The Curator of Schlock #299 by Jeff Shuster

Terminator Genisys

No more Terminator movies ever!

I know I covered this movie once before. I think it was back in 2015.  I rambled about the summer movies that year.  One has to wonder in twenty, thirty, or even fifty years, which movies from the 2010s will be remembered? Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? Interstellar? Sicario? Gone Girl? The Peanuts Movie? Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Blade Runner 2049? Mandy? Alita: Battle Angel? I think so.

Terminator Genisys? Ehhhhhhh.

2015’s Terminator Genisys from director Alan Taylor serves as a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, so forget about that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines nonsense! Terminator Genisys begins in the future after The War of the Machines is well underway. We see a young Kyle Reese grow up fighting in the human Resistance and being mentored by John Conner (Jason Clarke). Grown up Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney of TRON Legacy fame) and John Conner go to a Skynet base on the final night of the war. Inside this base is a secret weapon, a time machine that Skynet uses to send a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to kill John Conner’s mother before he is born. John Conner sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother from the evil cyborg.

We’ve seen this story before…or have we. We see the Arnold Terminator show up in the early 80s just like he did in the first Terminator movie, but an older version of the Arnold Terminator is waiting for him. Middle-Aged Arnold Terminator terminates Young Arnold Terminator. Kyle Reese shows up back in time and gets attacked by a T-1000 played by Byung-Hun Lee.

Sara Conner (Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame) shows up with Middle-Aged Arnold Terminator to save Kyle Reese from the T-1000. Sara grew up with Arnold Terminator and he served as a pseudo father figure for her. Oh, and she knows that Kyle Reese is supposed to impregnate her with the future leader of the Resistance, but the timeline has been changed since they eliminated the first Terminator. I think they melt the T-1000 with an acid trap they set up in advance and Sara wants her and Kyle to time travel to 1997 to stop Judgment Day, but Kyle tells her the date has been moved to 2017 due to new childhood memories he received while time traveling.

This is where the movie loses me because it starts throwing around alternative histories and timelines and blah, blah, blah. Sara and Kyle time travel to 2017. Arnold Terminator stays behind so his skin will grow back. Plus that de-aging computer graphics technology is rather expensive. Kyle also remembers a warning about Skynet actually being Genisys. Turns out Genisys is a new tablet app everyone is excited about. The son of Miles Dyson of Cyberdyne Systems created it.

Oh, and John Conner shows up in 2017 too. And it turns out he’s an evil half human/half Terminator thing. What can I say? He’s working for Skynet now. I guess yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. I think I’ve lost the plot at this point. I’ll call it quits for now. There’s still Terminator: Dark Fate, but I think I’ll take my time getting to that one.

Maybe I’ll watch it in 2037.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.