TERMINATOR: GENISYS (2015) Review

 In the future, the war on the machines ends: resistance leader John Connor is about to end the actions of the supercomputer Skynet. But shortly before giving up the ghost, the latter then uses a revolutionary machine to send a T-800 (original model of Terminator) in the past in order to eliminate his mother, Sarah Connor. John then has no choice: he must in turn use this machine to send someone in the past to protect his mother. Sergeant Kyle Reese volunteers and eventually lands in a temporal divide, in which Sarah has become a warrior, trained from an early childhood by another T-800 tasked with looking after her. Together, they must face a new threat, suddenly unexpected ...

Films about time travel are always the same story. It is first necessary to make a choice of narration in order to make the concept credible: while some opt for a narrative loop logic like "Looper" (what is "modified" in the present is only the continuity of what will happen in the future), other screenwriters instead choose the option “rewriting time” in a “Back to the future” way (what is “modified” in time has an effect on what was already “written”) . But once the concept has been defined, it is still necessary to solidify and contain it so as not to go all over the place, nor to mislead the viewer in a scenario "spaghetti" to the extreme. In the case of "Terminator Genisys", we are entitled to the Maxi Best Of Menu of bad choices to relaunch a tired franchise: not only does the film constitute a shameful misunderstanding of the logic of loopy narrative specific to the "Terminator" saga, but the novelty points to absent subscribers in favor of sloppy formatting and narrative revisionism as vain as it is deeply imbecile. What to achieve the feat of violating a franchise from behind, with a sharp blow and without preliminary.

From beginning to end of its butchered story, "Terminator Genisys" stands out as the absolute incarnation of a neurotic Hollywood system, whose lack of new ideas and daring then causes the worst effects, namely that of rewriting history to the detriment of the myths that were installed beforehand. Two cases have then emerged in recent years: on the one hand a pair of franchises-Gruyères (let us quote "Saw" or "Fast & Furious") which were satisfied to leave narrative gaps in each episode while filling those left in the previous episode (a logic of television serialization which has nothing to do in a context specific to the cinema), and on the other, an "X-Men" franchise now doomed to the nauseating rewrite of its own codes,"Days of future past" ), overloaded with superimposed time slots, scattered characters and shamelessly crossed out issues. This second option characterizes Alan Taylor's film, which, from its first quarter of an hour, commits the unimaginable by purely and simply canceling the existence of the first "Terminator" - the original T-800, charged with eliminate Sarah Connor, is destroyed as soon as she arrives in the past by another T-800, necessarily "older".

We should specify that this shameful scene does not only encourage us to erase from our memory everything in which the two films of James Cameron and that of Jonathan Mostow had made us adhere to. Above all, it offers a metaphor for the project itself: literally bugging the saga by sending an old Terminator model to clean up to change fate. Roughly speaking, it all comes down to a sentence addressed to the Terminator embodied by Schwarzie: " You are only a relic belonging to an erased timeline.". The film then only gets lost in an endless jumble of narrative and temporal convolutions that we no longer even try to assimilate, between pseudo-scientific terms supposed to serve as an explanation (however, if we only get Damn, that's no use!), narrative surprises so badly led that the distributor had deemed it preferable to spoil them in the trailer (John Connor is the villain here… WHAT?!?), a visual inventiveness below of level zero (not James Cameron who wants!) and a director who does not hesitate to trace the cult scenes of the saga, without understanding them and sacking all their iconic and mythological substance.

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Faced with a truly mind-boggling massacre, as hollow and Taylorized as a Marvel production sloppy by executives addicted to market research, we no longer know what to say or do, dropped between the desire to leave the room angry, to take a nap or laugh nervously in front of a first degree that constantly falls flat. But since the production of the film does not even make the effort to be at the level of that of a calibrated blockbuster (crappy framing, inane dialogues, incoherent cutting, false connections in shambles, jokes at two cents, etc.), we does not want to force himself. The mere fact of hearing James Cameron himself praise the supposed qualities of this episode in a web video that reeks of forced publicity is more than enough to finish us off. With such a turnip, the "Terminator" saga has indeed "self-ended".

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