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Terminator Genesis - now "Genisys"

TM2YC said:
He's totally impartial. He only attended several production meetings and owns the intellectual property the movie is based on.
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^ This. Plus he hasn't impressed me with anything lately. Sorry, the blue rabbits were meh.

Didn't watch the video and I've been avoiding everything that I can so I can go into it with an open mind. we'll see...
 
Well... I liked it. Much better than Salvation. About on par with T3. I enjoyed the plot quite a bit. Very BTTF2. There's a crucial detail that's left mysterious, saved for another movie that probably isn't going to get made, if I had to guess. Lots of fun homages to the first two movies, and a nod or two to the third. Does a lot of turning those moments on their heads, twisting things to fit the new narrative. I like that kind of thing. For the most part, it balances a serious tone with some levity, but a handful of moments go too far into sheer goofiness for my liking. The action is just okay. A handful of exciting moments, but mostly just... adequate. No shaky cam or overly rapid editing, at least. CGI was pretty bad in places. There wasn't enough Arnold. He's also a lot... slower. This is justified in the plot, but you can really see his age catching up to him. It isn't as bad as, say, those last few Roger Moore Bond movies, but his glory days are behind him. There is a neat idea that's introduced that might get things a bit more up to speed in the sequel. If they wind up making one. This is probably going to flop. It's marketed as a soft reboot, but I think that unless the viewer has intimate familiarity with the first two movies, they won't understand or enjoy what's going on in this one. The new Sarah Connor is... okay. It's a new take on the character, something of an amalgamation of both of Linda Hamilton's performances, but not as memorable as either. New new Kyle Reese and John Connor are both miscast. But at least this Connor is easier to hear than Chris Bale's rasp. Matt Smith's underused. More of an extended cameo than anything.

All in all, I had fun. The first two films will never, ever be met or surpassed. But this was worth watching.

7/10
 
Yeah, I'd agree with pretty much all of that. It felt like the first JJ Trek film to me. New timeline where the 'rules' are changed, utterly stupid in a lot of places, but generally fun and watchable.
 
Spoiler free review

Just seen it an hour ago and I agree with the comments above.
It was fun (maybe too much in places?) entertaining, but seriously... too many twists kill the twists! It's like if something coming from the left field should happen every 5 minutes (some interesting things, some obvious but okay, some dumb, some not really explained). No wonder they've shown some twists in the trailers. You can't show 10 seconds of this movie without spoiling some things! So it keeps you entertained, right, but at the end of the day it does not look like a movie that knows where it goes. In fact it does not look like a movie, more like 10 episodes of a TV-series fanedited in one movie. Or a best-of from the elements of the 4 previous ones.
But i'm surprised that despite all of this I still like the movie, somehow. I think it mostly comes from the fact that they found places in the script to let the characters have some "character moments" between all the "splosions". Even Jay "mister zero charisma" Courtney was not that horrible. Emilia Clarke was all right as Sarah but she looks like a soldier with a baby face to me.
Arnold is Arnold. Love him.
Matrixgrindhouse is right when he's talking of this movie as a kind of Back to the future 2... and I love BTTF 2. Maybe that explains why I like T-G I don't know (and also the fact that I did go to the theater with low expectations...)
I feel like I'm too tolerant toward a movie that I should bash, but I just can't.
At this point I think an entertaining Terminator movie with Arnold that somehow continues, re-tell and expands the story is about all we can ask for. Some would say "shits on previous movies", but I don't feel that way. Would be more like "tries too hard to be as good and failed, but nice try anyway."
 
I saw it today and I think I'm on the same page, it's not great but it's better than 3 and 4 (imho.)
Nevermind Matt Smith, J.K Simmons doesn't get much screentime either.
Courtnay is too buff to be a soldier in some ragtime malnutritioned future and John looks like David Cameron. They really shouldn't have revealed him in that trailer because that's the one reveal that should've been reserved.

Fanedit I'm not sure how to get around it, maybe take out the 'smiling' moments, I didn't even like that part in T2 and now it's overused. Hope someone can do some magic with that
bus and the helicopter scenes but I'm not hopeful. Arnie Bouncing down the freeway can probably be trimmed to him falling out of the van and landing straight into the car behind
 
I definitely had some thoughts on minor tweaks and trims while watching it. I don't think mine would be too drastic though, I sort of fell into the vibe they were going for and went with it. The film is certainly too much of an intentional departure to be able to drag it back to anything resembling my preferred timeline.

My main beefs were with Kyle seeing a T800 when he was a kid, Pops and the T800 cracking the pavement, the Superman-800 vs Kyle fight, and a chunk of the chopper chase. I'd cut 'em all.
 
Yeah the part I had beef with regarding the chopper was the
freefall and recovery before they hit the ground
also T1-asian's
javelin throw into the air, the spin before the actual throw

Like you said even with a few tweaks it's not going to be anywhere near the same tone you achieved with the coming storm, but I accept it for what it is.
 
I really hate myself :mmph:. I was at a loose end, there was nothing else on at my local sh**ty multiplex and I was a liitle bit morbidly curious about how bad it could be... so I went to see Genisys.

I'm still too angry and in shock to make much detailed comment right now but I know I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to designing a time-machine so I can go back in time and murder the parents of everybody involved in the making of this movie before they are ever concieved :mad2: (With the possible except of Arnie who actually looked like he was trying).
 
Ha. I had the opposite experience to TM2YC. Loved it. An enjoyable, timey-wimey homage to the 2 GOOD films. Loved the whole thing, except for the bus flip which would have smoooshed everyone inside - but they're all fine. And Arnie seems to have remembered how to act. He was GREAT! Old, but not obsolete! :) Woo!
 
!!!SPOILERS!!! (Hell you've seen the trailer, so I don't know why I care?)

Rant Part 1

The people who wrote this movie have never watched T1 or T2. This is the only possibility to explain this movie. Then again, they did reference several lines and specific shots, which leads me to believe they have some partial psychic sense (Which might explain why the characters they wrote also have psychic powers - see below). For example, they cannot have watched T2 because it does not contain the following dialogue...

John Connor: Wait a minute here. You're telling me that this thing (The T-1000) can imitate anything it touches?
The Terminator: No, it doesn't even need to touch it.
John Connor: Get real, like it could disguise itself as a pack of cigarettes?
The Terminator: Yes.
John Connor: Then why doesn't it become a bomb or a machine gun or something to get me?
The Terminator: The T-1000 can form complex machines. Moving parts.
John Connor: Like what?
The Terminator: The brain of T-800.
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...and in the same way they cannot have watched T1 because Kyle says...

Kyle Reese: The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these (T-800s) are new. They look human... sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.
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...but in Genisys Kyle recognises the T-800 straight away because either A: He looks like that Arnie Dude off the poster or B: He's bloody psychic. Again on the pschic front: How did Pop and Sarah know the original T-800's location when it arrived? I had that George-Lucas-Prequels feeling of them either lazily screwing things up, or doing it on purpose.

On to the terrible mis-casting... Emilia Clarke was actually worse than Jai Courtney. For, T2 Linda Hamilton famously trained for a year until she looked like she could punch through a brick wall, and did extensive weapons training with an ex-commando. Clarke on the other hand looked like she couldn't punch through paper. Obviously being a regular in Game of Thrones, she couldn't buff up... then why was she cast! She clearly was given zero weapons/combat training as in her very first shot she is visibly flinching at the sound of the gun. Then for the rest of the movie she has no idea how to hold the guns and runs around nervously. These kind of details stand out a mile when they are not there. Jai Courtney is also totally wrong. Bland, cocksure, muscle bound and nothing like the established Kyle Reese and nothing like basic logic would tell his character should be like too.

The worst aspect was the dialogue: Kyle and Sarah in this movie were both smug, wise-cracking, sarcastic d*cks. They just spouted copy'n'paste dialogue from the garbage bin of lame Hollywood script writing. If the writers could not have written dialogue that felt less contected with the characters of T1 and T2 if they'd tried.

Random thought: Why in the nine hells did they not have the excellent Joe Morton playing Miles Dyson?!? Why was he recast?

Lastly (For now)... why is there a Bad Boys music montage! Arrrgghhh!
 
I saw this with the wife and kid and actually enjoyed it. Well atleast what it was, a reboot or something. Arnold was good in it, Jason Clarke was good as usual, I do agree that the people who played Sarah and Kyle were kinda oddly cast. I could think of a crap load more people that would be better. But overall, it was fun and reminded me of fun 80's action, (stupid one liners and dialogue). I'll definitely add it to my terminator blu ray collection when it comes out. Still better than most of the reboots out there.
 
Saw this film earlier. It was about as bad as I expected, but I was surprised to see a few things that worked.

Arnold as an aged Terminator worked much better than I thought it would. He's still tough, and is far more restrained than T3 when it comes to humour. His fatherly role was not exactly new ground, but the film managed to squeeze some new material out of it. He played Arnie's new role as gadget man and voice of exposition was a decent turn for the character, and his aging/breaking down between time travel jumps was kind of melancholy and sweet at the same time.

JK Simmons was great if under-used. I liked Jason Clarke as John Connor and the villain later, though what he became was so unclear it was hard to get a read on the character. The effects were great for the most part, really impressive compared to the trailers. There are some fun sequences and details. future stuff, Arnie vs. Arnie, so cool to see the time travel device for the first time etc.

Sadly, there is a laundry list of problems that squash any potential the film had.

The script is pretty dire. Time travel needs to make some kind of sense, at least in the context of the story, and the film doesn't even try. Nor does it try to establish any rules so the audience can understand the stakes. The hero plot is the same as always (note fate, lets blow up skynet!) with absolutely no attempt to be inventive; only it's picked up a lot of convoluted time travel baggage this time around. There are a ton of recycled ideas at play here, and not just in the direct homages.

Courtney is as terrible as everyone expected. Kyle is now a douche, and has no chemistry with Sarah. This is a film derailing issue. Speaking of Sarah, Clarke was okay but never quite convinced as a tough as nails character. Seeing these new guys next to the mainstay Arnold just serves as a constant reminder of the original faces from superior work. By the same token, the film is slavish to some continuity details but tramples others. It all amounts to a sense of artefice throughout. It's like fan fiction.

All in all the film was bad, though not as bad as Salvation. With a tighter script and another actor playing Kyle Reese, this could have been a solid movie.
 
I agree it's like fanfiction, but the irony is that if simple fans had made this movie I would have congratulated them.
Now there are plenty of questions not answered, plenty of average acting, plenty of WFT moments (one each 5 minutes to be precise); and yet I like Genisys for what it is: the first Terminator movie, to me, who is clear and not ashamed to tell the audience: okay we fully play with alternate timelines now, we are not trying to hide it anymore like in the previous sequels, the rules have changed indeed, we are going to go crazy.
What makes the first Terminator great is that it is a perfect "time loop". Reese do not try to change the future, he is here to make the future happens the way it "always had", so to speak. In T2 the characters tries to change the future by killing skynet and at the end, mmmaybe they did it, maybe not. We don't know for sure. That's what makes T2 still relevant "timeline-wise". After that in T3 and T4 it is like the filmakers changed the timeline while still trying to stay true to the james Cameron's movies (and it does not work very well). And you get movies that I personaly like but that are not worthy successors of the first two. A worthy sequel, to me, would have been a Terminator sets during the war with the machine with ver little, if not at all, time travel involved, until the very end with Kyle being sent in 1984. I think that's what everyone wanted and it is exactely like Alien 3: amazing that they did not do the movies everyone wanted to see to close a perfect trilogy. Making a movie everyone wants to see can still be a good movie, it's not selling your soul to the devil. I liked Salvation though because it tried to be something else while still going in the direction of that possible final movie about the final battle against the machine.
Now Genisys enters the room and say: okay we can't continue to fuck the timeline and pretenting we are not! So we're gonna go full Back to the Future 2 style and fuck it. That will be a new trilogy (as they said...) that will show you another timeline and we're gonna have fun with it.
I would say that at this point I don't mind that. And well when james Cameron will have the rights back in 2019 maybe he will direct (or at least make the script) that final war movie to close "his" trilogy.

Of course Hollywood having new ideas would be more ideal...
 
Rant part 2 (Again with the spoilers):

- Why did Kyle tke an instant dislike to Sarah (In a lazy 'Romancing the Stone' type way)? It made no sense. In T1 he's worshiped Sarah like some kind of warrior-goddess and finds she's just a frightened waitress and he still loved her. Here she is the warrior of his dreams and he's pissed off with her from scene one.
- Obviously the time-travel logic was garbage. But it was garbage in 'Star Trek: First Contact' and I didn't care because that movie rocked.
- Big gaps in the story unless I missed something? Who sent Pops back? How/when did John get back? Who sent the South Korean T-1000 back?
- If Evil-John controls the time-machine after Kyle leaves, how come he doesn't send back a million Terminators?
- Why was the young pops dressed exactly like The Terminator from T1? Why does he have the same haircut and shades even?
- Kyle and Sarah are runover and clearly killed in an unsurvivable car accident at one point! So why did they only have a scratch? Are they Terminators? This was arguably the worst moment in the film. I was thinking, are the filmakers just f*cking with the audience here?
- Oh boy was the score bland. Easily the worst Terminator soundtrack so far.
- Why make a PG-13/12A Terminator movie? There is no Cronenberg-ian body horror like in the first two movies. Also, you put all that time, money and effort into making CGI Arnie and then have blur out his buttocks :-D. It's pathetic. Are CGI ass cheeks really going to destroy the minds of the world's youth?

However some plus points:

- Arnie is really good in this movie. Much, much better than in T3, although when Arnie given far and away the best performance in a movie, it's probably not a thing to celebrate.
- I loved the aging-Terminator angle. It was actually something fresh. The bit where his hand malfunctions and he gives this look to Kyle and they both know why he is hiding it from Sarah. That worked so well. If the whole movie had been about this I would have been happy.
- The CGI young-Arnie was 99% photorealistic. Very impressive stuff and exciting for future movies.
 
I think it all gets summed up pretty well by the Red Letter Media Crew. I'll watch it on netflix.

[video=youtube_share;II6OAIJPe70]
 
^ Yes that was well said. These three dudes summed it up well too, including some detailed criticism of "Un-Terminator-Like" elements of the production...

 
I saw it today and enjoyed it. Yeah, Kyle was miscast. Sarah was better but still not completely badass.

I'm guessing it was Kate or Blair that sent Pops back.
 
Uncanny Antman said:
They aren't characters in this version.
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That could be due to the alterations in the timeline from the T-1000 and T-800 being sent back to 1973. That could have happened sometime after Salvation, and then the 2029 that we see in this film is the result of that.
 
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