Thoughts:
- Emilia Clarke and Arnold Schwarzenegger were both very good. The dude who played Kyle Reese was utterly unmemorable. He also looked entirely too well fed and beefy for someone who’s supposed to be living a hardscrabble post-apocalyptic existence. What’s the point of a Kyle Reese who looks almost as swole as a fresh-out-of-the-box T-800?
- I would say I enjoyed about 50% of this movie. I would see one moment that was an effective tribute to the source material or a good bit of building on its foundation, only for the next moment to be something obviously intended as a tribute or further building but tone-deaf/point-missing/just kind of a dumb idea (um writers, I’m pretty sure Miles Dyson didn’t own Cyberdyne - that clunked as hard as the “Cardassian Sunrise” line in the Star Trek reboot, a pointless bit of “SEE WE REMEMBER THE THING” without understanding how to use The Thing in context).
- I enjoyed Pops and his interactions with Sarah very much; their relationship and his development as an old and somewhat worn out cyborg were my kind of content. His having to “take the long way” and work for a living was a brilliant idea that I wish were explored more.
- You’ll remember that Linda Hamilton was allowed to look terrified and get dishevelled. She got sweaty and her hair went stringy. When she got hurt it affected the way she could move. Emilia Clarke’s face stayed perfectly matte the entire time, because this is the type of movie where the heroine looking pretty is more important than the heroine’s appearance helping us to understand how hard this experience is for her and how much danger she’s in.
- Another action movie in which people get injured but are basically unaffected except for expressing pain in the moment of wounding and scenes of utter mayhem take place in major urban locations but life just goes on in the rest of the city as normal.
- I am sure you can’t do all that with a helicopter and have it keep working until an elderly cyborg plummets into its rotor face first (but only loses a few patches of skin from one side of his face).
- The use of “I Wanna Be Sedated” in the scene where Kyle and Pops get competitive about loading magazines or clips or whatever you call them with bullets was effective from a rhythmic point of view, but if Sarah was listening to the music through Walkman headphones it shouldn’t have been audible in the rest of the room.
- The use of “I Wanna Be Sedated” at its first appearance struck me as a lazy way to convey, “Here’s Sarah Connor, but she’s different! She’s angry! So she listens to punk rock!” Oh my God imagine if they’d committed to that more fully and this version of Sarah were a punk. I would love that so damn much. Sarah Connor in full 1984 punk mode with spiky hair and black lipstick and bovver boots.
- I was tremendously irritated when the Johnbot suddenly debuted a new fighting style in his climactic fight with Pops, as if he’d been saving up his best moves for a dramatic moment.
- I really, really liked the T-1000 we met in the early part of the film, especially when he was in the mirror. That was a neat effect. It was a shame he got knocked out of the running so quickly.
- I also liked it when a blob of T-1000 liquid metal reanimated the young T-800 because it reminded me of fresh blood reviving the ashes of a vampire, an undead kinda thing. But then they used it as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it thing at the end so they could have the pathos of a battered old T-800 fighting to the death and then sinking away, and have Pops survive so Sarah didn’t have to be sad. That peeved me off massively. As long as a Terminator exists in our period, the risk of Skynet technology is present. He should have had to die the way the one in Terminator 2 did.
- I have to reserve the most intense venom for the decision to cast Matt Smith. You simply can’t plant a former Doctor in a scene about time travel and not have it be completely distracting and disruptive the moment he’s in shot. Were they trying to be cute? Because of the context it becomes almost impossible to accept him as an avatar of Skynet; you find yourself thinking that the Doctor must be forced to do what he’s doing in order to preserve a fixed point in time. It was just a rubbish idea from stem to stern.
- They did that Thing, you know the Thing where a villainous character is impaled and pulls himself hand over hand along the impaling object to impress us with how inhumanly unstoppable he is in his malice? But the Johnbot can separate and reform himself like a T-1000. From his point of view, the sensible thing to do would be to take a step left or right, then close up the resulting tear in his side. So they completely ignored their own creatures’ logic for the sake of a really hackneyed shot.
- In a sinking rowboat with a T-1000 coming up through the floorboards Sarah’s dad would not have had time to teach her a little life lesson complete with finger tracing across palm. That was absolute cheeseball.
- While we’re at it, every other time a T-800 has had to fight a T-1000 (or, as in this film, even another T-800) it’s been hard work and resulted in significant surface damage, but here we’re expected to accept that the young Pops slew the T-1000 that killed Mr and Mrs Connor (while Sarah, the target, hid under the dock and was completely unharmed) so handily that, when Sarah first saw him, he was uninjured, his clothes were clean and undamaged, and his hair wasn’t even messed up. How.
- Also why did the cabin explode. Why? Why. Terminators don’t try to avoid collateral damage in pursuit of their targets, but they also don’t waste time blowing things up or killing people when that won’t help them to reach the target. If Sarah wasn’t in the cabin, there was no reason to blow it up.
- On the other hand, I really dug that when Pops attacked the newly arrived T-800, he was just a decoy. He and Sarah never expected him to be able to defeat his counterpart alone. His job was to hold the T-800′s attention until Sarah could get a clear shot.
- That said, it was idiotic that he threw aside the telescope thingy after one good hit with it. He could certainly have hit the T-800 again, or thrown it at him, or something. It was such an obvious piece of “oops, that weapon is effective but we want the fight to go on a bit longer, so the hero can’t continue to use it.” And instead of creating a way to have him lose the weapon, they just had him drop it as if it was of no further use!
- Did you know that liking dirt bikes is genetic?
- The idyllic pastoralism of the closing scenes did not belong in this series of movies at all.
- Also, obviously they weren’t going to do anything this interesting, but I wish with all my heart that instead of kissing Kyle at the end of the film, Sarah had given him a firm handshake and said, “It’s so good to know that there’s nothing we have to do.”
- and then they drive off happily as if they aren’t all wanted criminals and suspected terrorists at this point in time, and none of what they’ve done in the past few days is going to have any kind of consequences or impact on Sarah’s new life
- also Genisys was a stupid boring device to deliver Skynet in one more flaming form, and it still looks spelled wrong.
- There was no reason for Genisys to appear as a hologram of a child that aged up. Why would it be programmed to do that? Why would aging up be associated with the countdown clock skipping ahead? What was any of that about?
- J K Simmons: also good.
- I don’t have the energy to talk about the plot holes and failures of underpinning logic.
I can address some of these. Only some, as most are completely valid criticisms that I myself share (only in my case, I loved the film enough for said criticisms to not influence my enjoyment because it turns out this is the fanfic AU I never knew I wanted), but I have yet to get through a movie without criticizing something in it, so there’s no reason this one should be the exception. I haven’t actually discussed this film’s flaws with anyone previously, so this was kind of refreshing, in a mental-floss sort of way.
Firstly, yooooooooo thank you for giving me such a detailed response.
Secondly, responding to selected bits:
Example A of me liking an overall thing enough not to overly care about the flaws: Kyle Reese. Yes, the sewer rat diet is probably not going to give you the physique Jai Courtney has in this film, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on Jai’s part. He knew Kyle wasn’t getting “three square meals a day” (in his words) and went on some awful nothing-but-salmon-and-water diet and lost 20 lbs by the time filming started yet still looked like a brick house, so I guess Kyle was just really good at catching the largest, meatiest sewer rats available in Apocalypse Land.
This just makes me think… but why not cast someone with the right physique in the first place?
Also, I enjoyed the hell out of his facial expressions and thought he was an adorable puppy dog of a man who spent most of his time confused and annoyed with the world at large, so, as I said, I’m willing to let bulk and the fact that he clearly takes way more showers than one would in an apocalyptic war zone slide. (Most of the time, anyway. The production team spent so much time and thought worldbuilding the Future War that the lack of dirty Kyle Reese still bothers me a bit.)
See, here, if I had also found him endearing I would probably not have cared so much about how beefy he was, but he’s not in the Golden Retriever Boyfriend category for me, or even the Feral But Could Be Rehabbed Pit Bull Boyfriend category inhabited by the Tom Hardy version of Max Rockatansky. I didn’t find him likeable or interesting. Just a personal response.
On the Miles Dyson front, it could be fanwanked that because Sarah and Kyle time traveled from 1984 to 2017 without leaving the CPU/arm combo from the first Terminator behind, Miles Dyson’s life took a very different turn (what with the not dying in an attempt to blow up Cyberdyne and all) and he used the intervening decades to take over the company, after which his son followed in his footsteps.
Even then, I don’t understand why his son would be PRESIDENT OF THE COMPANY when he looks like he’s maybe twenty.
This movie is part of a planned trilogy (which may or may not happen, as it’s been well-received by general audiences, but it’s on the bubble, financially speaking, much like Pacific Rim was), with Sarah, Kyle, and Pops. The writers have said that they definitely plan to explore Pops’ Learning CPU and give him a definitive character arc in regards to Sarah and his relationship with humanity, and they posit him as a question of whether or not humans and robots can peacefully coexist, as, after all, Skynet only tried to wipe out humanity after humans freaked out and tried to pull the plug on it (a point which they touched on some more in this film, I was happy to see).
So presumably Skynet is still on some level trying to make fetch/itself happen, or there’d be no more plot. I guess they have to eventually address the question of who sent Pops back in time in the first place, since he can’t remember and it’s a bit of a plot chasm. He’s going to end up like the compass in Lost that had no original owner, because Richard gave it to John because John gave it to Richard because Richard gave it to John.
The use of “I Wanna Be Sedated” in the truck was actually a callback to John Connor in T2. Cameron was originally going to use it as the music John is listening to when he’s working on his bike, but ended up going with Guns N’ Roses instead. The filmmakers included it here as a nod to that.
I… I don’t get the point of doing a callback to something that was never used. Not just filmed but left out of the theatrical cut, like the scenes where Sarah dreams about Kyle in the mental hospital and where Sarah and John perform brain surgery on the Terminator so that he can learn. Just not done at all. What’s the payoff?
Dunno what to tell you on the Matt Smith front, other than the fact that your average American moviegoer isn’t going to know who he is, and that, unfortunately, is who most blockbusters are geared towards. Much like casting Karen Gillan in a movie about space, I suppose.
Well, it helped a lot that they shaved Karen Gillan bald and painted her patchwork colours. Cut down on the recognition factor. Here’s the thing: there’s no compelling reason that I know of why they needed Matt Smith (it’s not even a particularly interesting part), and there is a reason not to use him. It’s symptomatic of how fucked up movie-making decisions are that the reasoning would be, “Well, people who are passionate about sci-fi and time-travel adventures will notice that we’ve use a highly recognisable actor from another major sci-fi time-travel adventure series, and it might be disruptive for them, but we don’t care about them, because the vast majority who see this film will just come for the explosions.” They could have had casting that wasn’t distracting and had explosions.
John Connor the human still exists within the T-3000, so while the obvious answer for the whole impaling thing is “because the director thought it would look cool” there is the argument that within the universe, John retains his illogical human need for showing off. LOOK HOW BADASS I AM I’M TOTALLY NOT BOTHERED BY THIS IMPALING THING BEING A MACHINE IS THE BEE’S KNEES GUYS.
But nobody was there to see him doing it. He was all by himself; after Pops impaled John he, Sarah and Kyle went further into the building and left John by himself pinned to the broken screen. Who would he be showing off for?
The T-800 didn’t defeat the T-1000 at the cabin. He had a grenade launcher (maybe? I’m not a weapons person) that no doubt did the T-1000 some damage and slowed him down, but the T-1000 reconstitutes itself and survives to chase them for another 11 years, until Kyle shows up and they acid shower the fiend.
Okay, but then, why didn’t they acid shower the fiend (or destroy it in some other cunning way) sooner? And/or why didn’t the T-1000 catch up with them sooner? In the preceding movies, we’ve seen how much mayhem a T-800 or T-1000 causes in the pursuit of a target over just a few days, chiefly because although they’re built for infiltration, they don’t actually give a shit if their cover is blown, and will adopt an approach as weird as shooting everyone in the phone book called Sarah Connor just to make sure. The authorities definitely notice, even if they don’t understand that they’re not dealing with a human assassin or terrorist. We’re now asked to accept that there were a T-800 and a T-1000 in the world of the 1970s/80s for ten years and the T-800, with a traumatised young child in tow, managed to evade the T-1000 well enough that they didn’t have a whole series of pitched battles that left a trail of destruction across California and resulted in the National Guard being called out or some shit. That’s a pretty big change of the rules.
Sarah/Kyle has been an otp of mine since childhood, so I was not unappreciative of the kiss (and in fact went searching for smutty fanfiction not long after seeing the film), but I enjoyed the fact that for this film, at least, that’s all it was. It gives the possibility of them building something more, but not the obligation, and veers dramatically away from the “I met you 10 hours ago and now love you irrevocably for the rest of my life” thing which James Cameron seems so fond of.
What I see between Sarah and Kyle in the first two films is not so much “now I love you irrevocably for the rest of my life” as traumatic bonding and a desperate staving-off-fear shag. When Sarah dreams about Kyle while she’s in the mental hospital, I think that’s not so much/just because she loved him as because she is totally isolated in there and absolutely nobody believes her. Kyle knew first-hand that what she’s so afraid of and angry about was true, and if he were there he would support and encourage her. The dream, to me, is Sarah trying to draw on that source of encouragement and support, from her own memories if not from her present reality.
I think it wouldn’t be at all surprising if, given a chance to know each other without a crisis throwing them together and intensifying their feelings, Sarah and Kyle found they weren’t actually in True Love and felt rather sheepish about it all.
And now Kyle actually gets to spend time around her and learn to appreciate who she is as a person, rather than an ideal, which is nice. Even more so, I appreciated how this film pointed out the issues with the Mother of the Savior trope and showed that even before Kyle arrived, Sarah had been planning to throw destiny out the window and save the world herself, sans child. Kyle and Pops just ended up going along for the ride.
They’ll get some big brownie points from me if Sarah tells us in the next movie that she’s nineteen, for heaven’s sake, and she is not about to have a baby at her age because she’s supposed to or “things want to happen,” as Johnbot suggested at one point. I would also like to see them go against the idea that John Connor has to happen, that he is the only possible leader for the human resistance and nobody else could have become that leader.
Again, this was supposed to be part of a trilogy, so the whole “wanted for terrorism” thing would most likely be a continued problem for them, and I don’t think anyone assumed that they’re going to be able to do anything other than live fugitive style, but they prevented an apocalypse, Kyle didn’t kick the bucket this time, Pops got an upgrade, and Sarah isn’t being forced to incubate the future savior of humanity, so I think they’re allowed a little bit of a celebratory moment or two at the end.
The problem with that is that they kind of went Star Wars Medal Ceremony for the same reason as the medal ceremony, not knowing if they would get to do a sequel and needing to end on a happy note to satisfy audiences who wouldn’t be aware of the possibility of a continuation. It’s kind of sappy (and also doesn’t involve characters I love as much as Leia, Han and Luke, obviously).
Of course, Kyle’s BFF/son turned evil and then died, so he’s probably going to have some angst about that, but for the moment he didn’t die while wearing a hobo’s stolen pants and he got the girl he’s been kind of creepily
John’s mom has got it goin’ on/ she’s all I want and I’ve waited for so longcrushing on over for goodness knows how long, so his angst can wait for a minute or so, I suppose.
“Getting” a girl tends not to be a “reward” for a hero that I like very much.
My major annoyance comes from the fact that Sarah’s plan was actually better than Kyle’s, as going to 1997 and being wrong would cost them nothing (and would actually give them 20 years to stop Genisys from being a thing that happens), but going to 2017 and being wrong means too late, apocalypse already happened, and now not only do you have to live in a hellish war zone for the rest of your lives, but you missed the chance to make John Connor and humanity is probably screwed. Or if you were super duper confident about Kyle’s visions, why jump to the day before Genisys goes live? Give yourself a couple of years, months, or at least a week, people. The movie already has the framework in place for doing this and not losing the tension via the jumping countdown clock.
This is an excellent point which I hadn’t thought of. Damn. That’s brainless.
Also, Pops really should’ve anticipated L.A. traffic being terrible and headed out early. It’s not like he has anything else to do.
I thought they were in San Francisco by that point? Ugh, I don’t know. I don’t understand why the scene shifted to San Francisco in the first place. Just to have an iconic bridge to fuck up? Because San Francisco is more techie than LA these days?
If they decide to go ahead with the sequels, I look forward to seeing these characters explored more deeply (burning question: will Reese ever learn what a waitress is????), as I’ve discovered that characters go a much longer way towards my enjoyment of something than anything else. (The MCU is a good example of this for me. I find most of the films themselves underwhelming, but I’m showing up for the characters.)
Meanwhile I found these versions of the characters underwhelming, chiefly Kyle. Sarah had good moments but wasn’t allowed to be as effective as she could have been (I know Emilia Clarke is capable of more). Arnold Schwarzenegger was reliably good. I really do appreciate the fact that each T-800 he’s played, while they were identical when they came out of the box, has become a different character. It’s interesting that we tend to speak of Schwarzenegger playing “the Terminator” when he’s actually played several distinct individual Terminators.
Another burning question, this time for all Terminator movies: Skynet nuked the world. Shouldn’t it be soaked in radiation and largely uninhabitable by humans (and the dogs Kyle seems so fond of)?
PLOT TWIST: radiation has made this version of Kyle infertile.
Adding to this a bit:
1. I really don’t disagree with anything in here, this is pretty spot on.
2. Matt Smith did not need front billing for what essentially amounted to a walk on role. Entertainment Weekly’s terrible photoshoot also made him out to be more than he was (in a sense) certainly they made it seem like we’d be seeing more of him than we ended up with.
And as much as Matt (excuse me Matthew) Smith didn’t really need front billing, Courtney B. Vance really didn’t need front billing, holy shit blink and you’ll miss him as Myles Dyson.
Pops was good, all three versions of him. I think they needed to work on the original’s Terminator’s chin tho, it didn’t seem quite right.
Again, the T-1000, should have had more of him.
I wonder what Cameron got out of Paramount for toeing hte company line on this one.
One of the problems with Kyle Reese is that he’s about as exciting as a lump of clay. Michael Biehn brought a lot to the role, this guy whos name I don’t know was told to do the same but just isn’t in the same leage.
For some reason I also personally dislike Jason Clarke, I don’t know what it is. Oh he tries to be charismatic and leadery and has that…..that Vincent Karthaisier whiny-ness. but no it’s more than that, I can’t explain it’s a …revulson.
And: re getting hurt and gettng right back up, after Reese shields Sarah from being vehicularly slammed on the freeway he should be in TRACTION.