TERMINATOR GENISYS (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                          The slight improvement I saw in the fourth TERMINATOR film, TERMINATOR SALVATION, was not maintained when the franchise shifted to a new production company. The creators hired by that company then sought to extend the already muddled mythology into the idea of alternate timelines, which had been implied in the third movie in the series. This resulted in a summer blockbuster that made a lot of money-- at least partly due to Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to the role of "T-800 As Protector" that had resonated so well with nineties audiences-- but GENISYS also increased the franchise's reputation for being less a meditation on the evils of technology and more a funhouse mirror designed mostly to distract and disconcert.                                                                                     

In fairness, part of the attraction of JUDGMENT DAY was that it reworked the pitiless, implacable image of the original Terminator into an almost-human protector to Young John Connor. The change of the formerly helpless Sarah Connor into a skilled master of combat was almost as extreme, but in that reworking, James Cameron managed to give emotional depth to his extension. Both the third and fourth films failed to formulate strong storylines, but they still had occasional flashes of said depth. GENISYS is the first TERMINATOR iteration I found to be almost completely without any emotional intensity, even though one of its key re-imaginings is that, for some reason never clarified, a T-800 (Schwarzenegger) travels back to the era when Sarah was a young girl and becomes her de factor father from then on (she calls him "Pops") after a T-1000 kills Sarah's parents.                                                                                 

   Possibly there was some explanation for this anomaly that was lost in the shuffle, but in the future-world of Grownup John Connor (Jai Courtney), the events of the first TERMINATOR transpire just mostly as expected. But just before Kyle Reece (Jason Clarke) begins his time-trip, John Connor is attacked by an entity from the almost defeated Skynet. Somehow this creates an alternate timeline for time-traveler Reece, so that he journeys to the timeline where Grownup Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) has been raised by "Pops" to become a gun-toting badass. This Sarah is fully aware that she's supposed to mate with Kyle to produce John, but all of those emotional storms are lost when John, now mutated into some sort of Nano-Terminator, also travels to the time when the Terminating Trio are attempting to nullify Skynet-- although now that time is 2017, and Skynet is part of Genisys, a sort of glorified Iphone network.                 

The many convolutions of the plot don't matter given that the film has no meaningful center. The "man is too dependent on machines" trope gets dusted off for another outing, and eventually, even in the midst of Things Blowing Up Good, Kyle and Sarah more or less get together. The two (unrelated) Clarkes do as well as they can with these limited roles, but ostensibly GENISYS was not a happy shoot, so that experience may have colored their performances. Arnold gets a fair number of decent lines, but nothing as memorable as his work in T2, while Courtney makes a bland villain. J.K. Simmons, playing an older version of a minor character from the 1984 film, provides a few light moments. Despite good box office, GENISYS failed to generate further iterations of this timeline and the franchise was again rebooted to 2019's DARK FATE, which I have not yet seen but for which I don't have high expectations.