast from one deafening
CGI action scene to the next, with no attempt to build suspense or inject any
sense of actual drama. The result is massive, messy and noisy: a 125-minute
cartoon that has none of the heart — or intelligence — that made director James
Cameron’s first two films so memorable, back in 1984 and ’91.
This is simply a pinball machine,
with its little spheres — our heroes — whacked and bounced from one crazed
menace to another, somehow (miraculously!) surviving each encounter, physical
laws and human frailty be damned.
That said, this new big-screen Terminator chapter
— the fifth — does have one secret weapon: the same bright, shining star who
also highlighted Cameron’s entries: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Far from the
over-the-hill relic that many fans may have feared, the big guy owns this film.
He’s well employed, granted some droll one-liners and sight gags, and has solid
camera presence.
On top of which, Kalogridis and
Lussier come up with a genuinely clever explanation for why Schwarzenegger’s
good-guy T-800 android has aged so much, since its first appearance in 1991.
So ... take a deep breath, and
pay attention. Ready?
In the devastated, post-apocalyptic
landscape of an Earth ruined by the AI Skynet and its massive army of Terminator
soldiers, the human resistance led by John Connor (Jason Clarke) and his best
friend Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) mount a final assault to defeat their evil
computer overlord once and for all. The sortie appears successful, but Skynet
pulls a last-minute Hail Mary play: John and the others discover a time
machine, which has been used to send a humanoid Terminator (the original one, I
think) back in time to 1984, tasked with killing John’s mother, Sarah, so that
he’ll never be born to lead the resistance.
John therefore uses the time machine
to send Kyle back as well, to protect his own existence. All seems well — we’ve
seen all this before, after a fashion — until the final second before Kyle
winks out, as he sees something attack John.
Now in the Los Angeles of 1984, that
original humanoid Terminator makes his dramatic entrance — a sequence more or
less re-created from the first film — with an eerie sense of déjà vu, thanks to
28-year-old bodybuilder Brett Azar, his face digitally replaced by
Schwarzenegger’s younger features. But before this Terminator can casually kill
his first innocent bystanders, he’s stopped (albeit not without effort) by Schwarzenegger’s
circa 1991 (good guy) T-800, with an assault weapon assist from ... Sarah
Connor (Emilia Clarke).
But wait, I hear you cry. That’s
not the way it happened!
No kidding. And Kalogridis and
Lussier have only gotten started.
Kyle, meanwhile, has problems of
his own. His arrival has been anticipated by the way-creepy, liquid metal
T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) that menaced Sarah and John’s adolescent self in the
1991 film. By the time Kyle finally catches up to Sarah, he finds her far from
the helpless waitress he was expecting; she’s already a hardened fighter,
having been orphaned at age 9 by that same T-1000 (in the late 1960s?) and
rescued by Schwarzenegger’s good-guy Terminator. They’ve been fleeing the
T-1000 ever since.
She calls her unlikely guardian
Pops. Kyle has trouble adjusting to that, just as he questions the notion of a
benevolent Terminator. This is what they do, he cautions Sarah; they
infiltrate. How do you know he won’t suddenly turn on us?
(Well, because he’s good-guy
Arnie, silly boy ... but Sarah can’t break the fourth wall to explain that.)
Staying ahead of the relentless
T-1000 while adjusting to the unexpected dynamic of his new companions is bad
enough, but Kyle has other issues: a divergent memory stream of himself, as a
boy, living in impossibly peaceful surroundings. This alternate-reality younger
self is glimpsed during a birthday party, as he excitedly receives a smart
phone mere days before the worldwide unveiling of a highly anticipated,
cloud-like app, dubbed Genisys.
At the same time, Kyle remembers
his younger self repeatedly warning that Skynet and Genisys are one and the
same.
At which point, we unveil another
time machine, which sends Sarah and Kyle forward to 2017 San Francisco, a mere
two days before Genisys — dubbed, with deliberate irony, the world’s next
killer app — goes online.
This is welcome social commentary
on the script’s part. It’s easy to imagine worshipful Apple acolytes in 2017’s
one billion people, worldwide, who eagerly anticipate the Genisys app. Our
world today is one in which Cameron’s imagined Skynet never needs to “break
free,” because we all eagerly wait in line for the next software and hardware
upgrades, blithely surrendering privacy, freedom and personal information along
the way.
That’s actually pretty damn disturbing,
and a better film could have done great things with that unsettling bit of
real-world paranoia. Alas, it’s merely a sidebar thread on which to hang yet
more gun battles and destructive chases. You thought Dwayne Johnson’s speedboat
defied basic physics, while climbing the tsunami wave in last month’s San Andreas? Wait’ll you see what Kyle’s helicopter can do in this flick.
We also have to question the
basic logic of Kyle and Sarah’s decision to arrive in 2017, giving themselves
two short days in which to prevent Genisys/Skynet from going online and
initiating the apocalypse that created Kyle’s future. Since they know what’ll
eventually happen, wouldn’t it be more logical to arrive a year or two early, to
covertly sabotage this here, perhaps arrange a tragic “accident” for that
scientist there, in order to more efficiently — and safely — achieve the same
goal?
But no; this film doesn’t know
from logic or common sense. When in doubt, blow up something else. Taylor and
his writers even squander resources. We’re supposed to be impressed by the
weapons that Pops has stockpiled, while awaiting Kyle and Sarah’s return in
2017; it’s a massive armory ... and it never gets used. So the point of all
that lethal hardware was what, precisely?
Taylor gets a bit of mileage from
the prickly Pops/Kyle dynamic, with Schwarzenegger and Courtney trading
glowering glances at each other. Taylor is less successful with the Kyle/Sarah
relationship, particularly since the script requires the former to fall in love
with the latter in less than two days, amid all their perilous escapades.
Courtney couldn’t sell that line if his life depended on it, and matters aren’t
helped by the zero chemistry he shares with Clarke.
Actually, Courtney is rather
bland at the best of times, and not all that involving as a heroic character. The
same can be said of Jason Clarke, who was equally unconvincing as the human
good guy in last year’s re-booted Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. He simply
can’t play “fantastic”; his inherent smugness is much better used in straight
dramas such as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Zero Dark Thirty.
Emilia Clarke, recognized as
Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s Game of Thrones, can’t shake the fact that her
5-foot-2 frame looks ill-equipped to handle the bad-ass behavior demanded of
Sarah. Frankly, the very thought is unintentionally comical. (In great
contrast, Linda Hamilton was absolutely believable as the resourceful Sarah in
Cameron’s two films, particularly when she bulked up for the second one.)
That said, Clarke deserves credit
for trying; she does her best with the often ludicrous dialogue supplied by
Kalogridis and Lussier.
The always enjoyable J.K. Simmons
has a bewildering role as O’Brien, a San Francisco cop who, having encountered
Kyle in L.A. in 1984, seems to have figured out at least some of what’s going
on (which puts him ahead of the rest of us). But this role is under-written and
utterly pointless; O’Brien doesn’t accomplish anything useful.
Even so, Simmons is treated far
better than Courtney B. Vance and Dayo Okeniyi, whose eye-blink appearances as
Genisys co-creators Miles and Danny Dyson are the epitome of token
afterthoughts.
Matt Smith, on the other hand, is
deliciously malevolent in a key supporting performance: quite a switch from his
larkish work as the 11th Doctor Who.
As is true of so many of today’s
mayhem-heavy, script-poor, CGI-enhanced action epics, this newest Terminator quickly becomes boring, and eventually turns into a tedious slog. We’ve no
reason to care about any of these characters — except, perhaps, for Arnie’s
Pops — and the whole production seems as slapdash as Kyle and Sarah’s “plan” to
defeat Skynet in 2017.
On top of which, the
post-production (i.e. fake) 3D effects are worthless; as often is the case,
this “enhancement” further darkens cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau’s already
gloomy camerawork. Don’t waste your money.
In fact, you’d be better off
skipping this film entirely. Taylor may have been hot stuff on TV, having
helmed multiple episodes of The Sopranos, Mad Men and the aforementioned Game of Thrones, but he hasn’t the faintest idea how to handle this
big-screen franchise.
Hasta la vista, baby.
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