Terminator: Genisys

Proving James Cameron's Law Of Diminishing Returns

I went to see the new Terminator film a few days back. Not because I thought I'd be seeing a new classic. Not really out of a great desire to see an exciting new entry in a film series (or franchise, if you will) that I really enjoy. It was more a morbid curiosity, having spent probably too much of my youth glued to the untouchable first two films. The concept, the excitement, the iconic characters, the sheer brilliance of the wacky idea of a time travelling assassin robot. Yes, the third and fourth instalments have been misfires but surely this time they'd get it right. I left, to put it mildly, disappointed with what I witnessed.

Within minutes of the start, my eyes were rolling at retcon and re-cast trickery (Kyle Reese's burned Polaroid of Sarah Connor...) and some abysmally portentous scripting (John Connor's uninspiring inspirational pre-war speech). I didn't enjoy the film much: it looks ropey in places, a poor, convoluted plot, bad dialogue and worse acting made it hard to like, but faced with an attempt to post-mortem the film to my wife and colleagues, I found it hard to explain why I was so disappointed. I've managed to come up with something. While Einstein's theory of General Relativity makes time travel extremely difficult, what I'm calling James Cameron's Law of Diminishing Returns makes attempts to recreate past cinematic glories almost as unattainable.

It's probably fair to say that my expectations were lowered by the trailer and I should mention that I have a general lack of faith in re-boots, remakes, re-hashes and Hollywood's current trend for safe bets. But on the superlative strength of Cameron's The Terminator (1982) and T2 (1991), part of me wanted this to be brilliant. Given the director, stars (some of them) and the promise of fresh new ideas, I was convinced that this had potential. I'm going to suggest here that when following up a classic film, mediocre is a greater sin than execrable. For some sequels, stripped of the key creative personnel (writer, director, sometimes stars), expectations are brought down so low that when the series falters and vanishes, nobody seems to care. Examples include the later Hellraiser, Highlander and Crow films, the Psycho, Exorcist and Jaws sequels and Robocop 3. Hell, for me even the remakes of Robocop and Total Recall, with Paul Verhoeven's wonderfully perverted cynicism replaced by franchise-sniffing studio opportunism, didn't make me want to buy either, even for a dollar. I just didn't care about them so their failure meant nothing to me.

Far worse than this is where creative talent is still in place but gets it so very very wrong; this is where it really hurts, because it feels like something you believed in is being diminished by an inferior product. I would cite Spiderman 3, Jurassic Park 3, X-Men 3, Terminators 3 and 4 (seeing a pattern here?) and Indiana Jones 4 as examples. Although all but Spiderman featured new directors to the franchises, there was still a degree of continuity, be it in casting or even just in a general respect for the original plotting or mythology. When something you really enjoy, even love, is followed up with something that just doesn't pass muster, it hurts.

So here lies the problem with Terminator: Genisys: while some of the creatives are missing they have been, on paper at least, well replaced and there is still a lingering public interest in the series to warrant interest and expectation. And there's also the Arnie factor. Such an iconic role will always draw attention. Arnie. Playing the T-800 again. He's going to say the line, he's going to face something harder than him but he's going to win. Please let it be good. Put simply, Genisys is crippled by the success of its predecessors. Ironically, hamstrung by history.

Not only are we lumbered with another colon: subtitle (I suppose a '5' would seem daunting to an audience and also conjure associations with the Rocky film nobody talks about) but also a new cast to get our heads round. The film doesn't expect a huge knowledge of previous instalments (3 and :Salvation are wisely ignored), and although it helps to already know the characters, I get the impression the producers would prefer you to forget. So poor are the new actors' interpretations of Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), they bare little resemblance to the cherished performances of Linda Hamilton and Michael Beihn. While talented Method actor Hamilton brought a humanity and believability to Connor's arc, all Clarke brings is cheekbones and her best 'troubled' face from Game Of Thrones. Jai Courtney is a terrible actor who brings almost nothing to make us like Kyle Reese. He's also so freakin' built that we never really get the sense of inferiority that Beihn had when going up against Arnie back in 1984.

The script tries (weakly, I suppose) to mitigate the retcon changes by suggesting that by messing about with time, they've created a different time stream where all previous bets are off: so far, so Back To The Future 2 (“all bets are off”, the Sports Almanac, geddit? Ah, nevermind...). But while the first two films (and 3, I suppose), despite their sci-fi trappings, were fiendishly simple cat-and-mouse chase stories, Genisys (pain in the arse to type, by the way) throws in new timelines, new Terminators, characters with fuzzy agendas, and jettisons timeless San Winston practical effects in favour of cheap, weightless CGI. That this is the 2^nd reboot of the year which didn't look as good as the 1990s predecessor is another debate for another day. There is so much going on and there are times when the sense of threat is lost. The film opens with mankind's victory over Skynet and goes on to a battle-ready Sarah Connor and 'Pops' (Arnie's T-800, finally drained of all threat) dispatching Terminators with relative ease. They then go on the offensive with a jerry-rigged time machine and some hideously convoluted plotting designed entirely to allow the film to take place in a contemporary setting.

Plot holes generally don't bother me. I can forgive them as long as they don't upset the drama. I'm not one of those morons who thought The Dark Knight Rises was ruined by the question “How did Bruce Wayne get back into Gotham...?”, I just accepted that he had to for the film to have a climax. Time travel films, with the possible exception of Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) are by nature littered with plot holes. What I can't forgive is poor plotting. Not until the introduction of Jason Clarke's John Connor/T-3000 did I feel a sense of threat in Genisys. On his arrival, I had no idea what his purpose as a Terminator was; he just seemed to want to protect Skynet and offered no direct threat to anyone but Arnie's T-800. The film tries at times to be a protracted chase much like 1 and 2, but we don't really get a sense of who is chasing what, and for what purpose other than 'Skynet' as a giant MacGuffin.

Sarah Connor's story arc was originally brilliant: weak-willed waitress becomes hardened survivor, never loses her maternal instinct but has to rediscover her humanity and choose not to kill Dyson in T2. She's a fascinating character, who develops and changes. In the hands of Emilia Clarke, she's reduced to pretty, shouty, just plain dull and has no arc whatsoever other than by the end of the film she's kissed a boy. Perhaps I'm being unfair to Clarke, who isn't given a lot to do, script-wise and perhaps just looks wrong. Either way, some baffling time hopping aside, her story boils down to tooling up and going to blow up a computer factory. We are never really encouraged to care or truly take her side.

It's not, however, a complete (plastique) bomb, which was my original point. There are several redeeming features, the tragedy being that they're all so half-baked and under-developed. Director Alan Taylor, having made Thor: The Dark World light and fun, manages to pay homage to the original films with several visual nods. Reese's arrival in 1984 is impressively recreated shot-for-shot (although modern digital photography lacks the grungy, dirty feel of James Cameron's cheap film stock). There are several nods throughout, which raise a smile and distract from the mess: Reese's arrival in 1984 and department store escape is neatly subverted, as is the T-800's “Wash day tomorrow, nothing clean...” sequence; the design of the detonator is the same as the one from T2; the T-800 endoskeleton attacking Reese with a pipe harks back to T2's climactic smackdown; even the positioning of its arm as it 'dies' harks back to the end of The Terminator, although Genisys doesn't have the balls to go with “You're terminated, fucker.”

Also worthy of credit are some quite touching moments including one between Connor and a young Kyle Reese, and the way they finally work out how to beat the T-3000 (magnets can do anything!), although the final victory is preceded by an awful fight between Arnie and Jason Clarke's respective terminators, which lacks the drama and impact of the slower-paced scrap in T2. Genisys also has an impressively epic feel, and you don't come away feeling short changed as you did with T3. The writers have admittedly come up with some decent ideas and wisely avoided reference to T3 or Salvation which presumably just didn't happen. Arnie is also given some nice moments of comic relief, which further dilute the character from what it began as, but offer some needed levity.

The problem is that it's all just so half hearted and feels like to work of a committee rather than a visionary. After Cameron decided against making more films, every director has been a hired gun (Jonathan Mostow, McG and Taylor, none of whom are exactly auteurs) and the whole thing seems like it's been geared to franchise potential and not making a solid piece of drama. And without a solid grasp of what they want to do other than retain their option on the characters, the film suffers from a lack of focus. It may also seem like a perry and immature complaint, but the film has a bloodless, almost profanity-free 12A rating, which is clearly another move designed to broaden the audience as much as possible at the expense of visceral impact. The original was 18 rated on release, the sequel compromised to 15 to go with a bigger budget but still brutal enough in places to make you wince (the deaths of Todd and the 'identical twin' asylum guard). At no point does Genisys have a moment as dramatic as “Call to John now,” “Fuck you.”

So it's hard to take when a company gets its hands on something you enjoy and tries to cynically turn it into a moneyspinner. Lessons perhaps could have been taken from Jurassic Word, which turned creative control over to the relatively untested Colin Trevorrow but whose previous film showed the producers enough potential to be handed the keys to a massive franchise. It worked, and his film managed to be both reverential to Spielberg's original and bold and new at the same time. This mess, however, just makes you wish that the proclamation at the end of T2, that the future wasn't set, hadn't been true. They stopped Skynet, and with it any inferior sequels, when Arnie was melted down. On the strength of Genisys, “I'll be back” sounds like more of a threat than it ever did before.