Last Saturday, I expressed the view that the writers killed the franchise by sending too many Terminators to too many points in time. But truth be told, they’d fatally undermined the franchise before this. So far, it’s taken five reviews to analyze approximately twenty-five minutes of screen time. That should be enough to tell anybody that this film is awful. But thankfully, the pace begins to quicken after the writers limp through the setup, despite many remaining flaws.

For example, in one of the early scenes, a mysterious woman, “Sarah Connor,” is helping her pet Terminator Pops dispatch the original Terminator from the 1984 film. Connor shoots the T-800 in one of its power cells to kill it.

We can presume that Pops told her to do this, but she wouldn’t have had any prior practice targeting this power cell. In any event, in the third movie as well as in Terminator Salvation, we learn that these power cells blow up if they’re damaged. And their explosions aren’t exactly tiny.

So, assuming she could hit a power cell, she’d have to hit it just right; otherwise, she would destroy the surrounding area. I’m not a gun expert, but shooting a fifty-caliber round at a bomb seems like a bad idea. At the very least, she might’ve killed Pops.

For another thing, if Sarah and Pops already knew where the Terminator was going to be, then why did Pops fight it — I mean, apart from the fact that the fight made a teaser for the trailer? Why didn’t she just tell Pops to wait while she just shoots it? Otherwise, she’s risking her own T-800. Assuming the T-800 didn’t kill Pops, she might’ve shot Pops herself, instead of her target.

Meanwhile, what has happened to Kyle?

As for Kyle, instead of meeting one of the cops from the original film, he encounters a T-1000. Kyle runs from the T-1000 and breaks into the same clothing store as in the first movie. I’m not sure how the T-1000 found him, but it doesn’t really matter. Kyle continues to run, but then he bumps into a cop.

But now, what are police doing there? There hasn’t been time to report a break-in! In the previous film, the cops were there because they were already chasing Kyle, so it made sense for the cops to be in the store. But now the cops have no reason to be searching the building. The T-1000 wouldn’t hardly have called the cops for backup. And Kyle is only one man!

The T-1000 makes quick work of one of the cops and traps Kyle and the remaining officer. Then Sarah Connor crashes into the store with an ambulance! She opens the passenger door and screams, “Come with me if you want to live!”

This was cute, but… how did she know she should be there? It’s as if Pops watched the first movie and told Sarah all about it! Anyway, Kyle goes with them, and the trio evades the T-1000.

Kyle’s unhappy transformation

Once Kyle Reese is safe, he is transformed from a confident, well-meaning soldier into an idiot. Actually, he suffers from a profound (and surprising) lack of common sense throughout the film. The original Kyle Reese was resourceful, leaving the audience with the impression that — had he been given his normal ammunition to face the Terminator — he would’ve done just fine.

Kyle’s primary issue in the first movie was as practical one: how to kill a Terminator with 1984 weaponry.

This Kyle Reese seems convinced that Pops is a villain, despite his training Sarah Connor for the past eleven years. This suspicion persists until the very end when the T-800 and Kyle make amends. The audience is apparently supposed to think this is sweet, but again, the T-800 is a robot, and neither the robot nor the audience really cares if Kyle feels a sense of kinship with a can opener.

The trio drives to a nearby warehouse…   

During this drive, Pops shoots a piece of the T-1000 off of the ambulance. I wasn’t impressed by this scence —until the next scene, when Sarah makes it clear that she and Pops are baiting the T-1000 to get it into the warehouse.

Well, this creates two problems. Number one: How did the T-1000 find them if the piece of his machinery that was tracking his prey was blown off the ambulance? Number two: Why did Pops shoot said tracking device when the goal of the drive is to bait the T-1000 to the warehouse?

At any rate, the T-1000 shows up, and they fight. At one point, the T-1000 drops a piece of its liquid metal into the first T-800 that was killed, and this somehow wakes the machine up, despite the fact that the T-800’s power cell was destroyed. Not sure how that works, but it doesn’t really matter because Kyle needs something to do while Sarah sets up her trap.

The trap itself is very cool. She basically dumps acid on top of the T-1000, which begins to melt it, and eventually Pops arrives to hold the T-1000 under the acid to finish it off. It’s a good scene, probably the only decent scene in the movie.

After this, Sarah tells Kyle that they’ve been prepping for the Terminators’ — plural — arrival for the past decade. I’ve already discussed the issues about what people do and don’t know about the Terminators and, as before, the writers give the audience no answers. The closest thing to an explanation that I can come up with is that, at one point, Pops says it’s easy to understand multiple timelines by comprehending an algorithm, or some such nonsense. It’s just sciencey talk that’s meant to make it look like there’s an explanation for all of this.

On to 1997? Or 2017?

Then things become even more ridiculous. It turns out Pops and Sarah have built another time machine! They just need the chip from the T-800 to make it work. How does a chip from a Terminator relate to the function of a time machine? Don’t know! Moving on!

Sarah wants to travel to 1997 to stop Skynet. Why doesn’t she want to go back earlier instead, to convince whoever is building Skynet this time not to pursue that dream? Can’t say.

But Kyle disagrees with her anyway. He wants to go to 2017 because his visions, which we now learn are memories, tell him that Skynet is really called Genisys, and Genisys will be uploaded during that year. He and Sarah argue about this for a while, until Kyle is able to convince her that his memories are genuine. Then she agrees.

Why? It makes no sense to risk this trip! If Sarah is wrong and they go to 1997, then they have a decade’s worth of chances to stop Skynet before it starts! They have enough time to start an anti-Genisys lobby if they want. They don’t have to fire a shot. But if Kyle’s wrong, then the two of them would meet Christian Bale’s John Connor. Taking a risk on Kyle’s hypothetical memories is just stupid. There’s no benefit. Even if he’s right, all it means is that there’s less time to stop Skynet.

Fast forward

Anyway, Kyle and Sarah travel to 2017, while Pops is forced to stay behind and “take the long way,” because he was damaged during his fights with the other two Terminators.

For some reason, they land in the middle of the road, and Kyle is hit by a car. He’s fine, but I’m not sure why. How much control do the operators of these time machines actually have? Kyle and Sarah are arrested and taken to the hospital. Then they fake a fight, and Kyle grabs something to pick the lock of their cuffs.

At this point in the movie, the audience is introduced to an older gentleman played by JK Simmons, who was the cop Kyle ran into for no reason at the clothing store in 1984. His encounter with Kyle, Sarah, and the T-1000 has forced him to undergo a lifelong pursuit of time travelers.

He quickly realizes that Kyle and Sarah are from the future because of the strange sphere of blue light produced by the time machine, which was caught by some kind of camera when the two time travelers arrived. Not sure how he made that connection, but anyway. I won’t be spending much time on him because his whole job in this movie is to free Kyle and Sarah from their handcuffs when they get arrested the second time.

As for Sarah and Kyle, they uncuff themselves, and then someone unexpected appears in their hospital room — John Connor.

This leads to the single worst decision in the entire movie, and I’ll cover that next Saturday.

Here’s what I have written so far on Terminator Genisys (2015):

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 1: What was the point? When filming a sequel, it’s important to draw on the previous story, to keep the viewer emotionally invested in the characters. Genisys completely ignores everything set up in Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3 and assassinates John’s character, reducing the emotional stakes.

Terminator Genisys Review Part 2: A colossal monster mash The writers wanted the recreated scenes to be fond “memory berries” for the audience but they ran into problems setting them up properly.
Terminator Genisys is one of those movies where that create a growing sense of unease that viewers can’t quite put a finger on.

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 3: Genisys’ fatal flaw The film was seen in the industry as so bad that another sequel was proposed that effectively wiped its timeline from the canon. A critical plot decision — to give Skynet a key piece of information — makes Skynet’s Terminator strategy seem incoherent.

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 4: The fatal flaw, revisited. Genisys didn’t perform well but it makes a good illustration of the issues science fiction writers face. I don’t know if the inconsistencies were enough to convince the powers that be in Hollywood to try to follow up with an entirely different sequel but viewers tuned out.

and

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 5: Too many Terminators in here! The chaos created by tampering with the timeline of the franchise continues. The problem with resetting the timeline is that the audience’s emotional stake in the outcome necessarily diminishes when no events are permanent.