Terminating the Franchise: Terminator Genisys

Everything I’ve seen regarding this new remakequel/preboot/whatever the hell it’s supposed to be is utterly atrocious. First it was the casting. Arnold is back… old, but still some remote potential and yes I can see a Terminator getting old...maybe, but when they said he’s playing ‘father figure’ to Sarah Connor in yet another terrible timeline alteration, I think I was ready to say enough right there. Emilia Clarke isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but doing a prequel about Sarah Connor makes no sense. We don’t need to see 16 year old Sarah before she gets a job as a waitress, but, oh, you say you’re sending more Terminators back in time before that?  We’ve seen that already, in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I’ve seen enough Terminator Father Figures and Connors growing up. Enough of that shit already. The guy they cast to play Kyle Reese is the worst thing about this movie for me with all of its foolishness. They have two actors still young, and still capable of playing Reese who already played him… nope, we’re not going to see Christian Bale play John Connor either. I’d have rather seen Thomas Dekker reprise his role than the actor they picked because I just don’t see it at all, it’s absurd. I don’t even want to know why Doctor Who is in this movie.

Then we see the promotional photos, and it looks like this is some sort of parody movie. Arnold just looks ridiculous, and I don’t even want to know why they’re carrying Super-Soakers and shooting at the ground and screaming. The title is dumb, then they changed it to simply spell it differently? Nothing about this Terminator movie is good, it’s worse, it’s fucking insulting.

Remember that Terminator Salvation trailer when it came out? Wow, it didn’t live up to that entirely, but it wasn’t the worst movie ever made. This Genisys looks like the worst movie ever made. There are several stories they could have and should have told other than this garbage. The most obvious story which I believe everybody has been waiting to see since the first movie is what happens in 2029? What about the big future war? A giant epic futuristic robot war with all the imagery and all the big flying machines and the desperate attempt to save the past and the future? Nope. We get this shit.

I’ve been told that “everybody” hated Terminator Salvation. I didn’t. I didn’t think it was terrible, and while it wasn’t ‘great’ and could have been a lot better, it didn’t sink it for me. I liked the casting, I didn’t care for the Marcus storyline, but the rest was pretty decent in my opinion and I thought the effects and action were all pretty good. There was supposed to be three of those with Christian Bale, or at least three in a series that McG wanted to do. He could have improved… we’ll never know now, and now we’re getting something that looks so much like shit, it makes Terminator 3 seem like the quality of ALIENS. 

There’s so many better things they could have done with this, they could have made a sequel to Terminator Salvation and showed us the big future war. They could have given us the answer to the Sarah Connor Chronicles and tied the series, Salvation and the other films all together. They should have gotten the actors who played the people previously (any of them, there’s a lot to choose from for Christ sakes, every film is a whole new set of actors).  I would have even accepted a story about the creation of the T-1000, (this could easily have been the tie-in to the TV Series).  What was needed was for somebody to look at all these stories and attempt to tie them all in somehow, because everybody knows it’s off the rails now as far as continuity goes, and a few things could have been done to make things right. Nope. They decided to fucking change everything all over again. In the TV Series, they basically gave us “Terminator 3 has been superseded… Sarah Connor flew right through the timeline and it never happened.” Thanks for that, I’m good with that, but here we are again another fucking story about a teenager and a robot? Fuck this nonsense. 

The ending of Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles left a few questions as well as a few good ideas, but also changed the whole Timeline again. There’s a good place to start if you’re going to do yet another fucking sequel/prequel. The fact is, as soon as you start to think about any of this none of it makes any fucking sense, and I’d be happy to treat it like the Old Planet of the Apes Franchise, which is about the same level of continuity and sense, but this shit is just getting so ridiculous it’s not even worth thinking about.  For me though, the constant cast changes just piss me off. I seriously doubt they even considered casting ANYONE that previously played Connor, Reese, or Sarah. This is clearly just an Arnold-is-back cashgrab gimmick. It’s that simple. The people who hated The Sarah Connor Chronicles can suck it now. The writers of that show gave the Terminator Franchise a lot of thought and tried to write some good stories, and the people who hated Terminator Salvation can also suck it now, because looking back at it, it really wasn’t as bad as Terminator 3, and though it focused too much on a character nobody cares about, it wasn’t Phantom Menace. Now we’re getting Phantom Menace, only no Ewan MacGregor to give us an acceptable Obiwan. No Christian Bale, just an old Arnold and likely a lot of stupid jokes about his age. This is going to suck miserably, think Terminator 3 only on a scale you previously didn’t think possible.

Personally I would think people would be pissed that Christian Bale isn’t back, and this has nothing to do with Terminator Salvation, because at least we saw a John Connor who kicked ass for once and didn’t sit there and pout. To be honest, I would have rather seen a movie starring Linda Hamilton as an old Sarah Connor (now that Terminator 3 has been excised—thanks Sarah Connor Chronicles) in the future with Christian Bale, and the other cast of SALVATION.  If you really want Arnold, do the Tron Legacy CGI. (They did it in SALVATION didn’t they, and they’re doing it again in this piece of crap). There’s no reason to have an old Terminator except for jokes. They could have had Linda Hamilton getting old, watching the world die, and having some sort of relationship with her 30 year old son before she dies. This could have started it all out, with the death of old Sarah. Or perhaps she doesn’t die, if Terminator 3 was non-existent, no cancer, no death.  

I would have even gone for a movie-sequel to the Sarah Connor Chronicles which would have been the storyline of how the T-1000/liquid terminators deviated from Skynet, evolved beyond Skynet and played a third party to the post-apocalyptic conflict, and nobody knew who John Connor was when Thomas Dekker jumped into the future to find his fembot. Sarah clearly could also make a jump after all the events we’ve seen up to that point, thus making her alive in the future to fight the war. Enough of this shit about sending Terminators back in time. Skynet must be stupid, all it needed to do was go back in time and either kill off the early descendants of the Connors before guns were even invented, or just kill off the human race by exterminating all prehistoric hominids or primates with Ebola or something. This is just getting ridiculous. Give us ‘the future,’ this is why we all had high hopes for Terminator Salvation. It was the future, no time-travel for once. Now we’re back to that stupid shit again. 

Once this movie comes out, I’m pretty sure I can’t watch this shit any more. Terminator was one of my favorite franchises. I even loved the TV Series, but this is beyond the pale. This shit they’re releasing looks so bad, it’s like a SyFy movie of the week piece of garbage written by hacks worse than Damon Lindelof. The End did Begin as Terminator Salvation said. The End Began of the franchise, and now the End Ends here. No other reboots could possibly be taken seriously after this shit. This is Batman Forever, this is Batman and Robin here. This is the worst possible avenue these idiots could have taken with this series. Time-travel doesn’t fix everything (sorry Lindelof), and they never should have gone down that road again. Ultimately, they might as well have made a Terminator film where Arnold gives birth to Sarah Connor, and then sends her back in time to kill himself.

        Perhaps they should have stopped after T2, perhaps they never should have gone forward with anything, and at this point, unless they're going to give us a really good story not inspired by Damon Lindelof, I think they really need to quit. People are still holding out for James Cameron, and a lot of people still want to see Arnold do the Terminator schtick again, but Arnold wasn't the center of it all.  If we're not getting Bale as Connor, or a continuation of anything we've seen before, nothing but 'reboot' after 'reboot' what is the damn point? Franchise: Terminated.