“I’m old, not obsolete.” Although a mantra repeated throughout TERMINATOR GENISYS by T-800 model Terminator “Pops”, TERMINATOR GENISYS is anything but old or obsolete as thanks to director Alan Taylor, screenwriters Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis, and producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg of Skydance Productions, the Terminator is back and he’s bigger and better than ever!
While nothing in the original “Terminator” canon created by James Cameron has changed, Lussier and Kalogridis open up the story and reinvigorate the franchise thanks to exploration of the temporal nexus by creating alternate universe timelines. Nothing in the original canon is negated; rather, just added to and built upon with another storyline. The same core characters are front and center. The difference and premise for TERMINATOR GENISYS, however, comes from incorporating those core characters and elements but, thanks to time shifts, placing them in different situations and different environs. How do they change? What within the world changes? How do they respond, react and grow? And with the opening of a new universe and new world filled with twists and turns, the seminal question of TERMINATOR GENISYS becomes “What does it mean to be human?” With the complexity of the story and layered emotional texture, director Alan Taylor then takes us into seven different time frames, including flashbacks, with visuals that bring the words on the page to life while dazzling us with giant sets pieces and explosive visuals.
EXCLUSIVE: Producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg talk story construct
A prologue lets us know that since Judgment Day on October 29, 1997, three 3 billion people died in the nuclear conflagration. And yet, despite the technological victory, 30 years later the battle between man and machine still rages bringing us to what could be the final showdown. With the last threads of humanity at stake, revolutionary leader John Connor knows that the stakes are high and battlelines drawn in time. Fighting shoulder to shoulder with Connor is Kyle Reese. As Connor sees it, Reese must go back in time to 1984 to protect John’s mother Sarah from assassination by a Terminator. Should Reese fail, John may never be born and the course of history changed forever.
Reese goes back to 1984, but the shy timid waitress he was expecting to find, protect and warn, is not who Sarah Connor is. The timeline has already been altered. Arriving naked in a dark Los Angeles alley in May 1984, the shape-shifting T-1000 machines are already laying in wait for Reese. They knew he was coming. But how? And as for Sarah, she is a trained and skilled warrior going toe-to-toe battling these T-1000’s, and by her side is Pops, a T-800 Terminator guardian sent more than a decade ago to protect Sarah Connor. The world is already changed and so must Reese’s mission, but who can he trust and just what – or who – exactly has altered the timeline.
With Judgment Day now postponed from 1997 to 2017 in the temporal nexus of GENISYS, the technology foreshadowed by James Cameron in the 1984 installment comes full circle and plays into a well contrived smartphone twist of today. With Kyle and Sarah now required to make their way to San Francisco 2017, they make the time travel jump while Pops has to “go the long way” which means living the 30 years and preparing for their arrival, leading to engaging tacit discussion on humanity and the world, including some emotional touchstones that tug at the heartstrings.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger himself describes TERMINATOR GENISYS, “[I]n Terminator 1, it was very clear that [the Terminators] are just a machine that destroys human beings. . . Anything that was in the way I will wipe out in the most brutal way without any feelings or any kind of remorse. . . My mission was to protect the machines and to find Sarah Connor and to basically be successful with my mission. In this movie, it becomes a little bit more colorful because now I am again back to destroy Sarah Connor. I’m still this vicious cold machine that is programmed to destroy Sarah Connor and nothing will get in my way, except in this story something does get in my way; another Terminator, one that has been around for a longer period of time. It’s also the T-800 model but he was programmed to protect Sarah Connor and the human race. So there’s obviously a major conflict between the two when they meet and that’s what creates then this huge epic battle. Then of course, the Terminators, depending on how long they have been around, some of them are just straight Terminator, as the one from 1984, but then the one that has been around longer, he has already adopted certain human behaviors.”
Recreating specific shots and scenes from the original 1984 “Terminator”, from the get-go, we have the evil T-800 appearing through the temporal nexus to 1984 Los Angeles intent on his mission to kill Sarah Connor, only to have the protector T-800 step in for a mano-y-mano showdown of Arnold vs. Arnold. (Eerie to see the Arnold of 2015 fighting Arnold of 1984, but it works and is pure entertainment!) Then jumping right into the fray is Sarah Connor with a bewildered Kyle Reese staring on in wide-eyed, head scratching disbelief. Sarah knows that Reese has returned in time to save her life, but she also knows a few other things which were secreted from Reese by John Connor, and that it’s no longer Sarah’s life that needs saving. Of course, this go round it’s Sarah who gets to bark at Reese, “Come with me if you want to live!” And so the journey begins.
Directed by Alan Taylor and written by Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis, TERMINATOR GENISYS is truly a genesis for the franchise. Utilizing the storytelling device of the “temporal nexus”, the story itself is well written with characters well crafted and yes, subtly nuanced. While the film is heavy on technology and action for set piece driven visuals, it is the character driven story elements that propel GENISYS forward. The temporal shifts open up the story – and the characters – for more exploration and depth allowing for wider range of emotions and inner conflict. Lussier and Kalogridis give us a crash course in time travel that explains the theory behind parallel timelines and, particularly in the case of Kyle Reese, alternate memories. And while director Taylor candidly admits “getting across to the audience why you’re doing it, why you’re allowed to do it, and doing it, and what are the limitations of what the rules are, is a tricky thing”, the result is intriguing, thought-provoking and entertaining. The story on the whole brings the franchise full circle as we go from machines taking over the world to a machine who has actually become a meld of machine and the best of humanity, helping humans defeat the machines, with the underlying thematics and messaging about man – his arrogance, his blindness, his ability to cure his own ills. Open your heart and your mind and you’ll see some powerful thematics unfold.
LISTEN: Patrick Lussier, Laeta Kalogrides & Alan Taylor talk temporal nexus
TERMINATOR GENISYS hits the mark on every level of casting starting with the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger. As we saw with that chapter in the franchise which shall not be named, Schwarzenegger IS the franchise; BUT…. given the powerful performances, physically and emotionally, of Jai Courtney, Jason Clarke and Emilia Clarke, I can see the franchise heading into new territories of emotional exploration of humanity without Schwarzenegger as the film’s spine.
Jai Courtney is a perfect fit as Kyle Reese – and even more believable than Michael Biehn in the 1984 role. Courtney has a strength of character that matches his physical strength, not to mention some comedic skills that come into play here. And speaking of comedy, GENISYS is laced with it – but not as planted comedic lines; the comedy here is inherent within the situations themselves and with the “fish out of water” temporal dynamics.
As John Connor, Jason Clarke oozes dark slickness emotionally and, uh, physically. He gives Connor layers and depth. Key is that for the dynamic between Connor and Reese to work (and for events to unfold believably), the audience has to see and connect with Connor the hero in the first 15 minutes or so of the film. While Clarke achieves that through some well timed vocal nuance, where the performance falls short is with the character’s sincerity. We never see or feel anything that would have Connor earn Reese’s unwavering loyalty towards him.
Perhaps the actor facing some of the most difficult challenges was Emilia Clarke in having to step into the iconic shoes of Linda Hamilton while making this Sarah Connor her own. She does so beautifully. Embracing the ideals of what Sarah becomes in GENISYS – an iconic feminist action hero – Clarke adds levels of innocence and charm that feed the temporal ideals of Sarah’s idyllic childhood before her parents are murdered in front of her and she is saved by this T800 machine who lays out a less than idyllic life for what lies ahead. With a perfect blend of strength and vulnerability, Clarke is as at ease and as believable in the father-daughter dynamic with Schwarzenegger’s Pops as she is toe-to-toe with Courtney’s Reese or the mother-son heartbreak with Clarke’s John Connor.
Scene stealing is none other than Oscar winner JK Simmons. Talk about fun! As Detective O’Brien nee Sgt. O’Brien circa 1984, Simmons’ character serves as a perfect piece of connective tissue between the timelines that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Simmons is both divine and divine comic relief.
EXCLUSIVE: Producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg talk casting
When it comes to Schwarzenegger as “Pops”, given that the character has now been living among humans for so long and raising Sarah Connor from the time he saved her at age 9, there is an emotional range we haven’t seen in the T800 previously. According to Schwarzenegger, “[Y]ou have to be really be very wise the way you use that, and how you get that across; that he has human behaviors and he does have certain feelings and stuff like that, but also creates great comic relief when the Terminator tries very hard to be like a human and he fails miserably.”
Also key with Schwarzenegger’s performance is the “Arnold vs Arnold” sequence; something which took one year to perfect. Initially finding a body builder with a physique resembling that of Schwarzenegger in 1984, to go against present day Arnold, while smartly executed, still required some CGI for the face, hair and some body sculpting. Even Schwarzenegger was wondering, “How’s this going to work out?” On seeing the final product, he was not disappointed. “I looked at the technical stuff and I just thought it was seamless. The technology has advanced so much that it was really extraordinary to get this kind of entertainment and storytelling. . .[I]n the old days you had to do kind of split screens and all kinds of things. You could tell that it was not the same; it was not like two ‘Arnolds’ fighting, two Terminators fighting. They’re different ages and stuff like that. But in this movie, it totally worked. And so I was really impressed.” According to producer David Ellison, it was “hundreds of visual effects artists” that pulled this off. “Creating a walking, living, breathing ‘synthesbian’ has always been a holy grail to achieve in visual effects and we absolutely think they’ve achieved it for the first time in this movie.”
Giant set pieces peppered throughout GENISYS are jaw-dropping, particularly the Golden Gate set and “wheels down” harness-rigging sequence which is one of the best pieces of stunt work melded with technology that we’ve seen all year. Absolutely killer. Showcasing the spectacle of these set pieces as beautifully as some of the warm childhood flashback scenes of Sarah Connor, is cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau. Already having a shorthand with director Alan Taylor thanks to their work together on “Thor: The Dark World” and “Game of Thrones”, the visual tonal bandwidth is not only distinctive and beautifully rendered for each temporal jump, but cohesive within the overall story. As Taylor related to me, “We were trying to delineate the worlds from each other so it felt like you were in new time frames. . .We obviously did a lot of work watching and re-watching. There’s a curious transition with the translation because the first one [T1] we were quoting so heavily was really a low budget horror movie, so we had to find a version of that to fit into a big budget contemporary movie.” Although there are some over-extended VFX scenes in a few places which could have been shortened, the overall scope and lensing is well designed and executed.
Most appreciative is the sound design which allows for the auditory distinction between dialogue, score, foley, explosions and action, so as to find no element of sound getting the short shrift, particularly the dialogue.
Production design, props and weaponry are meticulous and embrace the parallel time lines, infusing important elements of authenticity into the proceedings. With over 500 individual weapons ultimately utilized, three different time periods had to be covered and thanks to weapons master Harry Lu and prop master Diana Burton we have everything from a Remington 1100 to M3 and M4 Benellis and even a .50 caliber Barrett for Emilia Clarke’s Sarah. And yes, Schwarzenegger was very involved in the selection of armament.
Playful, eye-popping, thought provoking and beyond entertaining, the Terminator is back. . .with a vengeance. . .bigger and better than ever with TERMINATOR GENISYS!
Directed by Alan Taylor
Written by Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis based on characters created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Jai Courtney, Emilia Clarke, JK Simmons
