If you loved the Terminator franchise but always wished that they were directed by Michael Bay, Terminator Genisys is for you! More explosions, less plot, and piles of cheesy dialog, Terminator Genisys will leave you on the edge of your seat waiting for the lights to come on so you can leave.
Terminator Genisys… where to start. If you are not familiar with the Terminator franchise, get ready to get lost in the weeds. Just like all Terminator movies this one starts with a Terminator being sent back in time to kill Sarah Conner, which in turn will prevent the birth of John Conner, the leader of the rebellion. The twist in this movie is that someone sent the Terminator (T-800) to protect Sarah as a child so the timeline has changed. The old Arnold is waiting for its younger self and kills him immediately basically changing the events of the first movie. From there all of the timeline is different and Kyle Reese is sent back to protect Sarah, destroy Skynet, and prevent the future nuclear holocaust.
Im going to start with what I didn’t like; the story is too complicated for casual fans, the action is pretty dull, and the dialog is pretty cheesy.
For a casual fan the story weaves in and out of old movies as well as new concepts and becomes a cluster fuck on plot points and ret-cons. This movie should have some amazing action scenes but instead it is a lot of fist fights, convenient traps and storm trooper shooting. The Terminator fights: himself, a T-1000, a totally new type of Terminator along with the random henchman but all of the fights get whitewashed in a series of fast cuts and identical choreography. The movie had a great opportunity to show 3 pretty different fight scenes and instead they just gave us the same fight 3 times over. Finally, a Terminator movie is no stranger to cheesy dialog and one-liners are expected but if it’s not Arnold delivering those lines the dialog becomes pretty bad.
With all that being said I did have SOME fun in this movie and I wasn’t angry at the end like the Transformers movies. I have no interest in seeing this again and I definitely don’t want to see a sequel but it may be worth skipping around to see old Arnold punch his way through the bad guys.
My Score: Catch it on Cable