Terminator Genisys (2015)
★ — Terminator Genisys (2015)
There's a moment in Terminator Genisys where I genuinely couldn't tell you what was happening, who was fighting who, or why any of it mattered. And I don't mean that in a fun, chaotic action-movie way. I mean I was sitting there, completely lost, wondering how a franchise built on such elegant, propulsive storytelling had ended up here: a bloated, incoherent mess that somehow manages to be both overstuffed and completely empty at the same time. One star. And I'm being generous.
Let me be clear about what this film does. It takes the bones of one of the most influential science fiction films ever made, cracks them apart, reassembles them in the wrong order, and then asks you to be impressed by the corpse. The time travel logic, never simple to begin with in this franchise, becomes an absolute jumble. Timelines fold in on themselves without purpose or payoff. The script throws in a "clever" reimagining of iconic moments from the original, and it falls completely flat every single time, because there's no emotional intelligence behind any of it. It's not subversion. It's just replication with the confidence drained out.
The decision to bring Arnold Schwarzenegger back should have been a strength. And look, I don't blame him personally. But what's written for him here tips into self-parody so quickly it made me uncomfortable. The warmth and strange melancholy he brought to Terminator 2, that sense of a machine slowly becoming something more, is nowhere to be found. Instead we get knowing winks and tired callbacks dressed up as nostalgia.
Emilia Clarke is a genuinely talented actor, and watching her struggle to do anything with this material is painful. She's given a role that requires her to be fierce, complex and compelling, and the script consistently lets her down at every turn. As for Jai Courtney, I'll just say it plainly: he has the screen presence of a lamp post, and no amount of action choreography changes that. The chemistry between the two of them is nonexistent, which is a disaster when the whole film is supposedly built around their relationship.
The effects are technically fine, I suppose, in the way that a very expensive screensaver is technically fine. But spectacle without stakes is just noise, and there are no stakes here. I never once felt that anything happening on screen mattered, because the film itself doesn't seem to believe it matters either. Explosions arrive, CGI fills the frame, and then more explosions. It reminded me of how I felt watching Transformers, that specific flavour of exhaustion you get when a film confuses scale with substance.
What really stings is the cynicism at the heart of it all. This isn't a film made by people with something to say about the Terminator mythology. It's a franchise maintenance exercise, a contractual obligation dressed up in a leather jacket. The kind of production that looks at what people loved about the originals and decides the best response is to hoover up the iconography while discarding everything that gave it meaning. Compare it to something like Resident Evil: Retribution, another franchise sequel running on fumes, and Genisys somehow manages to feel even more hollow, because at least the Resident Evil films stopped pretending to be anything other than what they are.
I've sat through some frustrating blockbusters. I've made my peace with films that aim low and hit their target. But Terminator Genisys doesn't even manage that. It aims for the stars of its own legacy, misses completely, and leaves a crater where a decent film could have been. Forgettable in the worst sense: not so bad it's interesting, not so good it's worth defending. Just a long, loud, exhausting waste of a Tuesday evening that I will not be getting back.
One star. Don't bother.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-04-09
Where to watch
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