Terminator: Genisys is the story of how Skynet decided it was better to destroy the world by going back in time (this time starting out as the Sega Genesis) and influencing a bunch of people to destroy the Terminator series in one fell blow. Unfortunately, the nearly omniscient AI somehow forgot that it couldn't do anything as an operating system for phones, rendering it powerless. Luckily for humanity, Bill and Ted were able to bring world peace shortly thereafter through the power of their music.
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| The new face of the end of the world. |
As silly as my synopsis may seem, it actually makes more sense than the movie itself. Genisys starts out near the end of the human/robot war. We see a heavily scarred John Connor arrive at the Skynet headquarters just shortly after the Terminator was sent back in time to kill his mother (Connor's mother, not the Terminator's mother). An oddly buff Kyle Reese (I am slightly comforted by the fact that protein shake production is unaffected by the nuclear apocalypse) volunteers to go back in time, while also inadvertently revealing that he has a well-worn picture of Sarah Connor in his wallet. Apparently unfazed by that, or just realizing that he still needs to send Reese back no matter how creepy, Connor agrees.
Reese arrives in 1984 and is pretty much immediately attacked by the T-1000 (Liquid metal Terminator). Right after that, Sarah Connor shows up in an armored truck to make sure that the movie can immediately begin fulfilling its obligatory quota of one-liners from previous films. We are also treated to a scene of the original Terminator (ironically played by a computer) fighting an older and digitally buffed up Terminator (ironically played by Schwarzenegger).
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| Probably not what you saw in the theater. |
Sarah Connor reveals to Reese that the time he was sent back to is different from the one that he would have seen from all of the other Terminator films. HOW Connor was aware that her timeline was different from the original timeline is something that is never really explained. Sarah recounts on how the T-1000 was sent back to kill her when she was just 9 years old, at which point the Arnoldinator (T-800) was sent back to rescue her. After scaring the T-1000 off, the Arnoldinator spends the next 10 years raising Sarah Connor to be a child soldier. The T-1000 apparently spent those same 10 years just bumming around the world waiting for Reese to show up, or else it was just working as a police officer.
Reese has multiple hallucinations about an alternate past that he had where he was given the budget version of the iPad that ran on Genisys. Realizing that nothing makes sense, Reese decides that Genisys is now the new Skynet and is determined to travel to the year 2014 so that he can stop it from being released. Luckily for the plot, the Arnoldinator was sent back in time knowing how to build a time machine, which allows us to skip the 30 years it would have normally taken.
Due to his synthetic skin being damaged, the Arnoldinator is forced to just sit around for 30 years waiting (although it is explained that he worked in construction for a part of that time). Reese and Sarah suddenly appear in the middle of a highway, escaping relatively unharmed despite being hit by a speeding vehicle while they are completely naked. Unfortunately for them, the Arnoldinator is late in picking them up (despite having 30 years to prepare for it).
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| Even Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, was able to be on time! |
It's at this point that the plot decides that making sense is for chumps. John Connor shows up and is quickly revealed to be a Terminator. This would have been an interesting and surprising plot twist, if it weren't for the fact that the entire movie was spoiled by its own trailers. Connor explains that shortly after Reese was sent back in time, Doctor Who showed up and turned him into a Terminator. He was then tasked with going back in time and protecting the development of the Genisys operation system, because apparently Skynet knew about the new timeline despite having no way of connecting to it or even being aware of it.
The movie then descends into your typical action movie with the script writers being very careful that it was liberally sprinkled with quotes from the previous movies. It is revealed that the same company responsible for developing and releasing the Genisys operation system were also finishing up their own time machine as well as designing the liquid terminator. Apparently they decided that the Genisys system was more important, though, even if all it did was act as a simple internet cloud storage system.
The movie ends on a whimper, with the only sacrifice in the entire film having been reduced to nothing. The gang go to traumatize a young Kyle Reese so that his alternate future self would remember that Genisys was the danger when he traveled to the alternate past timeline. Oh, and John Connor (the person the previous 4 movies were centered on keeping alive) was killed by his mother, father, and Arnoldinator grandfather. However, it seems like the movie was completely fine in skipping over that little fact.
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| Just don't worry about it. |
Time travel has been done before to reboot a series. The Star Trek movies made the interesting choice of going to an alternate universe to excuse discrepancies between the movies and the original show. "Days of Future Past", the X-Men film, used time travel in order to remove the crappy films from the timeline. However, Genisys seems determined to remove EVERY MOVIE from the official timeline, while counting on the fact that you watched all of them. As you watch this movie, just remember that Terminator 1 and Terminator 2 never happened for these characters. Instead, the creators of the movie seem to operate on the idea that if you cram everything that was loved about those two movies into a single movie, it will be better than those two movies. Hence why we have a ton of Terminators being thrown into a time machine willy-nilly.
The original Terminator (although plagiarized) presented a simple story about an unstoppable killing machine trying to kill Sarah Connor. It presented the interesting paradox of how John Connor would have never been born if Skynet had never sent a Terminator back in time to kill his mother (since Kyle Reese would have never been sent back to save her, and also accidentally impregnate her). Rather than distracting from the plot, the Terminator Paradox added to the complexity of the characters trying to alter future events they already KNOW happened. Genisys seems to think that time travel isn't complicated and therefore is just a vehicle for the plot. It ignore the relatively rich nuances of its predecessors in favor of plot twists it spoils in its own trailers and lots of explosions.
Really, the only good thing to come out of this movie is the idea of the Terminator raising Sarah Connor from the ages of 9 to 19. Frankly, the idea of a sitcom showing the struggles of the Terminator raising a teenage Sarah Connor is fantastic. There could be tons of episodes that would be delightfully funny. There could be an episode where Sarah accidentally volunteers to help someone at the same time they had agreed to go on a date with their high school crush, and so would sneakily use the Arnoldinator's time machine to be in two places at once. There could be an attractive single woman living nearby who constantly tries to flirt with the Arnoldinator, who never catching onto any of her hints since he's a cold-blooded killing machine. The T-1000 could even come up with a variety of harebrained schemes to kill Sarah Connor, thereby filling the annoying neighbor slot. You could have another episode here Sarah agrees to help out with a bake sale, but then forgets about it, which then forces the Arnoldinator to help bakes hundreds of sugar cookies at the last minute. This entire idea could be a potential goldmine! You could call it "Leave it to Terminator" or "I Dream of Skynet".
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| Come on! We all want this. |
On a side note, given how Reese lived in a post-apocalyptic world and Sarah was raised by a robotic-acting man acting as a robotic killing machine, I guess it explains why Reese and Sarah didn't act like real human beings. Honestly, it would have been a better twist if it had turned out that they were ALSO Terminators and had never realized it. Maybe EVERYONE in the movie was a Terminator.
