Kritiken

There's a witty idea behind Genisys, revisiting the first film in the franchise through the prism of all the subsequent films, but the result isn't witty, it's tiring. By the end, you may sympathise – though not in the way intended – with Kyle's anguished cry: "Time-travel makes my head hurt!".

Terminator Genisys is the worst of all possible worlds. It's neither a surprising work of pop art nor an entertaining piece of crap. (And forget about explaining that spelling to a nosy 6-year-old.) It's awful in a way that makes you not even feel entitled to a refund.

As with so much contemporary culture, Terminator Genisys feels simultaneously self-satisfied and desperate, frenzied and boring. It is at one and the same time a desecration and plundering of the series' past that is also pathetically reverential towards it.

Hollywood's lusty obsession with reboots, retools, reloads, recasts and regeneration falls with a loud thud in Terminator Genisys, a clunky, messy, analogue-minded science fiction thriller that's hardly scientific or thrilling. If this is what the post-millennia Gen-Z audience have in terms of pop-cultural marquee, those above 35 can revel in the nostalgic romp of James Cameron's 1984 original, a far more intelligent and terrifying film about our fear of technology.

As the action develops, it becomes as pleasurable as manipulating a Rubik's Cube with no hands, just your mind. The explanations of nexus points and quantum physics are thuddingly abstract, and, what's worse, they fail to draw viewers into the physically extravagant but conceptually routine chases, crashes, and showdowns.

Genisys is a staggeringly dull film. You could mount a case for its defence based on this being the first chapter of a proposed new trilogy, and consequently it is required to do a lot of heavy lifting in order to bring everyone up to speed. But that doesn't pardon Taylor from engineering such a joyless spectacle. If this is a sign of things to come for the Terminator franchise, the nuclear apocalypse can't come soon enough.

For this fifth installment of the Terminator movie franchise, screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier pile on so many pulpy sci-fi conceits—involving time travel, alternate realities, and the end of civilization—that you might be carried along by the batty excess... Director Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) maintains an agreeably tongue-in-cheek tone, though his visual style is pedestrian.

[Aside from Schwarzenegger,] the other main actors, Courtney and both Clarkes, come off in the film as nonentities, due to Taylor's direction or non-direction. None of the three seems to do anything but provide flesh and blood to the written text... If they never seem to be thinking about what they're doing, it's not for lack of ability to do so, but for direction that never catches them doing so—that flees, in effect, from spontaneity.

The first challenge you face in decoding Terminator Genisys, before you even get to the multiple tangled-kite-string horrors of its plot, is working out who on earth the thing is for. To anyone without a reasonable working knowledge of the first two Terminator films, it will be nigh-on incomprehensible: the super-fans, meanwhile, will soon realise that everything here runs counter to the chrome-plated directness of James Cameron's original vision.

[They] end up toggling between memories of Mr. Cameron's kinetic original while watching this latest reboot lurch from one narratively clotted turn to another. The director, Alan Taylor, has racked up loads of credits in cable TV, but his work here is disappointingly flat, even in the intimate exchanges between Ms. Clarke and Jai Courtney, who's been similarly miscast as Kyle Reese, Sarah's protector and sparring partner.

Terminator Genisys may not be a good movie, but Sarah's arc manages to do what the franchise's previous film shied away from: radically altering the parameters of not only the series's timeline, but its philosophical and emotional underpinnings. As an action movie, this film is clumsy and condescending. As an ambivalent meditation on the responsibility of raising a savior, it's the most fascinating entry into the franchise since The Sarah Connor Chronicles.