Terminator Genisys

In an attempt to kick-off a new string of sequels Terminator Genisys takes the series back to zero, showing us the exact moment John Connor won the Battle of Armageddon by driving up to Skynet's front door hidden in the back of a truck. The Terminator posited a desperate future conflict in which mankind was reduced to the level of vermin. Conversely, Alan Taylor's smudged photostat is full of protein shook bruisers confident enough to charge directly at abstract art shapes armed with laser cannons.

To broker the handover, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as broadly the same T-800 seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Christened Pops by his bratty VIP, Schwarzenegger gets to play old and malfunctioning, a decrepit cyborg used to punching his motorised bones back into shape. Although his voice chip is stuck blurting out a couple of default phrases, Schwarzenegger is easily the best thing about the film, the impassive father figure taken to an absurd, indestructible conclusion.

Given that she's spent a decade in the company of a killing machine, you might expect Emilia Clarke's Sarah Connor to be steel. She's not. Instead, this deliberately cute, diminutive Sarah is a strange combination of T2's punk John Connor and the pressing need to please little boys grappling with the idea that girls are no longer icky.

Clarke's performance is Linda Hamilton's Virgin Mary reconfigured as something from the worrying end of the anime spectrum, a woman who is simultaneously infantilised and sexualised. The latter reading made explicit by a time travel episode that's treated like a skinny dip and the longing looks fired Connors way by a pre-teen Kyle Reese (Bryant Prince). As if to hammer home the idea that all of this is written in the stars, Young Kyle is practically dribbling any time Sarah is in his eyeline.

For his second attempt at burying a beloved 1980s film series, Jai Courtney plays Kyle Reese as an impatient prom date. It's a bold choice. James Cameron and Michael Biehn elected to portray a man who'd grown up in radioactive ruins as twitchy and feral, a bestial presence that didn't so much move as slink. Looking for a fresh hook, T5's screenwriters have lasered in on that moment in The Terminator were Reese clumsily reveals his virginity, elevating this sweaty desire to his sole, motivating characteristic.

Basically, Reese doesn't have anything else to do but look beefy and complain. He's surplus to requirement. Reese has fell through the decades to arrive at a point were he's no longer calamity's messenger. Sarah already knows more than he does and has a Terminator Guardian to boot. Perhaps recognising that their leading man is a spare, Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier's screenplay gives Reese the framing monologue and a mutation that allows him to glimpse memories from alternative, concurrent timelines.

Most depressingly of all, Terminator Genisys is a case study in how sequel inflation can numb the experience. T5's Terminators aren't death rendered in metal, they're end of level bosses. Excluding the drone-like Endos that buzz around Skynet's time travel compound, T5 has no less than seven distinct infiltrators going about their business. The singular threat of a Panzer tank sheathed in flesh is gone, replaced with a succession of computer-generated goons that are each dispatched in flat, unconvincing ways.

Lee Byung-hun's T-1000 signs off in a particularly ignominious fashion. A terrible shame since Lee is the only actor who appears to have given any thought to the interior life of something invincible. Instead of just standing there like stone absorbing damage, Lee undulates around sustained fire. It's a movement decision that suggests a creature that finds being shot irritating rather than ruinous.

T5 quickly loses interest in its mercury man, trading in Robert Patrick's Vulcanian demise for a sequence in which the chromed metal monster is transformed into drowning dirt. It doesn't help that the broad idea behind the termination is straight out of a T2 tie-in comic published by Malibu in the mid-90s. It wasn't convincing then and it isn't convincing now.

Kalogridis and Lussier's screenplay demonstrates evidence of a deep dive into ancillary Terminator mythology and little else. The future war opener is a garbled lift from Randall Frakes' novelization of the second film (itself based on early drafts of James Cameron and William Wisher's screenplay), while the battle between two digitally augmented Arnolds is straight out of Cameron's rejected T2 pitch bin. Terminator Genisys is a work mired in brand and its perceived importance, content to cram the screen with loaned out moments shorn of context, excitement and threat.

GENISYS

This Terminator: Genisys trailer is a strange experience. It comes on strong with re-purposed scenes and ideas from the Jim Cameron entries before morphing into a full-on Marvel movie. If nothing else, it looks like Alan Taylor's film finally gets the complete future war prologue from Terminator 2: Judgment Day's tie-in novelisation on-screen. LA 2029 is a looker too. The human resistance, and their skeletal enemies, are lit like they're fighting in a city sized version of Tech Noir.

Although Jason Clarke is appropriately weathered as John Connor, Jai Courtney is a bizarre substitute for Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese. Courtney has zero of Biehn's wirey, malnourished intensity, the actor instead reads as a sub-Tatum, beefy, romantic lead. Chicken breasts and protein shakes must be widely available in the wasteland. This obvious sop to demographics is leavened by Emilia Clarke's Sarah Connor immediately subordinating her new boy toy.

I wonder how screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier will handle this Sarah? The T2 fringe and ponytail would seem to indicate an all-business approach, perhaps even a character that views her coupling with Reese as a necessary transaction in the process of creating a messiah. Presumably this Sarah is fully aware for how the following decades will unfold. Clarke's youthful, bratty demeanour, not to mention her cyborg father figure, mean this characterisation will probably be closer to Edward Furlong's John Connor than any previous Sarah.

Which leaves us with The Terminators. Lee Byung-hun looks great when he's running around 1980s alleyways, less so when he's hurling his body parts around like spears. Conceptually, there's an instant pop in the idea of a T-1000 interposing itself into The Terminator. It's reminiscent of Frank Miller's Skynet from RoboCop Versus The Terminator - an elemental, God-like force that overwrites time incessantly until it arrives at an advantageous path. It's a situation here born of sequel escalation, but the idea of chaotic agents arriving unexpectedly is pure Terminator.

Surprisingly, Schwarzenegger looks like a bit of a fifth wheel. Aside from junking his youthful doppelgänger, and ticking off another aborted Cameron sequel in the process, it doesn't look like he has much to do. Perhaps it's a sign of the star's waning power? This doesn't look like a top billed role, more a special appearance. Also, a protector Terminator hurling itself out of one helicopter to detonate another is just fucking stupid. At the very least, he's just nixed his camouflage.

It's a shame that Genisys isn't designed to take place on one long night. Even in this brief glimpse there's a sense of bloat. As the trailer rolls on we get further and further into anonymous, boringly framed second-unit work. The afternoon bus flip in particular is straight out of a Marvel sequel. Kramer Morgenthau ain't no Adam Greenberg either. I can see why the cinematographer got the gig, aside from priors with Taylor, his work on the Sleepy Hollow pilot nicely tracked an undying thing through a series of night shoots.

It's hilarious though to note that a two hundred million dollar Summer blockbuster can't wring out the same level of grimey verisimilitude as a six million dollar, non-union shoot. I know it's an entirely different genre - this is Terminator as a palatable franchise proposition rather than a thriller - but threat has taken a back seat. The shot of the T-1000's cop car arrival is, despite the much higher stakes, strangely perfunctory. Compare it to a similar sequence in the original. Cameron and Greenberg signal terrestrial danger with blaring sounds and lights. Taylor and co could have at least hosed the streets down and given the film that sweaty, post-storm texture.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is James Cameron's attempt at realigning the collective male psyche after the excesses of the 1980s muscle killers. Maybe he was motivated by guilt? After all, this is a model of masculinity that Cameron himself had a hand in pioneering. His Terminator acted like a slasher villain and inadvertently became the gold standard for the remote action heroes of the Reagan period. Likewise, Cameron's screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II, as interpreted by Sylvester Stallone and George P Cosmatos, took a damaged Vietnam veteran and allowed him to 'win', transforming him into a poster boy for popped veins and steely, supplemented sinew. These men were isolated, emotionally distant and obsessed with automatic weaponry. Relationships, if they even registered, were usually just revenge prompts.

T2 wasn't the first time Cameron tried to steer movie manliness in a healthier direction. Michael Biehn's characters in The Terminator and Aliens were both professional soldiers able to comfortably co-operate with women. Sarah Connor and Ripley weren't considered prizes, they were partners in a capable, multi-disciplined collective. Crucially, their strength wasn't shown to undermine Reese or Hicks' masculinity, it informed it. In Cameron's films the heroes and heroines aren't islands, they're components in a greater whole. The group survives, the individual dies. Unfortunately, Biehn's lithe intensity never stuck. His confident, secure characters were either upstaged by monolithic co-stars or de-emphasised by plot machinations. To push the ideal further, Cameron needed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For this sequel, Cameron and co-screenwriter William Wisher Jr gradually deconstruct the idea of the Terminator. After a rock and roll introduction the character is slowly shorn of the kit associated with the first film's mechanical assassin. First he loses his sunglasses, smashed by an institute orderly's bandaged forearm. With his Persol Rattis junked, Schwarzenegger's key colour also changes. After the Pescadero chase the Terminator is no longer lit to be a waxy blue, now flesh tones are emphasised to match his emerging, artificial, humanity. Next, Terminator gives up his motorbike, the two-seater an impractical way to transport two adults and a child. Terminator ends up driving a string of shitty trucks and estate cars, most notably a wood panelled Ford station wagon.

This mundanity stresses Cameron and Wisher's core idea - fatherhood as a high ideal, positioned in opposition to shallow nonchalance. Schwarzenegger is no longer an impassive leather murderer, he's someone's dorky Dad, regurgitating slang he doesn't understand. He's an incredulous focal point for the child to bounce his personality off. This isn't commodity cool, Cameron isn't trying to sell a particular product. He's taking the constituent parts of the 1980s action hero and reorganising them into something mythic and immovable. If we agree, to our horror, that action movies are able to provide instructive behavioural models for little boys, then T2 is explicitly saying that emotional distance is a sham. Much better to engage, and allow yourself to be considered weak or compromised. Being a man isn't about expensive toys or mistreating women, it's about the ability to be a stable, invested presence in someone else's life.

GOD OF ACTION (Guns N' Roses - You Could Be Mine)

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

With a lengthy stint of dilute stinkers to his name, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was Arnold Schwarzenegger's last starring role before he embarked upon a political career that saw him elected as the 38th Governor of California. As such, T3 can be read as both a payday sequel to stuff Schwarzenegger's coffers, and a public relations push for the star's impending aspirations. Certainly, this terminator resembles little more than a flagging, toothless repurposing of Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2: Judgment Day performance.

Although in similar shape to his mid-forties, T2 self, Schwarzenegger sports a deep red tan that clashes with his leather-daddy outfit and any pretence that he's actually from a terrible future. Director Jonathan Mostow also fails to give the star any killer establishing shots that aren't immediately voided by ugly, after-the-fact tinkering. It's a kick to see Schwarzenegger juggling a coffin full of rocket launchers like a futureshock Django, but the moment is mangled by Mostow's need to paste on post-process slow motion.

The film rolls on and on, never finding any way to make Schwarzenegger look iconic. Instead he's a bumbling old man, hair permanently fixed in a state of greased shock, snowboarder sunglasses stapled to his face. He doesn't look cool, he looks absurd. Factor in a reprogramming shorthand that replicates the near-human state of T2's father figure, a suffocating rash of Schwarzenegger career quotes, and a long streak of bawdy, contemptuous humour at the killing machine's expense - "Talk to the hand!" - and you have a performance that wades into full-on parody.

Elsewhere, Edward Furlong's vandal John Connor has mutated into a trembling loser played by Nick Stahl. Stahl's Connor is a messianic bum, taken to crashing motorcycles and day-labouring after T2's theatrical ending robbed him of his ambition. Stahl burns screentime furrowing his brow and looking confused. There's zero sense he's capable of leading anything. Indeed as soon as the Terminator shows up he instantly abdicates any sense of command. Much more convincing as an impending Techno-Caesar is Claire Danes's Kate Brewster, a revision role perhaps originally written to be Sarah Connor.

Although by no means as capable as Linda Hamilton, Brewster does occasionally ask questions and take the initiative, something the dumbfounded Connor never quite manages. The suggestion here seems to be that Connor is the cuckolded sap pushed front-and-centre by his Brewster wife to be the male poster image for her own military ambitions. Cameron's films posited Connor as a scarred and cold Übermensch, forged by an abusive upbringing to be the shitkicker Christ that topples the machines. T3's sole shot of Future Connor is a scruffy old Stahl limply leading a victory chant whilst wearing oversized fatigues and a worried expression. Fuck that guy.

The weak linking continues with Kristanna Loken's irritable TX, a female shaped terminator programmed with the need to writhe in ecstasy whenever she tastes her target's blood. An early emphasis on the TX being aware of the uses a sexualised identity can afford her does raise the intermittently interesting idea that she might try and seduce her quarry. In the end though, all this cat housing amounts to nothing. Incredibly, the idea of a mechanised honeytrap was better explored in Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, at least there Bay was able to conjure a terrifying sense of destructive, sexual otherness. In T3 any such posturing is ultimately revealed to be cynical titillation.

Unfortunately the TX wasn't conceived to be interesting, she exists solely to turn up late and harass our heroes forward. There's an overwhelming sense that very little imagination is being flexed on her behalf. Her basic physiology is founded on a solid metal core, so immediately she's less interesting / invincible than the T-1000. Cameron's Terminator films also afforded their villains scenes of detective work and incidental murder. Threat was close and constantly stressed. A few brief assassinations aside, T3 only manages to burp up a sequence were TX idly sets some trees on fire after getting her ineffectual plasma weapon junked. She's vapour. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines simply doesn't give a shit. It knows you'll watch it out of some dimwitted allegiance to past glories. Why should it even try? It's a sequel designed entirely to be just another instalment in an unending multi-media franchise.