TAKE ONE Presents... - Pod With Us If You Want To Live 5: TERMINATOR GENISYS (2015)

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Simon and Jim enter the modern era of Terminator films with TERMINATOR GENISYS directed by Alan Taylor, a film with a promising start that goes on to absolutely fall off a cliff. They discuss the producers' ambition for a new Terminator Cinematic Universe off the back of this film and the perils of planning for a trilogy without making a successful film first, the interesting way that this film recontextualises and subverts the original film and creates a blank slate for a new direction, the uninteresting way that the film just goes in the same direction as the previous entries in the franchise, digital de-aging and the "mummification" of cinema, the transformation of Skynet into a consumer tech product and how that impacts the politics of the narrative, and why 'Genisys' is spelled that way.Content warnings: nuclear war and apocalyptic destruction; murder and violent death; patriarchy and forced procreation; body horror and removal of skin.Our theme song is Terminator Theme Song (32Stitches Remix) by 32Stitches available on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/32stitches/terminator-32stitches-remixFull references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/EIRIF9WS/collection

Hello and welcome back to Take One Presents, Pod with Us if you want to live, a podcast where we're watching all the Terminator franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie. I'm joined as always by my co-host Jim Ross. Hello, Jim. Hello. How are you doing?

Good. I think I'm probably in a slightly better mood having watched this compared to salvation. I say better, not good. Yeah. But yeah To me this is kind of us entering the modern kind of era of Terminator films

because I think this is after I got involved with film criticism and stuff so this is an interesting one to revisit So yeah Very much so good So yeah we're Today we're discussing Terminator Genesis From 2015

directed by Alan Taylor But Jim you might notice something Something a little funny about the word Genesis in this title Yeah, I do. Something a little off. I mean, it's dumb. Let's just get us out of the way off front.

It's dumb. It's spelled with a Y. It's spelled over a Y. And this is named after, ostensibly named after the operating system in the film, which will evolve into Skynet. We'll discuss it when we get to it. But, yeah, I did find an LA Times article.

article answering the question, why is Terminator Genesis spelled with a why? What were the filmmakers thinking? And producer David Ellison said, it didn't work. The actual thought process behind it was we were kind of playing on words, like Google. Okay. First off, first off, that's that Google's not a play odd words. It's a misspelling of the first part of Googleplex.

Like that was the intended thing. So, kind of, but not really. And it's in reference to Genesis. Thanks, David Ellison. Thanks, I couldn't have put that together. Yeah, we didn't get that bit. Which is in reference to the singularity. We need noted, yeah, we need noted genius.

Napal BV David Ellison to point out for us. And it's in reference to Genesis, which is in reference to the singularity and the man-machine hybrid that John Connor ends up beginning. Now. None of that is in the book of Genesis. I need you to tell me that you know that, David Ellison. Yeah, I know. That's the entire word you think about that quote.

It's like, does he even know what word he's playing on here? Also, if you pronounce it in a different way, it signals a new beginning. You don't pronounce this in a different way. This isn't... Hold on it, right, Simon, I need to take a minute here, right? because when you linked to this article and I read that part of the quote, right? I genuinely don't know what other

pronunciation he's talking about. They pronounce it Genesis in the film. What's he talking? Is he pronounced it? Genesis? Genesis. Genicise. What's he talking about?

I genuinely don't know what he's talking about. So it was kind of a play on words. It wasn't. It was kind of a play on words and it did not come across that way. So, I'm so... Simon, you still have answered my question. What pronunciation is he talking about?

I don't know. What was he thinking of? Did the interviewer ask him? I have so many questions. There's a clip. Which I'm not going to watch while we record, but maybe I should have watched it. Maybe there's a different pronunciation in there.

You know what? If it involves David Ellison speaking, I wouldn't subject yourself to that, to be perfectly honest. don't spend any more time trying to unpick the genius, the genius working. Yeah. And I'm sorry for doing this close reading of a paragraph of an LA Times article.

Asking why Terminator Genesis was called that, but it's a baffling explanation. It's big of him to admit that it doesn't work, because it doesn't, but just baffling decisions, baffling creative decisions. I mean, also for better, For better or worse, it is pretty much the first thing you say when you see the title of this film, right?

The first thing that does pop into your head is, does it be spent a lot? Why isn't it like that? What does that mean? Yeah. Yeah, right. Make it that what you will. I guess it's computery. Like, cis is computery, you know? A cis admin, system D, all that stuff. It's just to make it seem futuristic, but it doesn't work. Yeah. We'll get into it, like, in a bit.

slightly more erudite fashion, I suppose, about what the film's trying to do with this, but straight out of the gate, it's not going about this in a particularly smart way, I think, is what this signifies, really. So when did you first see this? I was trying to figure this out, actually, because normally, for films that are reasonably recent,

I can usually find a ticket receipt in my email or something. I can't do it for this. I'm 90% certain I saw it in the cinema, on release, probably even week of release. Is possible, I might have seen it on demand, because this is around that time I ended up spending a lot of time in the Middle East for work, so I might have been in Kuwait when it came out, looking at when it came out, but I'm fairly certain I saw it in a cinema.

I'm pretty certain. Sure. Can't find any evidence of this, but that doesn't mean I didn't. So I definitely, I've definitely saw it in a cinema, but I've watched it digitally since then I've actually watched it once on a plane before I then rewatched it for

rewatched it for this. This is my first time I think I've said in previous episodes that only the last three I haven't seen at all. So this was my first time it was all new to me. So the film came about Terminator Salvation

which we discussed last month was intended to begin a new trilogy. But it caused the bankruptcy of the Halcynian Company, which we discussed a little bit at the end of the last episode. So the rights to Terminator... Oh, was a good sign. So the rights to terminator were up in the air again,

and they went around about a bit, Universal Studios were interested, MGM were interested, blah, blah, blah. Eventually, Megan Ellison at Anna Purna Pictures, picks it up, and there was kind of a run for it, because people were worried that the rights would reverse, to James Cameron at some point, which they eventually did for the next film. Cameron met with David Ellison and Megan Ellison a couple of times.

They discussed Schwarzenegger's role and got Schwarzenegger interested in returning, which was important for setting the framework for how they were going to do it. They also decided to make a new trilogy. They decided this was going to be the start of a new trilogy. and it was going to have a spin-off TV series that were going to be video game accompaniments. This was going to be a huge cinematic universe type thing. This film came out in 2015.

I blame the MCU and the Avengers for this squarely. 100% at this point in time in cinema history, 100%. There's no focus on, you know what, just make a good goddamn film and then people will want more of it. stop conceiving of things as multimedia universes. I have a lot on this as we go through because there's various threads that are clearly intended to be picked up in later films

but never get picked up because the film wasn't successful. They were originally interested in Justin Lin to direct from Fast and Furious 6. Also looked at Ryan Johnson, Denis Vilnerve and Ang Lee but they eventually went to the MCU and got the director of For the Dark World, Alan Taylor,

who also directed, is a TV director, he did Game of Thrones and stuff and The Sopranos, but also did For the Dark World and the Many Saints of Newark, The Sopranos film. He wasn't interested. His girlfriend told him to turn it down and do something more personal, but he just wanted to work with Schwarzenegger,

so he went for it. He believed he could fix the script and make the film work. Spoiler alert. I feel like if that's your attitude going into the script, that's probably not a good sign. This will be great if I could fix the script. Not tweak. Not sort of like, you know, just add a layer in here.

No, fix, fix. Yeah. So they knew they were going back to the kind of start of the franchise. David Ellison said in an interview with I-09, we know exactly what the lost shot of our Terminator 3 is going to be. For us, this is Terminator 1. He's not Terminator 5. This is not a prequel to the first Terminator.

This is a complete standalone film based on the Cameron Source material. Now, that's nonsense. But it shows he's kind of... The idea was that this was Terminator 1. This was starting again, starting afresh. And they obviously had plans for Terminator 3. He says he knows what the last shot will be. Sure.

But they were going back to the start. So they wanted to cast a new Sarah Connor. They were looking at Tatiana Maslani, Brie Larson and Amelia Clark, who eventually got the rule, and wanted Tom Hardy to play John Connor, but eventually got Jason Clark instead. So the film was,

eventually released in June 2015, June July 2015 in the summer, Big Summer Blockbuster. And 2015 in film we've discussed before because there's a Jurassic World film on the box office list and a Mission Impossible film. So we've discussed this year before. I think I've said this before, but Richard Brody said that 2015 was one of Hollywood's worst years. partially he said because there were no releases from like Martin Scorsese, Sophia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Miranda July, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson But the top ten is all kind of franchise stuff So I have read this before but we'll go through it quickly again for context Star Wars the Force Awakens at number one

Furious 7 Jurassic World Avengers Age of Ultron Minions, Spector, Inside Out, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation The Hunger Games, Mockingjay, part two, and The Martian, that number 10. So yeah, a lot of franchise stuff. I probably said this the previous two times, because, look at it, we must have gone through this at least twice a day. I'm all surprised at how much money the Martian made. Yeah, 600 and...

No, no, not because I don't think, I quite like it. I think it's quite a good film. It's just, you know, $630 million dollars worldwide gross Which is a lot You know puts it in the top ten like I say As we're recording this project Hail Mary is out Which is kind of a spiritual sequel

To The Martian Same source author Andy Weir And that's doing quite well From what I see Yeah And I don't know It's obviously just my sort of thing

At the time of recording I haven't seen Project Hail Mary yet But I'm intending to and it strikes me as something I'd be in too. I don't know. It probably tells me I should just read some Andy Weir novels.

I think you should. All the flaws I had with Project Hail Mary, which were few, were also flaws I had with the book. So I think it's a fairly faithful adaptation. It kind of leans into comedy a bit more than the book. Anyway, that's by the by.

That's what 2015 looks like. So Terminator Genesis comes out in this context and doesn't trouble. the top 10. It grossed 440 million dollars worldwide, which is the second highest grossing entry after Terminator 2, but underperformed relative to the studio's expectations. Yeah, and I think something that is probably, not that I want to do huge amounts of box office analysis, but it probably says something about the reception of the, because on the face of it, like 440 on million.

I mean, it's not bad, right? I mean, I think of the budget of it, it probably wasn't great, but like, it's not terrible, I don't think. But if you look at it, the amount of money it earned domestically, meaning within the United States versus worldwide, is markedly different

to quite a lot of the films above it. Yeah. Right? Like, I mean, it made about 80% of its money overseas, whereas the highest one besides, it's typically, like, they're looking at about 67, I mean, if you go to Spector, it made more broad, it's not particularly surprising, same for Fury 7,

but if you look at the likes of the top film, right, the Force Awakens, it was basically 50-50. You know, and if you look at something that's more around where it is in the thing, you look at something like Ant Man at 65%. Right, so it's kind of like, you can tell it's kind of very much trading on brand name, I think, more than even some of the other franchise films

are in here, because it's not, not making money in the biggest, you know, the biggest individual market, basically. There's an article by... Or the biggest English-speaking market, anyway. There's an article by Philippe Wegener in science fiction film and television called Relic from a Deleted Timeline, The Economics of Terminator Genesis. And he quotes someone who declares that the audience's response to the film indicates America, didn't want or care about another Terminator movie.

Yeah. He asserts that Terminator Genesis represents one of the ugliest trends in modern Hollywood today, to wit, just because a movie or a franchise was momentarily popular back in the 1980s or the 1980s, doesn't mean that moviegoers young and old want to see another variation in a theatre. Now, this is a lesson that Hollywood has failed to learn completely. Like, there was a good Ghostbusters film, and now we've got a whole Ghostbusters franchise spinning out into various forms and being treated with, you know, the utmost respect and honour.

Yeah, I think as we get into the analysis of the film, I'm going to push back on that assertion a tiny bit, right? Because I think comparing this film and where it sits within the Terminator franchise with the Ghostbusters films is a little unfair to me, right? and I say this is somebody who deeply disliked Ghostbusters Afterlife and I didn't like Frozen Empire right I mean I go so far as to say those films are dog shit

To be honest I really don't like them I you know not to prejudice the discussion we'll have about this film I don't think this is a great film But I do think it does a couple of things that are interesting And I think the way that Bumps up against the first two films is interesting and what they've tried to do. I think they've ended up doing it poorly,

but I think it's a lot more interesting than what has spun out of the Ghostbusters franchise, so-called franchise, right? That was me saying, bringing up Ghostbusters, not Philip Wagner. Just because of... Still, though. The point has been made, though.

It's like, I... Yeah, like, I take his point, but I think it is not impossible to update the... update the themes, to provide a framework that has slightly more modern adornments to it and I think that's what this film is trying

is very much not what a lot of other films like this are trying there's different ways you can evolve a franchise and I think we've seen a bunch of them in the different series we've looked at and I think this is trying something it is trying something it fails but it is trying something

we'll get into it but it's more just I don't think it's not inherently bad taking something that was momentarily popular in the 80s or 90s and updating it if you do it well. I think it's just unfortunately here, it's not done especially well. So yeah, let's get into it and start running through things. Because there is a lot to say, I think, on this film. So the film starts and Arnold Schwarzenegger's name comes on screen even before the title of the film. It's one of the first things you see after production logos. then we get some shots of

the world, a monologue about nuclear destruction we see the nukes go up and we see San Francisco in particular destroyed by nuclear fire this sequence is actually pretty effective and it kind of goes back to the nuclear anxieties that we've discussed

in Terminator 1 and 2 there's a particular shot of like a kid on an airplane as he sees the missiles go up over the clouds that really worked like really really really good image yeah it's a little bit of a cgai fest

but like compared to compared to we spoke at length about the the way salvation kind of completely trivialises how terrified nuclear weaponry actually is this at least re-establishes that right and it firmly puts it alongside the explicit depiction of it in Terminator 2 and the kind of like slightly more implicit anxiety

in Terminator 1 this this is something where straight out the gate actually does it quite well, I think. Yeah, agreed. After the title, we cut to Los Angeles, 2029, and we hear the familiar refrain about how 3 billion people died after Skynet used our neglect weapons against us. And John Connor is about to lead a final assault on Skynet with his right-hand man, Kyle Reese.

Carl Reese is played by Jai Courtney in this film, and, like I said, John Connor is Jason Clark. Kyle has a picture. that I guess is of Sarah Connor. It matches the old Linda Hamilton photo, but this is Amelia Clark. So they're doing this final assault against Skynet. We're back to the kind of traditional hunter killers

from Cameron's films, rather than, you know, the messy future ones they had in Terminator Salvation. So that's something. And these future scenes actually look a lot better than Salvation, fairly video-gamy, but there's lasers and stuff. And it's kind of visually interesting. apart from one extremely dumb shot of a terminator skeleton driving a truck like this is what we said in the last film like why would the machines have

umphropomorphic robots doing that so we see the final assault they deactivate skynet's central core but skynet has already activated a t-800 and sent it back through its time machine there are lots of humans who volunteer to go back but conner picks reese this is kind of a big long section of dramatizing stuff that we were already told in previous films but it kind of needs that build up in order to get to the subversion that it's getting to.

So I don't mind it. This first bit's pretty good. Yeah, I'm all right with it. I mean, you never see, so the original kind of the R&E Terminator that get sent back at time, at this stage anyway, I don't think you see it in any kind of like full

profile or full shot apart from like a distance. And I actually quite like this to be honest with you. I mean, it's, like, I'm kind of, this,

like, seeing things that have happened from a different perspective, like, this sort of like ration on shit, I lack it up, right? Because it's kind of,

to me, it's a way of, and this is where, like, in the initial frames of this film, you could actually be reasonably optimistic because this is a way of

playing on nostalgia, but actually, actually, actually, producing something new, right? Because we know this happened, right? If you've watched the first two films, you know this happened, you know what's going on, right? So you get a little bit of an insider knowledge hit from that. But it also allows you, as a filmmaker, as a creator, to try and do something new. Now, whether that's done particularly, well, I don't know, but like, it's, to me,

it's a slightly more elegant way of doing the whole member berries thing, right? And it's interesting, and at this point also, it's also lead into the film, it's buildup, right? You're not hanging the entire thematic and narrative apparatus of this.

It's very much kind of an establishing thing. But just as Calais gets in the machine and goes back, Matt Smith seeks up behind John Connor and grabs him. and does something to him. Matt Smith, interestingly, is credited as Matthew Smith for this film, and this film only.

Like, he's been in other films where he's just Matt Smith. And he'd already been the doctor by this point on Doctor Who. So I couldn't find out why he's called Matthew Smith in this. The best I could find is a article on Colt Box, which speculates that he's going to be using this. new name for his career going forward. But it doesn't seem to be related to like, you know, screen actors guild rules or anything, where you can't have the same name as someone already in the guild or whatever.

So, don't know. Yeah, so it's not a Michael Keaton and Michael Douglas situation. Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't appear to be. So I'm really not sure why he's Matthew Smith, but he is. And there we go. So we go back with Kyle Reese to Los Angeles 1984. This is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the first Terminator film, the opening scenes.

We see Arnie emerging from the time bubble and looking out over L.A. We see Kyle Reese going back and stealing the unhoused guy's trousers. But things change ever so slightly when Arnie is about to beat up the punks. when an older T-800 comes up and challenges him to a fight and the two-fight. And meanwhile, there's a sniper watching who takes out the young Arnie Terminator, and old Arnie gives a thumbs up to the sniper. I have to be honest, so far, so far I have liked the film. Me too, 100%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is, you know, there's an article I found about digital de-aging technologies in Hollywood cinema. by Christopher Holliday in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. And because there's quite a bit of this digital de-aging on Arnie, obviously to make him look like his 1984 self. And he talks about the kind of nostalgic appeal of these confrontations between younger digital simulation and aged adversary. And he uses the examples of Terminator Genesis, Logan and Gemini Man.

He says it creates a further collision between several opposing forces that support the sustained attraction of de-aging technologies within Hollywood cinema. Old and young, past and present, presence and absence, authentic and artificial, etc., etc. He ultimately argues that digital de-aging is a way of mummifying change and kind of mummifying cinema. Stardom as a phenomenon equally offers a mass cultural engagement and identification with cinema's historical past, rooted in the pleasure of prosphetic representation. The virtual recreation of youth in contemporary cinema is therefore usefully conceptualised as the mummification of change that has already happened,

a commodified memory circulating within Hollywood's advanced capitalist system, or perhaps a digital representation of a star already trapped helplessly in amber by another medium. So, you know, there's something there about Arnie being trapped in this role, even as he's changed career and been governor of California. California at this point, he has had to come back and take on this role again that defined him in the past. He's trapped in amber like this guy says. Cultural change is mummifying, which speaks to the point of, you know, films from the 1980s being regurgitated again and again and again for audiences. But yeah, to speak to like the quality of the film, I'm also enjoying it at this point.

I like this recreation and stuff. I kind of like this subversion of expectations of doing the same thing again, showing the same thing, but it happening differently, or from a different angle, like with the time machine bit. So to talk through this a little more, Kyle Reese is confronted by a cop, but this time the cop who challenges him is a liquid metal terminator.

And the liquid terminator chases him through the clothing store where Calarice hides in the first film and kills some cops before it suddenly gets run over by an armoured van and Amelia Clark, Sarah Connor's driving it and says, come with me if you want to live. And again, this is an example of, like, that's a very obvious sort of like, you know,

call back. But again, up to this point, and I do think this is around about the time where things start to go downhill a little bit, right? But I don't think it drops off a cliff precipice, And I actually don't mind that as a callback, right? It kind of makes sense in the moment. It doesn't pull you out of it, but it gives you a little bit of a kind of insider thing if you've seen the earlier films.

Again, up to this point, I don't think it's bad. I think it's actually done quite well. I also think it's balanced some things quite well, right, because we've spoken about the humor balance in these films a little bit recently, right? So like Terminator 2 You know there's bits of it that don't You know bad to the bad to the bone moment was spoken about I wasn't a huge fan of that But like in general it gets it okay

Terminator 3 you went too far the other way It was ridiculous Terminator 4 It swung the pendulum back way the other way It was way too po-faced Little things like the thumbs up That you know the As we'll soon learn he's referred to Pops the older Arnold Terminator

The thumbs up he gives to say in a corner and then some of the lines that he gets in this sequence coming up where the three of them are now together, Kyle Reese Sayer, Connor. And it's good, to be honest. Like, I actually like it. I think it gets that balance right. Things start to go downhill from there. But at this point, I actually think it's balancing all the various things it wants to do pretty well. I agree.

Yeah, I think I'll talk about the overall structure of the film later and how I feel about what it does with that. But I also enjoy this opening sequence. and the kind of subversion, and bringing in unfamiliar, yet familiar elements in different ways, like the liquid metal terminator appearing, is genuinely a surprise, genuinely a shock. That kind of works. But the next few scenes are a lot of exposition, coupled with action scenes where this T-1000 is coming after them, reactivating the young T-800 and stuff like that. So basically Sarah already knows about Terminators and Skynet.

She calls the old T-800 pops. Carriess is not a fan of him. The T-800 reminds Sarah that she needs to fall in love with Carrease. And the T-800 has aged because his organic components have aged. He doesn't know who sent him back to protect Sarah. He says he's old and not obsolete. The idea of the T-800 aging because his organ is organic. organic components aged came from James Cameron.

He contributed that as a way to explain why Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like that now. So Sarah says the mission is now not to protect her, but to stop Judgment Day by stopping Skynet before it's born. Clyle is also having weird dreams where he sees himself as a little kid saying that Genesis is Skynet. and he's being told that he needs to go to San Francisco 2017. So after they dissolve the liquid metal terminator in acid and dispose of the young T-800, we find that Pops and Sarah have built their own time machine, which they can activate now that they have the chip from the T-800.

So they're going to try and travel to the future. Reese tells them about his dream, and Pops explains that those are actually his memories, from another timeline. He was in a nexus point when John Connor was attacked and that has diverged his memories of different timelines.

So Sarah and Reese disagree about whether to go out in 1997 or 2017 and he persuades her with some nonsense about their hands and straight lines which will come into play later. And as I watch the film

I find myself saying I don't care, shit or get off the pot. choose one. Yeah. By this point in the film, it's clear that it's kind of become endless scenes of characters

rehashing the previous films and rehashing what's happened in this film and all of this is against the background of some flirtatious connection between Reese and Sarah that doesn't actually come through because the characters don't have much chemistry together. But it's a lot of explaining things and there's going to be a lot more explaining things seen

where characters, including characters who are antagonistic to one another, just stand around and explain things to one another. We're going to get a lot of that. Yeah, basically it's at this point, it starts to fall into the trap that I think some time travel movies do, where it gets very caught up in explaining the mechanics of the time travel. Now, if it's simple, that's fine, right? Because it gets everybody on the same page.

If it's complex, which frankly, through its own making, this one kind of is, right? But we'll maybe get into that a little bit more later. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you need the audience and the characters to be confused as each other in my view, right? because if the confusion and the feeling of disorientation is what you're wanting to get across, then that can work, right? And when you get caught up in the mechanics of it, that's part of the pleasure of it really, is trying to figure it out with the characters.

Here, the problem is it's complex, it's not particularly interesting, and these characters, especially the T-800, are explaining this as if it's as simple as Newton's laws of motion, you know? and this is something that's happened well a lot of things that are involved in time travel right you see it in the MCU when it's got into like some of it was multiverse stuff in recent years

and various other points this idea of nexus points right they're all obsessed with nexus points and this one really leans into it and the thing is the time travel stuff beyond this and there will be more of this right

I don't actually know sitting here right now if it makes sense if it is logically consistent. But I think more damningly, I don't care to figure it out. Yeah. I don't want to figure it out, right? These characters have bored me of it

already through this sequence here, basically. An interview with the director, Alan Taylor, by Jen Yamato in The Daily Beast, which is simply titled Terminator Genesis Director Alan Taylor knows his movie makes no damn sense. So this is about how there's so many questions coming out of it, that aren't answered and how the timeline stuff really doesn't work. So there is a line later in the film where J.K. Simmons says,

what you're doing seems really complicated, and Sarah Connor just says, we're here to save the world, and he says, I can work with that. And that is Alan Taylor. He says, using humour to sort of skate over it. He says, it's a way of saying, you may not get this, but who cares? keep going. And yes and no. Because like you say,

I like convoluted time travel stuff. I like a time travel film. You know, bootstrap paradox and all that. The previous films were all about what is called the Novikov self-consistency principle, where the idea is if you go back in time, anything you do will always have had to happen. so Kyle East goes back in time

he had to do that in order to become the father of the person who sent him back in time it is self-consistent the timeline is fixed but there's also like back to the future rules where if you go back you can rewrite the timeline or whatever and this is kind of doing a combination

of back to the future rules but also multiverse stuff with like alternate timelines existing simultaneously and whatever And I think this is where it gets caught up in the whole nexus point thing, right? Because it wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to have the original one and that's why it is.

But actually, we want to pour everything over to this parallel thing where we can change it now as well. And it, you know, it starts to get itself very mixed up. And I think the thing is, again, all of this can be fine, right? And you can have something that, frankly, from a sort of like, you know, trying to figure out logically in your head doesn't make sense. it doesn't matter sometimes if it doesn't make sense but the film needs to have and I'm talking about films specifically here right

the films need to have a momentum and engagement to overshadow that and this film for better or worse at this point and I'm thinking of a lot of the action sequences around the T-1000 right or this new T-1-000 they don't have that

right it doesn't have the verve and the momentum of in particular Terminator too, but also the original Terminator, which had a completely different vibe to this, right? But this film does not have that, therefore all it has to fall back

on is a lot of this time travel, mumbo, jumbo, exposition conversations, and it just at the point where it's kind of set itself up quite well, it sucks all the energy, actually. It really does. It's just these endless explanation scenes. Like,

if your script requires this many explanation scenes, then your script's probably too convoluted or there's a better way to express all this that isn't just characters standing next to one another and talking

yeah yeah so Reese does some exposition and talks about John Connor and watches Sarah's shadow as she strips off and puts on different clothes

there's kind of there's a real pivot in this film back towards Sarah Connor as a protagonist of the franchise so John Connor is in awe of his mother and the French

has moved from Sarah to John over previous films, and now it's firmly going back to Sarah Connor as a protagonist. But she's a lot more feminized than Linda Hamilton's portrayal. She's a lot more, she wears a low-cut top for quite a lot of the film, but she is also, and she's overtly sexualized, like in this film where she's stripping off, and Kyle is watching her shadow and whatnot. But she's also more kind of dynamic and, is a feminized hero who is also

an action hero, an action heroine. So it's kind of pulling at two poles. You know, it's not doing the James Cameron thing where a woman is made into a hero by becoming more masculine, which happens in aliens and Terminator 2. You know, we've discussed this in relation to, what's the name, Rebecca Ferguson in the Mission Impossible films,

where she is more feminized, but he's also an action hero. And it's interesting because she needs to kind of evoke, this is Amelia Clark here, and I don't know if her performance is quite up to this, right, or whether she's just completely hamstrung by the script

that we've already spoken about. We can argue to tell us about which one it is. I think the Sarah Connor character here though is actually quite interesting and a film where it actually kind of reminds me a little bit of and I'm going to go into the weeds here is looper right and the thing that I found interesting about looper right and this is more from an actor standpoint was so you had Joseph Gordon Levitt playing a young version of Bruce Willis and what I found interesting was he was playing a version of Bruce Willis that never existed right?

he was playing a young version of Bruce Willis the action star, right? When in reality, a young Bruce Willis was, you know, it was comedy, he was moonlighting, right? So he was kind of like creating this character out of nothing based upon, you know, extrapolating backwards from an actor we know. To an extent this character is a little bit like that, right? It's presenting a version of Sarah Connor, and by implication of a little bit. but, you know, Linda Hamilton's performance, that doesn't exist, right? Because at this point, in, you know, the original Terminator story, she was just a waitress in Los Angeles, right? That's, that was her thing. And, you know, we've been discussing the opening of that film, kind of like,

you know, her kind of like mannerisms and behavior. And this is totally different, right? But it's, it's almost like they've taken the, they've taken the Terminator to Sarah Connor. and extrapolated backwards. Like, what if she'd had to have something more akin to that mindset earlier in their life? And it's actually quite an interesting idea, right? And I think there's a lot of stuff to run with there. I think because of the script

and the way it gets caught up in the time travel stuff and Amelia Clark's performance, or, you know, as I said, maybe she's hamstrung by the script a little bit. I don't think it really manages to do a lot with it. But in essence, it's actually quite an interesting idea. I agree. I think the treatment of Sarah...

in these initial scenes is interesting. It is like, what if her life had gone down a different path? What if her, you know, her parents had been killed and she was raised by this T-800? Is an interesting idea. And there is a particularly, for me, interesting moment during these discussions when Sarah tells Kyle that she doesn't want to wait around to be locked in a room to birth the Messiah of humanity. She wants to be defined by more than procreation.

She wants to be defined as something more than just a mother. And for me, this kind of links to, like, modern ideas of feminism. Like Helen Hester in her book, Zeno feminism, argues that when we think of the future, in terms of politics, we largely think of cultures based around children, because children are the future, right? But these are ideologies that are hetero and homonormative. She says the only proportionate response to this state of affairs is refusal.

The refusal of politics, the refusal of the future, the refusal of the child. Those beyond the sanctified confines of heteronormativity are to embrace the death drive and to become reproductive futurism has already decided that they are, just a bunch of selfish quares. So there's this kind of feminist and queer reading of what Sarah's doing in this scene where she is refusing to have a child. She is refusing the future that is pressed upon her by the kind of

patriarchal norms represented by Reese. But then the film don't do anything with that. That line of the engine ends here because she ultimately ends up pulling in love with Carlis anyway. So it's, yeah. Yeah, and it's interesting because there's so many roads that I thought it was kind of going to go down,

especially when it says this bit, because when you think about these slightly Christ-like presentations of John Connor beforehand and then you cast you cast her as the virgin mother to some extent right, you know, it's this idea of rejecting the very male

focused story of salvation. I mean, that's the small S, not the previous film, right? And recasting that, but then it doesn't really do anything with it, because it kind of wants some cake and eat it. And it's just, and then you put that with it having the weird genesis spelling for the title and it's like you think it's going to do something clever and then it just doesn't

do you know what it gestures towards something clever it gestures towards the ideas that the script has that fully run out of steam around this point you know I might as well discharge my thoughts now I like how this film recontextualizes the franchise and then subverts things. In my mind, it's like,

it's got this whiteboard full of all the convoluted Terminator stuff from previous franchises. And then in those first few scenes, it just wipes the whiteboard. And it's really exciting because you've got this blank page where you can do anything. And then it just draws the same thing that was already on there.

Like, you have the same... Maybe with a slightly nicer board. You've got the same dynamic between Kyle and Sarah. You have the same police station raid, you have the same sneaking into cyberdine to destroy it, you had the chance to do something interesting and new and you whiffed it, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know, it has this opportunity to subvert things and do things differently, and continually from this point onwards, it just does the same things we've already seen. So, they go through the time machine, they get naked and go through the time machine. Pops can't go through the time machine because his hand is no longer organic. He got his skin ripped off or whatever. So they go through time and space, I guess, to San Francisco 2017, because they were in L.A. They arrived naked on the freeway, they immediately get arrested. Pops was supposed to meet them but didn't.

His hair's a little grayer now, but he was there too. Then we have another scene of rehashing where Riesasks there how she got Pops. It was 1973 and a T-1000 went back to kill Sarah. And the words that Reese used earlier about the straight line and whatnot were words that were used by Sarah's dad as he died. So she trusts him because he knew these words, whatever. There's some detectives who are looking into the arrival of these two naked people on the freeway. J.K. Simmons is one of them. He has seen the sphere.

He says that it proves his madcap theory is about time travel. or whatever and he reveals that he's the uniformed cop that re-saved in 1984 and he believes all their stories

about being from the future meanwhile they get patched up and a nurse explains that Genesis is some new kind of platform an operating system that will connect his digital life he can't wait

I fucking hate this little exchange I hate it it's clumsy it is just it's it's It's just, I mean, even in the bits I like, some of the dialogue was pretty wooden, right? I mean, the initial set-up stages, I kind of let it away with it because it was a setup point, but, you know, some horrendous dialogue in there. This is terrible, right?

This is, like, this is your moment. This is where you're saying what the kind of, the antagonist of the film is, and it's delivered as this, like, little off-hand line which is not developed. And again, I don't want to be too cinema sins about it, but the problem is when something like this pulls you out of the film, it's a problem, right? Can somebody explain to me why this, like, it's obviously like a multi-platform operating system or something? Why would this already be integrated with the military? Yeah, so there's a, like why? There's a news show where Danny Dyson of Cyberdine, who I guess is my old's Dyson's son, introduces Genesis,

and he says it's already integrated into military systems. And like, the software makes no sense. It is, it's everything. It's a new operating system. It's like a social media thing. It's controlling the military. They want it to be everything. And this comes to how they're recontextualizing Skynet in this film

and turning it into a consumer product rather than a military technology. So they're changing it from this Cold War idea of military technology to making it a consumer product. So there's a scene coming up where John Connor will say this out loud. He'll say like, oh, people are on their phones so much these days. People are so locked in. People are already bringing about their own destruction. And the idea is that you're blaming the public now for Skynet because people want consumer technology.

there's another article by oh this is the Philip Vegner article which I mentioned earlier talking about how the transplant from L.A. to San Francisco also speaks to this because they're transplanting to like Silicon Valley where consumer technologies and consumer software is developed. It's weird

this thing. It also speaks to a little bit I think. Maybe this is not the place to bring this up, right? But I think because this is where Genesis kind of like starts actually become a bit more obvious, maybe it is, it's where I feel like reality has started

to move ahead. And this is something that I'll talk a little bit more about with the next film, right? But I think this is a point where reality has started to move ahead of this series of films' understanding

of the horror is too strong a word, but creeping dread of technology. This is a very simplistic, crayon-rendered understanding of how technology can undermine humanity. And this is weird, like, there was potential for something interesting here, right?

Because if you think about it, it's kind of like humans' relationship to the technology they create, right? In the Cold War and nuclear technology, all this is through the first two films, and it's an interesting base note, if you like, to kind of like the action that the film goes through. However, here, you have to put the context of the Snowden, the Edward Snowden stuff, right,

and all the data gathering on, like, private citizens, hit, like, what, maybe two years before this film, something like that, right? So the idea that we're going through this, like, blaming consumers for wanting consumer technology and that being the nexus point at which people like start to undermine themselves with technology is really

it's a really poor understanding of how this works right it's taken a very bottom up vision here when I think it should be more top down right the horror in the modern world is the way in which the way in which authorities and potential bad actors gather data that has been consensually given

but not for the purposes that it is been, it was given for. And that's what the Snowden stuff you know, there's a lot going on there, but that's one of the key things about it. It was like I didn't sign up for this, right? Whereas this is kind of flipping on its head and it's trying to indicate, well actually

it is what you sign down for. And I don't think that's true. I don't think that's accurate. And I think it's a very poor understanding of why this stuff could be so insidious, right? And I think it fatally undermines any themes that the film would have been building to at this point, right? And there are all sorts of technical issues with the film from here.

Like, I don't think the action scenes have worked particularly well. And, you know, the dialogue continues to be very stilted and exposition heavy. But this is the point, the Genesis concept, this is the point where the film starts to lose any residence that I think it could have had. it doesn't understand how to update the themes of the first two films for the modern age. It tries to do it here, but I think it is fatally flawed. Yeah, so Philip Vegner says as much. He says the lesson of the film then is not that it will be by way of the state, but rather the market, embodied here by software or the abstraction of information,

that a complete end frame by an alienation through technology will take place. He says, in other words, what has the last is. ultimately become obsolete, Terminator Genesis underscores are the geopolitical concerns that had animated the Cold War period, and which in retrospect we realise continue on in undead fashion throughout the long 1990s and the opening decade of the new millennium. So he's saying it's not the state that's going to cause the apocalypse now, it's the market. I think the film is saying, like you've just said, that it's people, that it's the public, that is the body politic who will cause this, this, this, this, this, this destruction through their own desire for consumer technology. And I think that is a bad reading.

I think that's bad politics because like you say, it is, you know, elites, it is companies, it is leaders who are pushing these things. It's not people's fault for having phones. Like that's, that's, like you say, a child drawing of how technology impacts us. That's nonsense. But the film is really. leaning into that by having John Connor say out loud

these people are inviting their own extinction in through the front door over a shot of someone looking at a phone I mean it would be a bit like frame like you know some one of these films that's kind of like based in the idea of a future where the earth is destroyed it would be like going back to a flashback

there and blaming on individual people not recycling rather than you know all the other shit like it's basically the it's basically the equivalent of that and it's a really it really does undermine because here's the thing, right? This entire film

and the entire series is based around the difference that one person can make, right? It's, you know, that's the figure that John Conner has, you know, embodied throughout these films and to a lesser extent, Sarah Connor as well, right? And that balance has changed kind of like depending on the

film in question. But here's the thing, right? If we're all doomed and we're all such kind of like idiots that we're just going to doom our ourselves anyway. What's the point of any of these people? Like, what is the point in having an inspiration figure? Apparently, we're also dumb. It's a strange concept. It's really a strange concept.

And I think there are other things about it that are, that don't really work, and we'll get into that as we kind of like get into the final stretch of the film. But like, this is the point where this is the point where it goes off a cliff, right? The opening of the film, I think, works quite well, I actually quite liked it.

Then it starts to go downhill, a lot of exposition, a lot of clunkiness, and this is the point where it starts to go off a cliff basically. Yeah, yeah. All of which is to say, like, they simultaneously need Genesis to be a consumer technology so that people are to blame for it,

which is a kind of thematic re-rendering of the political anxieties of the moment, and also a military technology, because the film requires that Skynet sets off nukes to cause the apocalypse. So it needs to be both ways. It doesn't work. It doesn't make sense.

but I mean that's Dury Goer from the film for this point on So They're handcuffed to hospital beds And suddenly John Connor appears in the room John Connor's wearing a suit You know he's not the grizzled military leader That we've seen in the past two films

And Sarah asked John to prove his John And not a shapesifting robot He tells her that she likes Elton John And Rocket Man specifically Do we hear Rocket Man in the film? No, don't be silly but they mentioned that I guess that's where she got the name John

but also from Kyle Reese telling her that in the past whatever I actually really want to take some of the fight scenes and put them to Saturday nights all right for fighting now throwing it in over the credits couldn't have hurt if you're going to reference it so they escape

John makes his social commentary like I've just said John reveals to Reese that Reese is his dad, which surprises Reese because he didn't know that. And then Pops appears and he shoots John, but John's blood is all funky, and he's a Terminator.

This is another... Another exposition scene, where these people who want to kill one another just stand around explaining things. So John explains that he was changed by SkyNet in the future and he's like nanobots or something now. I think they say

every cell of his human body is a machine, so he's part machine, part human. Kind of. He was sent back to 2014 to safeguard Skynet's creation. So they fight in this hospital car park. They eventually trap John in an MRI machine because he's still susceptible to big magnets. There's a kind of edible element to this now

where the father is killing the son and the son wants to kill the father and whatnot. It all gets quite convoluted and I'll discuss some of that later. Pops is also clearly aging. He has to pop his knee back into place. Then we cut to Cyberdine, where Miles Dyson is congratulating John Connor and his breakthroughs.

So he gets away from the MRI machine or whatever. They're also building the time machine in the basement. The Dysons do a big outdoor event, advertising Genesis pre-orders, and they reveal that Genesis has a weird little boy avatar. this is fucking weird like this

this this this the film's really just gone off the deep end at this point like the Genesis slash sky net

right because there's never 100% clear what we should be remembering to it at this point as well as little

little Calorie says Genesis is Skynet they're the same thing you know whatever yeah I admit you know

it's just it's a it's a weird one right but this kind of like personification of it is like a faceless child hologram with a weird sort of child voice. It's weird. It's weird and I do not get it. I do not get it. Like are they going for something kind of like, kind of like, you know, a naive, innocent seeming intrusion into our lives is actually a sinister. Like, is that what they're going for? I don't know. I feel like there's kind of like it's unnecessary. It's very unnecessary, and it doesn't really add anything to this, to be perfectly honest.

It's just weird. Put this way, in the real world, right, this thing's meant to be on everybody's phones and everybody's super excited about it. If this is how you advertised it and marketed it, like, good God, nobody would sign up for it. This would fall flat on its arse straight away. Like, it's weird. It's just weird. An outdoor event with like 20 people looking at your screen. There's a continual countdown in these shots as well of like when pre-orders are going live or whatever.

But Reese Sarah and Pops go to a weapons cache. Reese and Pops silently compete to load bullets until Pops hand spasms to show he's aging and he has these all abilities. That's actually a pretty effective scene. Like that kind of silent work, silent scene works for me. Notably because there's no dialogue. But like... think it's good. I like this dynamic between Reese and Pops that is generally, generally not very good, but is good in this scene. So they have a plan to blow up the Cyberdine campus, defeat John Connor.

Sarah tells Reese that they can't fall in love because of the monster that John has become. They can't produce John. Another interesting idea that isn't developed. Because they just end up falling in love anyway. and then John turns up at the weapons cache he says he won't stop until Scanet rules they blow him up they blow up the weapons cash but fortunately right outside the weapons cash there's a school trip to the weapons cash

a very big school trip as well there's multiple buses so yeah they've hidden their weapons in the best place possible a place overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge where school trips go regularly. So the gang

steal one of the school buses despite smaller cars being right there. And it's not because they're filling it up with weapons because they're on the run from John. John gives chase on a motorbike. There's a thrilling fight. The bus heads on to the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's an action scene where the bus flips over end over end, like in Terminator 3 and the Dark Night. And it's overshadowed by the latter in particular. It's overshadowed by the dark night. something comes out after it.

This one looks more CG. I don't know what they did to achieve it, but yeah. And then they get caught dangling over the bay, which is a bit like that scene with the trailers in the Lost World. So we have an action scene reminiscent of the Dark Night. We have an ending action bit reminiscent of the Lost World. It all feels quite done before. Yeah.

I hear us get arrested. There's a brief montage to Bad Boys, of them getting mugshots, getting interrogated. Not a completely jarring moment for me. Completely at odds of the tone of the film at this point. It's weird. For unfathomable reasons, J.K. Simmons invites a young Kyle Reese

to go see old Kyle Reese being interrogated by the cops. J.K. Simmons believes his story, so he knows what he's doing. Yeah, and he doesn't think this would be an incredible. incredibly traumatic thing to put a prepubescent child through. Like, it's just bizarre. It's like, it's presented as this, like, oh yeah, he knows what's up.

He knows what he's doing. No, he doesn't. He's an idiot. This is deeply traumatizing. Even if you don't believe it, and you believe it's like identity theft, taking the kid to see the person who's stolen his identity is a weird move. Incidentally, one of the, I believe one of the spin-offs of this film was going to be about J.K. Simmons' character.

So he's going to have a lot more to do. He would have had a lot more involvement in the new trilogy. But obviously that was all cancelled. So never mind. He's good in this, but he's kind of wasted. He didn't do a lot. Anyway, one of the detectives in the police station is John in disguise. And Pops recognizes him and goes to fight him.

J.K. Simmons frees Sarah and Sarah goes to save the Reese family, including the little kid that she will one day sleep with. So this is where all this kind of Edipal time travel stuff gets a little too gnarly for me. Because it all gets a little edible and weird. She teaches him the straight line thing that he knew back in 1984, and that is significant for getting them, you know, safe and whatnot, learning to trust one another. But she gets so involved with this kid in a way I find creepy.

It's a bit weird. Especially at the end, especially at the end where she doesn't need to go up to the kid and say hi, but she does. And it feels odd. Yeah, it's weird. So our heroes steal a coast guard helicopter, they head to Cyberdine, John pursues in a helicopter. At some point, Pop says, I'll be back and jumps out of the helicopter. So recent say I get to Cyberdine, and they talk to this child avatar of Genesis, which is a bit like arguing with an LLM, it's pointless.

Then they have 11 minutes to blow up Cyberdine, because Skynet is evolving. Genesis is evolving now. As demonstrated by the hologram. growing, I suppose to it, like it becomes a teen, it becomes prepubescent, then a teenager, then a young adult, and then... I think Matt Smith. That's right, he grows up

and he's eventually Matt Smith, but it takes a while to get there. Sarah is captured by John, but Popps can't kill her, and neither can John, which leaves Rees was the only person who can press the detonator. John dissolves onto him, which destroys the detonator, and John and Pop's fight with John doing all kind of

fancy, shifty moves, because he's basically like robot dust. John calls Pops a relic from a deleted timeline. So yeah, Matt Smith has Skynet's avatar continues to argue with Reese and Sarah. Our heroes all come together to beat up John, their son and Pops delivers the Cudegra by holding John inside the time machine while Reese turns it on and it'll tear them both apart because they're not made of organic material. I think that's pretty elegant. I like the idea of having like a Chekhov's time machine which will tear apart non-organic material and then using it in the conclusion as a way to destroy this

unkillable thing. That kind of works. I don't mind that. Pops is torn apart and his head sinks into the liquid metal gear which is being used to make T-1,000s. So Cyberstein explodes. Reach and Sarah make it to a bunker. Pops gets them out because his control chip from his head merged with the liquid metal so he's a T-1000 now. Cool. That'll be great in future films. And then yeah, Sarah takes a trip to see young Kyle Reese. Old Kyle talks to young Kyle and passes on the message that he needs to relay to himself in the future for his dream timeline memories and then Sarah and Kyle Kiss. In front of both Pops and the young Kyle Reese who is just meters away. And then it's over. Skynet is gone. There's a voice whoever that tells us the future is not set

and there's many roads, blah, blah, blah. Until a mid-credit scene of SkyNet's avatar looking at some weird red orb below Cyberdine. Dun-dun-dun. Everything about this little codi hate.

It's very... It's very... It's also... It's also so wishy, what are she nods? It doesn't try to tie up, like, really any of the thieves. I've got a few quotes around.

One road has become many. Though many questions remain, it was like, yeah, because she didn't bloody answer anything. Like, this is just all nodded. Like, it's just like, it's like, it's like, it got to the end of it, and it realized that it was both boring

and didn't make any logical sense. And it's like, oh, it's okay, we can just say, like, you know, anything can happen that, like, you know, you know, do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-you-know, good God. I read somewhere, I can't remember where, that this was paid off in Terminator Genesis, colon, future war, which was an MMO strategy game for the mobile phone. Oh, God.

So I'm not sure if it is, or if that was intended to be a sequel hook or whatever. I think probably a sequel hook for these sequels that never got made. but yeah I mean the sequels were going to answer the question like who sent Pops back in time which is never revealed in the film how did Skynet get it together to change John into what he gets changed into those questions were going to be answered and the two sequels the two sequels were going to be filmed back to back but this film underperformed and so they didn't get made. The second film,

Jason Clark, says, was going to be about John Connor after becoming Part Machine. It was about John's journey after Skynet grabs him by the Time Machine, and his journey to how he becomes I guess the villain of the first film.

He says it's a bummer that we didn't get to do that. Yeah, it's a weird one, this one, because I feel like, this film's reputation these days. because we're looking at this over a decade since it came out now and this film's reputation is not good

right what I will say is I do think it is attempting something more interesting than either for me right it is attempting something more interesting than Terminator 3 or Terminator

Salvation I think it falls flat on its face and it doesn't execute it very well I am at least more interested in some of the ideas that it sets up in kind of its first act. Yeah, I am too. I was surprised to see, this is the lowest rated Terminator film on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. It has 26% on Rotten Tomatoes and 38 on Metacritic, compared to 33% for Rottenmottos and 49 on Metacritic for Salvation. And I do think I enjoyed this more than Salvation.

I think, like you say, it is setting up some interesting things. It's doing this interesting thing for me, where it's wiping the whiteboard at the start of the film. It falls off a cliff and it just recreates what was previously on the whiteboard, which is a waste of time. But it starts well and it has some interesting ideas. They aren't developed in any way, interestingly, and it falls apart and it turns into endless exposition scenes interspersed with fine action. But it's not good. It's just fine.

Yeah. And I think thinking about when this came out, right? So 2015. And, you know, as I say, I don't want to jump the gun on the discussion about dark fate that we'll do after this. But I think part of the issue is is that reality is moving head of these films, right? it is trying to present a picture of an artificial intelligence and technology-driven trajectory towards dystopia

which fundamentally mismatches what is actually going on in the world right and if you go back to the original Terminator or even Terminator 2 it kind of links up with the world situation at that time it hooks into an anxiety this is attempting to do the same thing, and this is what's quite interesting about it, but it's got its perspective all wrong, in my view, right? And that, you know, there was a feeling in the first two films of kind of the underlying anxiety that comes from powers above you as an individual, or even you as a kind of society of people, and the effect that that I could have over it, and the lack of control that you have, right? Here it flips that on its head and it doesn't make sense, right? It's indicating that there is some sort of consumer control over this. Yeah. Where it's, it just doesn't work.

And I find it also a little bit interesting, this kind of like this integration with the military of Genesis, because this is even something that, this is even something that the whole sky net thing, that Terminator 3 actually did bear, right? Because, you know, the, it's, Claire Daines's father, right, the military leader, he hesitates before letting the AI into the system. Yes. Right. And there's a lot of talk about wanting to retain a human in the loop and let's not give over. And, you know, and ultimately it does.

And like, you know, that film has its problems. Of course it does. But it at least understood that aspect of it, right? You're giving over control to something, right? And then the conversation then becomes, well, what is the motivation of, you? either the thing you're giving the control over to or the people who created it, right? Here, it completely flips it on its head and thus undermines the concept. Yes.

The people to blame are the people who install Genesis on their phones. Those are the people to blame here. The consumer. It doesn't really look to interrogate in any way the role of Cybertine systems in this, actually, right? That's completely overlooked here, and there's none of the kind of like interest about kind of like Miles Dyson grappling with the idea of what his creation would become

in Terminator 2 and this sort of thing. All of that is skirted over. All of it is completely skirted over. Again, Deo Ocineye has a role as Danny Dyson in this film. He would have had a bigger role in the second film, they say, you know, where

John is infiltrating Cyberdine and whatever. So, you know, charitably, maybe some of that human interest, that human ideas would have come through in the second film. But then make it. So, you know, we have to judge this film on what it is. Yeah, it sets up interesting things, but then it's little things like this where I feel like it just, it doesn't have, it doesn't have the intelligence to really hook on to something memorable, right? And it could get away with this if it was, the action scenes were better,

or there was anything more memorable about it, kind of like the physical, technical craft of it, but unfortunately, there isn't really, you know. Yeah, it's quite messy. It's quite convoluted. It is a bad script, and Alan Taylor did not manage to fix it. He had a terrible time making the film.

Amelia Clark had worked with him on Game of Thrones, and she said on this film that he was not the director I remembered. He didn't have a good time, no one had a good time. He says that he lost the will. to make movies and to live as a director while making this film. It was so disastrous that a nearby crew who were filming Fantastic Four,

the one with you know, Myelho and Michael Jordan, yeah, had jackets made. The crew had jackets made that said, at least we're not on Terminator. Went, it's a bold given what happened with that film.

When Pan Tawastic are making fun of you. You've lost. And James Cameron didn't like... It's Josh Trank even made a film since then. Who knows? I don't know. I don't think so. James Cameron didn't like it either.

During the run-up to the film coming out, he said that he liked it. He said the franchise had been re-evigorated. Later, he said, in an interview with Orlando Porfit, I think it's rarely widely known that I don't have a lot of respect for the films that were made later. He added that he was complimentary about Terminator Genesis, in the run-up to its release for Arnold's sake,

because he is a close friend. He has been a mate of mine since 33 years ago, so I was always supportive and never too negative, but they didn't work for me for various reasons. So, yeah, said he liked it before it came out, and said he didn't like it in reality. It's a bold move to come out and say, you know, anything I talk about in the future,

there's a risk I'm full of shit. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm only doing this because I'm friends with Arnold Yeah, I don't think there's much more to say I think this tries to be Like, it tries to do a kind of Star Trek into darkness Is what I read in various Articles and things

It's trying to be Star Trek into darkness Where it's taking familiar elements And putting them together in a different way And I don't think it But I don't think it does do that It starts with that promise, but then just puts the elements together in the same way. And I guess Into Darkness did that as well, you know, it ultimately is Kahn, and Kahn kills one of Kirk and Spock, and then they come back to life. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, because we're talking about franchises and sequels and it's come up before, right?

So it won't come up to any surprise to anybody. I hate Star Trek. You hate Interd Darkness, yeah. I hate it. I quite like, or at least I enjoyed the Kelvin timeline star-tratt, is that what we're calling it? You're the Trekkie. Yes, the JJ Abraham's films are the Kelvin timeline,

which starts a new timeline from the moment that Nero goes back and blah, blah, blah. So the 2009 Star Trek, right in there, I remember quite enjoying it, And I would actually say what this film, Terminator Genesis, ends up doing is it wants to be Star Trek 2009. It ends up being Star Trek into darkness, right? Because I think what that, what that JJ even Star Trek did quite well was, it's kind of what you said, right? It didn't wipe the whiteboard clean, but it maybe wiped half of it off and said, right, okay, that's still over here. We've still got this. but because of this

time travel mumbo-jumbo-jumbo stuff we can now tell new stories and that's what we're going to do and it then focused on it then focused on kind of like recreating engaging chemistry with the characters and decent secret and you know and you can argue to us about how well

that film did it but I think that aspect of it it did quite well that's what this film tries to do but what it actually ends up doing is basically just kind of leaning on previous iconography the way into darkness did with

car, like redoing the death scene. So you can see what's wanting to do, I think, but in the same way that the themes don't work, it just kind of gets it wrong, and it ends up undermining itself totally as the point, right? You know, it gets bogged down exposition

in the same way that I think into darkness did a little bit and leaning on established kind of iconography, didn't focus on chemistry because basically one thing we haven't really touched on is there's not really a lot of chemistry between jai courtney and emilia clark i was just about to say we haven't really talked about the cast and the performances and it feels like there's just not a lot to say like they both both courtney and uh clark lack the presence of michael bain and linda hamilton

they like the chemistry of those two and they just don't look as good on screen like they look a lot younger. They look very young compared to, I think, Michael Bain and Linda Hamilton. Yeah, Amelia Clark especially, actually. Yeah. Which I found an intro, which I find an odd one. I mean, maybe it's something to do with

you know, just fashion and... I think it's, yeah, fashion how she's made up. I think she's shorter than Linda Hamilton which comes through. But, yeah, they look a lot younger and they look a lot shinier. Yeah, and I think it works

poorly, it works poorly for the Kyle Rees character in particular. Like, he's gone from this sort of, like, scrawny, wiry, sort of, you know, almost twitchy guy. Like, you know, athletic, but certainly not, you know, to kind of like, basically, I mean, like, Giancourtney, I mean, like, he's, like, halfway towards being the T-800. Yeah, he's a big, big, fee, boy. And it's weird, and it undermines that contrast. Like, it's very, it's very odd.

Yeah, unlike Anton Yeltsin, who I said I liked in Salvation, because I think he gets across that wiring anxiety of the original Cowies. But also Arnie, like, Arnie in this film is certainly there, but he has surprisingly little presence. Like, for me, I think he has less presence than T-3. You know, he has more than top billing. He appears before the title, but he's on screen surprisingly little, and I don't think he does much with it

he doesn't seem to have much personality with it Yeah I would like to have seen more because I do think it was potential here because there's one moment in particular in his performance where I was actually I actually quite liked it and it was when

Kyle Reese and Sir Connor travel forward to Is it 2017? Yes, 2017. Right and he's taking what they deem the long way round, right? He hasn't been able to go in the time machine because his arm was damaged,

so he's basically to stay there for 20 or years, right? And it's a nice idea. It provides a way to kind of, like, present that character, AJ. And there's just this moment after the time travel where he almost, you know, and he's been acting as a guardian to Sarah Connor, and there's a line where he says, sort of like, you're not a suitable guardian,

you know, to Kyle Reese, right? And there's just this one moment where he looks, not in this kind of, like, very obvious way, and a quite machine an arnie-like way he looks a little bereft right there's this moment of silence and it works really well

it's actually an interesting thing that speaks to the way that that machine has humanised a little over time right right there's this hint of what could have been a good performance but you're right he doesn't get a lot of time or things to work with and that's a shame given that I see that moment

there was something there there's a pithos to that idea of this machine continually living and he will have to spend 30 years on his own waiting for these humans to return that's interesting it doesn't show that because it goes from this brief moment like you say of him looking somewhat bereft cut to 2017 and he's there and he's ready to intercept or whatever or not as the case may be fucking up completely for reasons that are still not but yeah I just don't

honey just doesn't seem to he seems to be phoning it in I think is what I'm saying yeah I don't know I know I I I'm good I would disagree I think it's the script again right

there's no there's no room for it because they're doing all this exposition nonsense and you know bond villainy explanations of evil plans and things because the moments he does get I actually think are quite like you know, in particular kind of a lot of stuff in the early section that I liked. He's given stuff to do and I think it's good. All the sort of like, you know, arguing with Kyle Reese puts us at a strategic disadvantage.

And like some of the stuff are in like Kyle Reese kind of like not engaging with the very monotonous matter-of-fact delivery. And, you know, Sarah Connor kind of like jumping up against sort of like the inquiries like, have you metage yet? And this sort of, like to me that actually kind of works. and that's part of the thing where I think that the humour balance works well at the start. I think where your thing comes in where he's kind of folding it in,

he's later in the film. He's not really given anything to do, apart from a CG version of them jump at a helicopter and the CG version of them get tossed around to the time machine and the CG version get chipped it. There's nothing there for them, you know? And because of the film's reliance on...

There's no practical fighting in the way that there was in the first and the second. one, you know, like it doesn't have that same tactility to it, so you don't get any of his physical performance in it. So to that extent, you're right, he is phoning it in later in, because I think he, as an actor, is kind of

superfluous to proceedings from a certain point. Yeah, he doesn't really get the kind of emotional arc that he gets in Terminator 2. You know, he starts already bonded with Sarah, and he ends, bonded with

Sarah. Like, there's not the same movement as in Terminator 2. So, yeah, it's a shame. It doesn't really work, and there's a lot about the film that doesn't work. That's a shame, because I do think I was a better idea than either of the two immediate predecessors. Yeah, it starts off well. I think part of the problem is they become overloaded with being a foundation for a free film

series. Like, you said at the start, if they just made a film and then build on it later, that would be better. That would be the better approach. But to start thinking, oh, this has to set up three whole films. So we need to leave plenty of dangling hooks and mysteries and blah, blah, blah. It's just too much baggage for the script to carry. Yeah, and also over-explain a lot of the time trials, so we're not doing it in the hypothetical. second film. So it falls apart. It underperformed and the sequels and a TV spin-off were cancelled. And then, I'm not going to say the series lies fallow, because it's only 2019 when Terminator Dark Fate comes out. So the rights revert to James Cameron at a certain point, and he produces Terminator Dark Fate.

Of the films that we've covered so far and this is the most disappointing, in my view, right? because there is a kernel of a good... There are kernels of good ideas here that didn't exist in Terminator 3 that didn't exist in salvation. I am more interested in what this film wanted to do and that makes it a more disappointing end result. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom

in that respect, where I said it had a lot of interesting ideas especially at the start about kind of extinction and the Anthropocene and stuff like that that fall apart when it goes to this, house, whether just a dinosaur running around the house and stuff. It falls apart, but it has some interesting ideas. So I kind of respect it for that.

And this works in the same way, where it starts well, but falls apart precipitously. Yeah. So it's a weird one. I don't think it deserves its reputation. No, I mean, we'll discuss our rankings in the final episode, as we always do. But I think...

I don't know if it deserves a reappraisal. lighter, but... No, I think I'm going to struggle with place in this, because it... It's a tricky one. It's not good, but it's not wholly bad.

Or at least it had potential. Yeah, it's one of these films where its reputation is outpaced how bad it actually is, I think. Yeah. Like, you know, I have seen, frankly, worse films than this that have essentially got a pass.

Particularly franchise films, particularly a lot of kind of like... You know, I have seen... seen a lot worse films in this. I've seen a lot worse films in this. They've been received better. True. Same. Next month, we will discuss Terminator Dark Fate

from 2019, directed by Tim Miller. I know nothing about this film. I know what I can see on the poster in front of me. I know that Linda Hamilton's back and Arnold Schwarzenegger's back. And that's it. That's all I know. So we'll watch it and learn about it next month. And I will watch it preferably on a TV screen,

because it's the first time I saw it, it was as God and filmmakers intended on a seat back on a plane. Flip him between there and a faner shake this type. Yeah, yeah. Jolly good. Yeah, we will discuss that next time. For now, thank you for listening. Take One Presents.

has no advertising we only spread my word of mouth by people talking about us by recommendations so please do tell anyone who might be interested that we're covering the Terminator franchise that we cover film franchises

and that we have three previous seasons discussing alien Jurassic Park and Mission Impossible you can find us on social media I'm on SimonXX.com Jim

I lose track about I've got lots of things Basically, if you look for either the Take 1 accounts, right, which is generally Take 1 cinema, you'll probably find me via that, if not. It tends to be Jim GR. Yeah. Find us, ask us questions, etc.

But yeah, thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. And we will return next time to discuss Terminator Dark Fate. So we will be back.