Last Saturday, we discussed looked at the reasons why making Sarah’s son John Connor the villain of the piece was a screenwriting mistake. Worse than the villain, he has become a Terminator.

It’s difficult to describe the kind of Terminator John has become. It’s frankly very confusing. To keep it simple, I’m going to call him a “vampire robot” because I can’t think of another way to put it.

Basically, Skynet infected John with a bunch of microscopic nanobots that changed him at the cellular level. For some reason, robot John still has all of John’s memories. But at the same time, he isn’t John. Essentially, John was infected by a robot who turned him into a robot, as if becoming something mechanical was a kind of plague. That’s why I chose the term vampire robot.

The writers could’ve played with this idea, which is actually very creative. But they didn’t, and I’m not sure why. But I do have a theory. This isn’t only a terrible movie; it’s an odd one.

Why it seems like an odd movie, not just a bad one

There are hints of good ideas behind Genisys. As I said last Saturday, there was a way to make John Connor work as the villain. To be fair, I probably would still have hated it. The story setup to play with the Evil Child archetype was available because Sarah and Kyle, the parents of John Connor, were the focus of the movie.

All the writers needed to do was have John work with his parents throughout the film. He would do things that unsettled Sarah and Kyle but ultimately keep their trust until the climax, when he could betray them and join Skynet. And once that betrayal was complete, Skynet could explain what it had done to John and have him threaten to turn Sarah and Kyle into machines before they can stop Judgment Day. Then Pops could save Sarah and Kyle at the eleventh hour, and the three of them could defeat John and Skynet.

Were the writers too focused on their own worldview?

Really, the story writes itself if it is handled that way, so why didn’t they take advantage of the opportunities? I think it was because they were more focused on their worldview. They take great pains to make Kyle seem incompetent, even though they slow down the story that way. They have him challenge Pops at random times and have arguments with Sarah about Pops at inappropriate moments. At one point, Pops can’t rescue Kyle and Sarah when they reach 2017 because the two of them land in the middle of traffic. This prompts Kyle to declare that Pops has betrayed them.

This simply didn’t fit. There is also another awkward moment when Kyle and Pops enter into a juvenile contest where they try to see who can load the most bullets into their magazines, which is weird because the robot is obviously going to win. And why would Kyle feel like his manhood is being threatened by a can opener? It’s all very strange.

A vaudeville villain

It’s clear that this version of John is going to be the villain from the start. Jason Clarke’s mannerisms throughout the film make it very obvious he’s the bad guy. He grins slightly when he tasers two cops and is far too soft-spoken at times. The audience is meant to feel uncomfortable around him. I think this was by design.

Clarke is a fine actor, but— although he tries to behave like a hero at the beginning of the film— as a viewer, I immediately didn’t trust him. I felt like the soldier was an act, but the robot was the real John. I hesitate to blame Clarke for this because I0 think the problem was the interactions between John and Kyle. A hero is supposed to be somber, weighed down by his decisions, wracked with guilt at times. But Clarke’s version of John is too wry, perhaps snarky.

Some could argue that this is because John and Kyle are friends. But when John sends Kyle into the past, knowing that Kyle is going to die, the audience sees no guilt from John. There is a moment when John says he feels like he has no choice, but that’s the end of it.

Another moment that I liked—but it still felt off—was when John tells Kyle that the way he knows what’s going to happen is that he cheats. It’s a decent analogy for relying on his mother’s recordings; however, this moment of candor isn’t contrasted with a somber hero but comes from a confident— perhaps overconfident— general who is about to lose a war.

The writers don’t make John melodramatic about his confidence or flaws or whatever they were trying to portray, but Clarke’s performance still left me feeling like something was wrong. I suspect that the reason it felt so inconsistent with his hero persona is that the writers wanted to portray his heroic nature as an illusion. But they didn’t want to tag the character with that at the beginning of the movie.

In short, the writers hated John but knew the audience loved him, so they tried to hide their attitude; however, their contempt leaked into the script. Those who choose to subject themselves to this trash heap of a movie should watch the earliest scenes between John and Kyle and see if they spot any hints of this hatred.

Furthermore, another plot point that should’ve been evident but was wholly ignored was that John Connor never fights his programming. I can’t think of a better way to build tension for the audience, but the writers don’t even show the robotic John Connor pretending to fight his programming. In this movie, John Connor, the vampire robot, is a vaudeville villain and stays that way.

Saving Sarah Connor

There is also some strange dialogue between Kyle and John at the beginning of the film, where the word “save,” that is, we’ve got to save Sarah Connor, is used a little too often and with a certain emphasis that borders on the sarcastic. The repetition of this word made me suspect that Terminator Genisys is infected with social commentary. The repetition seems to imply something about men being too prideful because they think it’s their job to “save” women.

Lastly, there’s some canned dialogue from Sarah Connor about her wanting to choose her own fate when it comes to men. It seems she’s more angry about the fact that she fell in love with Kyle Reese in another timeline than she is about the robots taking over the world. The writers do offset this dialogue later by making her true motivation to save Kyle Reese by spurning him. But her choice of words in the beginning of the movie is the standard angsty teen terminology.

I think the reason for all of this is because the writers wanted to make it very clear that this time Sarah Connor is the hero. But this is redundant because Sarah Connor has always been a hero. The best movie in this series centers around her saving her son.

The writers seem to think that by undermining John’s character, they elevate Sarah to the role of protagonist, but save for Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3, she’s always been a protagonist. Even in the latter two films, she’s the one either supplying the weapons or the information. John can’t do what he does without her help.

Apparently, that’s not good enough. Sarah has to be a “strong” woman. But in this movie, the idea of a “strong woman” seems to require Sarah Connor to reject her role as a mother. This is done by using stilted dialogue and by making John Connor evil. And when he wasn’t evil, he was incompetent. All this justifies her not caring about John when she realizes that he is a villain.

But the story problem is that the role of a mother is tied to her motivation as a character. The writers can’t separate the two. So, for this reason, although people have criticized Emilia Clarke as miscast in the role of Sarah Connor, I don’t think she’s the problem. Nor do I think Jason Clarke is the problem. It’s the whole setup of the movie. Sarah Connor is motivated by her desire to be a mother. John is driven to live up to his mother’s expectations. Without these motivations, the characters cease to be who they are and become carbon cutouts of clichés that people have seen over and over again. See you next Saturday for the final segment of this extended review.

Here’s last Saturday’s segment of my extended review of Genisys:

Terminator Genisys Review Part 8: The Evil Child Murders the Film The screenwriters tried to adapt the Evil Child theme from horror films without allowing enough time to build the needed suspense. Making John Connor a villain also removes Sarah’s motivation to fight Skynet. Without that, she’s just another generic tough girl fighting an army of robots.

The earlier columns I have written on Terminator Genisys (2015) are all linked here:

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 7: Now John Connor is the Bad Hat. Why don’t Hollywood screenwriters understand the importance of what the audience thinks is at stake? The way writers make fantasy engaging — and sci-fi is a form of fantasy — is by anchoring the hard-to-grasp concepts with familiar ideas.