The writers seem to have run out of ideas for new Terminators. They’re recycling the concept and adding new abilities — without thinking them through.
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The actors are quite good and if their performances seemed canned at times, I blame the dialogue. They can’t draw blood from a stone.
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I have warned about the perils of using time travel in storytelling. This movie is a prime example of the problems I was talking about.
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Deprived of the natural motivations they started the story with, the characters become carbon cutouts of clichés that people have seen over and over again.
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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.
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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.
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Curiously, once Kyle Reese is safe, he is transformed from a confident, well-meaning soldier into an idiot with a surprising lack of common sense.
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The problem with resetting the timeline is that the audience’s emotional stake in the outcome necessarily diminishes when no events are permanent.
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I don’t know if the inconsistencies were enough to convince the powers that be in Hollywood to try to make an entirely different sequel but viewers tuned out.
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A critical plot decision — to give Skynet a key piece of information — makes Skynet’s Terminator strategy seem incoherent.
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Terminator Genisys is one of those movies where that create a growing sense of unease that viewers can’t quite put a finger on.
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Genisys completely ignores everything set up in Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3 and assassinates John’s character, reducing the emotional stakes.
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A real problem in cinema is that bad story writing is often treated as successful because it is wafted along by the hype from a previous film in the series.
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Science fiction is closer to comedy than tragedy so a device like this — technically, a retcon — is handy and the writers were smart to use it.
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Although the Resistance blows up Skynet’s headquarters, the success of their mission turns on saving badly wounded John.
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This film makes clear that the machines are the enemy because they are cold, and there is something special about being human.
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The dilemma is well handled because John Connor is genuinely confused and trying to understand the situation.
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By the end of the movie the viewer briefly sees John become something of a mentor, if not an outright father figure, for his father Kyle.
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It’s fine to play with the idea of fate in a time travel tale, but the writer must work within the set-up given by the prior stories.
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The problem with time travel stories is that dropped plot points and forgotten predictions add up and new additions to the story forget the older ones.
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