Terminator Genisys: A Lazy Product of its Time

One mistake we as the human race repeatedly make is thinking that our general culturally-held worldview is the perfect one that will lead us to glorious enlightenment. In 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace was famously quoted as saying, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" And while it's true that segregation had been the norm since around the end of the Civil War, it was outlawed just over a year later in 1964, a long way short of "forever." Around the turn of the 2020s, I noticed a surge in a worldview known as political correctness. The perception this belief system painted was that most everyone believed in its stated progressiveness, but not even five years later, the backlash to this wokeness, as some on both sides would call it, is one of the most thorough and fierce I've ever seen. Today, some of us would say we know everything there is worth knowing about morality. But tomorrow, it's out with the old and in with the new, and our oh-so-thorough enlightened state will only last until someone takes off the rose-tinted glasses. 2015's Terminator Genisys made the mistake of jumping to some perceived populist opinions about how the world works in the mistaken belief that they could substitute for the most basic of story-writing principles, and not even ten years later, its attempted progressiveness has ironically trapped it in the past—that and the fact that it's simply not a well-written movie in almost any way.

Genisys tries to function as one big what-if scenario. In essence, it's about the creation of an alternate timeline parallel to the original 1984 movie after a Resistance time jump gone haywire, and I have mixed feelings about this premise that lean into the negative. In theory, this reimagining could be an intriguing experiment, but in execution, it struggles with unoriginality bordering on creative vapidness. Genisys plays like a greatest hits of other Terminator films, and not in a good way, managing to often feel less like a genuine position-holder in the franchise and more like one of those fan fictions you'd make up with a friend on free time. Still, I liked the retro cinematography and color grading of the sequences set in the 80s, a visual style that was an intentional near-perfect emulation of the original. The ship went down, but at least the band kept playing.

As for my biggest problem with the very problem-ridden Genisys, it would have to be its reimagining of Sarah Connor. Unlike ninety percent of moviegoers out there, I'm perfectly fine with a new interpretation of a classic character as long as said reimagining is a plan rather than a reaction by the filmmakers - see Luke Skywalker in the contentious The Last Jedi. But to put it bluntly, Sarah is just a jerk in Genisys. I was very turned off by a character I was supposed to care about due to her somewhat uncomplicated and admittedly grating personality. I understand that the writers and director of Genisys were reaching for the much-discussed strong woman approach. Still, I hated how needlessly mean Sarah was to everybody when she could have been doing something useful, such as finding a personality. Statements alone don't make for good characters or stories, and Genisys didn't get the memo.

Most of this movie is extremely exposition-heavy, as if there were no other way to tell a story. The narrative flow of Genisys is an utterly graceless experiment on every level, reliant on clunky, uneven, and relentlessly information-based dialogue to do just about anything. Granted, there's a fleeting silver lining to all of this. Some of its story features a countdown to some flavor of a cataclysm all too familiar in the world of Terminator, and so even if its ways to get to zero are all too lazy, Genisys is nonetheless counting down towards something important, a feature that kept me watching it when I frankly just wanted to walk away. Spoiler alert, but it's a shame that it's not counting toward anything worthwhile.

Terminator Genisys is the weakest Terminator movie I've seen so far by a decent margin, even if it does play with some interesting ideas. It behaves less like a potentially potent what-if question and more like a subjective activist with a social bone to pick playing the Mad Libs version of Terminator. If movies are people, then Genisys is the edgy teenager yelling, "It's not a phase, Mom!" To get up on my soapbox, Genisys wanted to be culturally relevant, and so it banked on a social movement it thought would last a lifetime. And so, barely a decade later, its provocative ideas and their poor representation have both aged like milk. Like many other bad movies, Genisys makes too many statements, asks too few questions, and suffers from an inevitable and suffocating shallowness because of it. Its unoriginality and gracelessness don't do it any favors, but I'll nevertheless remember its ill-advised attempts at elevating lazy stereotypes over genuine personability more.

After reading all of my thoughts, this might surprise you, but I don't really like talking about contentious social or political issues in my reviews or real life. I worry I may get dragged back into a lifestyle I spent a long time trying to escape. But truth be told, Genisys wasn't competent enough to give me anything else worth discussing.

Terminator Genisys - 3/10

Luke 14:11