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Terminator Genisys - Blog Posts

10 years ago

The Terminator is having a bad day. It’s a muggy July afternoon in New Orleans—the temperature is loitering in the triple digits—and Arnold Schwarzenegger is...

Look, the title "Terminator: Genisys" actually getting through the sheer number of suits it had to have gone through for approval could just be a fluke. I mean, "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" must have had to get through just as many intelligent and/or marketing-minded adults.

Sure, it's written by the writers of, respectively, Alexander and the Dracula 2000 Trilogy. Good writers get screwed over by the system all the time. Looking at Andrew Kevin Walker's resume, you wonder how he could possibly have written something as brilliant as Se7en until you realize all his other scripts were shredded, mulched, and fed to the rats in the basement before they were filmed.

Sure, it's about a T-800 time-traveling to protect a young Connor (Sarah this time), making this a rehash of Terminator 3, which was itself a rehash of Terminator 2, which, let's be honest, was just a particularly brilliant rehash of The Terminator. There are good part 5s out there - Fast Five rocks, You Only Live Twice is... the worst of the 1960s Bond movies, but it had Little Nellie and that Volcano base and Donald Pleasance, and then there's... um... ah... does Batman Begins count as Batman 5?

But now we have pictures. And now we know that title wasn't a fluke. It was a warning.

Jai Courtney's Kyle Reese looks like a constipated kid at a water gun fight. Jason Clarke's John Connor could not look more bored. Matt Smith looks less like a tough soldier from the future and more like a paintball player worried about whether or not the turkey was overcooked in his TARDIS.

Emilia seems to be in the general realm of an actual character, even if that character is "waitress dressing as a biker for Halloween on a bad hair day". But then, here's the description of what Sarah Connor's up to:

Sarah Connor isn’t the innocent she was when Linda Hamilton first sported feathered hair and acid-washed jeans in the role. Nor is she Hamilton’s steely zero body-fat warrior in 1991’s T2. Rather, the mother of humanity’s messiah was orphaned by a Terminator at age 9. Since then, she’s been raised by (brace yourself) Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—an older T-800 she calls “Pops”—who is programmed to guard rather than to kill. As a result, Sarah is a highly trained antisocial recluse who’s great with a sniper rifle but not so skilled at the nuances of human emotion.

“Since she was 9 years old, she has been told everything that was supposed to happen,” says Ellison. “But Sarah fundamentally rejects that destiny.

So... they're not going with the compelling, relatable character from the first film, or the complex, unhinged badass from the second. Instead she's going to be emotionally distant like the second one but also not able to single-handedly take on an army (and with her combat skills apparently reduced to sniper instead of everything), so the worst of both worlds. And it looks like she'll have to be protected by both a Terminator and a buffer Kyle Reese. Hooray for feminism?

But hey, I was one of the poor unfortunate souls who liked Salvation and wanted a sequel to that, so maybe this just isn't directed at me.

On the other hand, they actually named it Terminator Genisys.


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