Terminator Genisys (2015)

Let’s get one thing clear about Terminator Genisys right off the bat:  I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. There’s some stuff – and that’s kind of the best word for it, as I’ll discuss momentarily – in this film that is entertaining to watch, but there’s a lot about the film that is largely hollow, and the word I keep coming back to is ponderous, even overly so.

After an apparent victory over Skynet, John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to the past to save his mother from an inbound Terminator. But when Kyle arrives in 1984, he finds that Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) is already prepared for his arrival, with a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) on her side. Together they realize that they’re in a divergent timeline, with Skynet set to rise in a new form.

I’ve actually never seen the original Terminator film – shocking, I know – but I have seen all the other films in the series (we’re up to five now). Even in spite of not having seen The Terminator, I have the same critique of Terminator Genisys that I had for Star Trek Into Darkness – that is, the allusions to the original source material are so obvious that even someone who hasn’t seen the original is aware of them, the effect being something akin to a clubbing over the head (I imagine) for those who are truly in the know. In both cases, the filmmakers have mistaken reference for reverence.

As for the exceptionally ponderous quality of the film, it’s as though the script writers looked at the original films and wanted to succeed by multiplying out the component parts. If you liked the liquid Terminator, this film has one of those and a shapeshifting nanobot Terminator. If you liked the time travel plot, this film has three. And if you liked Sarah Connor evolving into a badass, this film gives you a Sarah Connor who has always already been a badass. Of course, the difference is originality – we liked those beats in the films because they were different from what we had seen before. Okay, to be fair, the nanobot Terminator is pretty cool, a good adaptation of where our current understanding of robotics has taken us (even if I’m left thinking, “Didn’t I just see that in Big Hero 6?”).

Then again – and I’m not blaming director Alan Taylor for this, because he’s apparently miffed about it too – the big reveal of the nanobot Terminator was spoiled quite audaciously in the trailers. If you’ve managed to avoid the twist of which character is actually a Terminator, well done, and I won’t spoil it here because I think I would have liked the film more if I hadn’t known it ahead of time. (Although again, to be fair, it’s telegraphed a bit clearly quite early on.) And then, to top it all off, the plot is once more a race against the clock to blow up a computer before something really bad comes out of it.

I like alternate timeline stories; I think one of the best of them is Mark Millar’s Red Son, in which Superman’s rocket lands in the Soviet Union rather than Smallville, Kansas. But the difference is clear by way of one more comparison to the Star Trek reboot – where JJ Abrams’s Star Trek used an alternate timeline as a way to clear away the detritus of decades of continuity in order to do its own thing, Terminator Genisys does a soft reboot but then buckles under the weight of an inevitable future and a few obligatory callbacks (such as the inevitable “I’ll be back”).

There is “stuff” in this film – exploding things, car chases, action sequences – that is diverting enough, but they’re very much in a switch-off kind of mode that doesn’t advance the plot so much as puts it on hold. Even then, though, I’m left with questions the film shouldn’t force me to ask, like whether or not a Terminator ought to be too heavy to fit in a helicopter with two humans and their arsenal.

Unfortunately, the film ducks out on a lot of its big questions – like who sent “Old Arnold” into the past in the first place and what that mid-credits sequence actually means – because, surprise, there’s a new trilogy in the offing. That’s right, Terminator Genisys goes full Prometheus in the ending. And if the message of the film is that the future really isn’t set, let’s hope that the inevitable next Terminator film takes advantage of the alternate timeline’s freedom and does something new and surprising with the franchise. Just don’t be surprised if the next film climaxes with a few explosives around yet another computer.

Terminator Genisys is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and gunplay throughout, partial nudity and brief strong language.” Robots and humans fight, occasionally shooting or stabbing each other. We see one or two naked bottoms with implied nudity during the time jumps, and one F-bomb is dropped.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is now the eighth “Apes film,” the second film in the third franchise since 1968.  I list off the pedigree because I am feeling a slight sense of ape fatigue.  Though the film is tracking in the low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, my take on it is a little less enthusiastic – there’s nothing the film does incorrectly, but I do have a distinct sense of having seen all this before.

A decade after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, apes and humans live in isolation from each other.  The apes, led by Caesar (motion-captured by Andy Serkis), want to live in peace in a semi-civilized state; the humans, led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), want to reclaim a hydroelectric dam in the middle of ape territory.  While Malcolm (Jason Clarke) tries to broker a peace with the apes, Caesar faces a dissenting faction from within, led by his advisor Koba.

Rather than go toward the fantastical apocalypses provided by the Heston and Burton eras, Dawn continues in the realistic vein of its predecessor, with a marked focus on the verisimilitude of the special effects.  Assessing solely these visual effects, Dawn is a triumph; between the movements and the digitized facial expressions, it’s heroically easy to forget that you’re not watching real monkeys.  There’s rumbling about Serkis being up for an Oscar for his lead performance – well, I’m not sure about that, mostly because it’s hard for me to tell what’s Serkis and what’s an animator, but I do think he’s courting a well-deserved “Special Technical Achievement” award.

There’s a lot of other moving pieces in the film that are also successful, though they’re far outshined by the technical fakery.  Oldman and Clarke are compelling enough, though Oldman’s role is roughly equivalent to Bryan Cranston’s in Godzilla – he’s there for a plot mechanism, and you’ll probably leave the theater itching for more screen time from an actor as talented as he is.  But the slightly undercooked quality of the human characters really emphasizes the fact that this is first and foremost the primates’ show.

When it comes to the story, though, I’m not convinced that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is particularly visionary.  It is certainly more subtle than Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (an obvious inspiration) in that it isn’t reductionist in its approach to protagonist/antagonist relationships.  But once it does establish Koba and Dreyfus as antagonists of a sort, the film proceeds in a fairly predictable manner.  What ultimately emerges is a very unsurprising allegory about cooperation in spite of differences, open-mindedness on the subject of diversity.  Forgive me for saying, I’ve seen this movie several times already.

With a very different movie, I’d have spent a long time on the matter of the familiar plot, but in the case of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes this is less a misstep and more of a non-step.  The filmmakers don’t strike any false notes here; rather, the melody is quite familiar (no pun intended, though Michael Giacchino’s score does recall early Apes soundtracks).  The visual effects are the standout feature – the apes are strikingly rendered, the sequences in which they attack are appropriately terrifying, and the internecine struggles feel astoundingly human.  It’s not the second coming of science fiction, but it is a well-told iteration of a classic tale.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief strong language.”  There is some amount of blood seen, mostly during fights between apes.  Fight scenes between humans and apes proceed with more gunfire but with less blood; some of the scenes of attacking apes may be frightening for younger viewers.  The film also includes one F-bomb and several scatological S-bombs.

Pop back here on Thursday when The Cinema King tackles Transformers: Age of Extinction!