I assume some sort of film industry subsidy was involved.
It does fit continuity. Cyberdyne Systems has been located in the San Francisco Bay Area in most (all?) of the Terminator movies.
Given all the bad reviews, I didn’t have my hopes up but I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t great or anything (only the first one can truly deserve that label), but it was fun and I enjoyed the labyrinth-like tendrils of the time travel and their efforts to close loops wherever they could. I agree it lands safely in the exact middle of the 5 films.
Anyone who’s complaining about the bad acting of Jai Courtney clearly didn’t see the 5th Die Hard film, where he was even worse. This was a step up, though he’s still a pitiful shadow of what the original offered up. And Arnold was clearly having a blast.
Anyone who lives in SF knows that there have been some significant advancements in creating a new moveable median on the Golden Gate Bridge, so I found it funny that in 2017, they revert back to the old mini-pylons as a divider along the bridge (which, given the action of the film on a speeding bus, would have to be about 5-miles long, at least).
Late to the party, but I saw it today.
Wow, I really liked it. I’m as shocked that I liked this as I was that I didn’t like Jurassic World.
This is by no means as good as T2 or anything, but it was a really solid sequel. I liked it so much, I’d like to see the next one when it comes out. Good for them.
I knew I was in for a bad time when it opened with five minutes of narration.
One thing I’ve noticed in every movie after T2 is the terminators don’t feel right. When they fight each other they knock each other around like ragdolls, which looks ridiculous and immediately breaks my suspension of disbelief. They also have unrealistic strength, like in this one a terminator just punched through a concrete wall like he was Superman. I’m not an engineer or a robotics expert, but even if a terminator is 10x as strong as a person I don’t think that’s in the cards.
It was kinda cool when the T-1000 broke off a piece of his arm and threw it at them. I’m sure the staff were proud of that one. But then you think, wait, why didn’t the T2 T-1000 ever do that? This is why sequels and reboots are dangerous. Even a little thing like this makes you go huh? What?
The problem with a lot of these over the top modern action movies is that when you stray so far from reality there’s no tension anymore because you know the hero will do something ridiculous to save themselves. The end of T1 when Sarah is crawling away from the torso of the terminator is way more exciting than watching people get punched across the room or somehow living after a school bus flips over 37 times. One is comic book shit, the other is somewhat grounded in reality and more relatable and something you might have a nightmare about.
At least it was kinda funny.
Is there an in-movie explanation for this? I was also surprised.
just saw this last night.
So, who sent back ‘Pops’? Converted John Connor presumably puts the hit on 9 year old Sarah, which changes the timeline, but who the hell sent Arnie to protect her?
Eh . . .
I think so much more could have been done with the Arnold Terminator character. by there director and writers. The attempts at humor and play alongs of classic Terminator lines all fell flat. Arnold was way too animated for me to buy him as a Terminator. I did a belly chuckle at the mug shot though.
Just seemed like a rehash of the original movie.
Was pleasantly surprised by Emilia Clarkes performance though, she proved she is way more than just the blonde haired stone faced Mother of Dragons.
Loved it. Terminator was never meant to be a sensible sci-fi universe, so it’s not really worth delving too deeply, as you might with Star Trek or Star Wars or the Matrix. It’s action and since T2, humor. I’ll gladly shell out for as many of these movies as they want to make.
The films biggest problem is Kyle Reese. Not only was Courtney no Micheal Biehn, he wasn’t even an Anton Yelchin who did a pretty good job in the otherwise rubbish Salvation.
They should’ve cast Aaron Paul.
I saw it the other day. Given the awful reviews it got, I was expecting to hate it. In fact, I thought it was OK. Not great, by any means, and certainly nowhere near as good as T1 & T2, but OK nonetheless. It’s a perfectly competent, entertaining, SFX based popcorn flick. Everyone pulls their weight (especially Arnie, and the rapport between him and Emilia Clarke is remarkably good, given that he’s a soulless killing machine and all), it’s got lots of good action sequences, some snappy one-liners, and some terrific special effects. All in all, it’s an entertaining package.
It’s far from perfect, but who’s looking for perfect from a Summer popcorn flick? Certainly not me. If you want to spend a couple of hours watching unfeasibly good looking people blow shit up (which, let’s face it, we all do from time to time), you could do an awful lot worse.
I give it a reasonably solid 7 out of 10. I hope they make a sequel.
That would have been awesome!
I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t care about it either.
Agree about the casting. For all his emotional rage, I thought Jai Courtney was another terminator model! Kyle Reece should be this scrawny, crazed guy barely holding his shit together.
Emile Clarke was paying badass Terminator 2 Sarah Conner in Terminator 1 Sarah Conner’s cream-puff body. I would have gone with a more athletic actress who looks like a 20 year old version of ripped T2 Linda Hamilton since it wouldn’t have been practical to get Emile in that sort of shape (Khalisi! Have you been working with the Pilate-mancers?)
Interesting to note though, this is the second major Game of Thrones star to play Sarah Conner (Lena “Cercei Lannister” Headly played her in the TV show).
It was just okay. Better than I was expecting, but not great by any stretch.
I felt like they threw away a lot of good movie by rushing to get to the “EEK! John Connor is one of them!!!” part, which I thought was really weak and was really where the whole movie fell apart. I thought there was plenty of good action to be had with simply Old Ahnold vs the freshly sent Terminators. Sure, we’d seen that before, but it was great the first time and there was certainly enough story there to keep it interesting.
For me that was a problem. While I said before that it’s not like Star Trek or Star Wars, where fans should get too deeply into the plot, one thing that we’d been conditioned to accept for 30 years was that John Connor is the hero. Doing that to him was not good.
Huge fan of the originals and all of James Cameron’s stuff, but Genisys didn’t do much for me. Muddled gimmicky plot, never fully explained the time-travel stuff to where it made much sense (because, let’s face it, it didn’t), PG-13 rating, didn’t like either actor playing Reese or John Connor, just one soulless CGI set-piece after the other. And jeez, could they not at least find a blond actress to play Sarah?!
I’ve never understood all the hatred for T3. With these last two crappy sequels it’s more obvious than ever to me how Rise of the Machines came very close to catching the feel of the originals, something Salvation and this last one both completely failed to do. All James Cameron films have a sense of ‘immediacy’ to them. Small group of people in grave danger, dealing with it minute by minute, in a very intense but still always clear & concise way. Terminator and Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies, The Abyss, even the second half of Titanic, they all had this quality. Genisys had none of it, nor did Salvation, but T3 did. Biggest criticism of it could be it was kinda just a T2 remake. But I’ll take that over all this PG-13, CGI-laden dreck any day…
The whole time I watched the movie, I kept thinking “why is any of this necesary? Why did you make this movie?” - it wasn’t quite a remake, it wasn’t quite a reboot, it wasn’t very interesting. The action sequences were fine but nothing jaw-dropping by modern standards. The casting was all wrong.
It was nice to see Arnold in something. That’s about it.
As to why people hate T3 - it shit on the mythos of the series. We went from “no fate from what we make” and an interesting and plausible take on time travel and paradoxes and timeloops to “magical fate fairies fix everything!” self-correcting time magic bullshit. T3 is still worth watching because of the very cool practical stunt action sequences and Arnie going back to acting more like a terminator, but the actual premise and story is stupid and runs counter the established rules.
Although I enjoyed the movie, I don’t have much of an answer to any of the many valid criticisms, but…
Really? The hair color bugged you?
Hamilton wasn’t really blonde-blonde in either of the Terminator movies. She was more of a dark sandy blonde.
Admittedly Clarke’s Sarah’s hair color is a closer match to T2 Hamilton Sarah rather than the first film Sarah who she’s meant to match up with chronologically, but even in the first film Hamilton’s Sarah is on the darker end of the blonde spectrum.
An easy fan-wank is that original timeline Sarah was more carefree and might have spent more leisure time in the sun whereas hardened Sarah of the new timeline spent fewer days at the beach, more like original timeline T2 Sarah.
I really wanted to like this movie.
I want to like all of them, because the first one was truly awesome and surprisingly deep for an '80s action flick. Alas, each movie has failed in many ways, large and small, and my appreciation for each has been largely something I made up in my head rather than anything warranted by the movies themselves.
Same with this one. There were many cool moments, but each cool moment brought with it an immediate and visceral, “OMG it would have been so cool if” thought with it. Like the bit near the beginning where they did a shot for shot remake of T1, or when they introduced the T-1000. How fucking awesome would it have been if they had gotten a (made up and CGI’d) Bill Paxton or Robert Patrick to reprise their roles?
Or, how awesome would it have been if our very first introduction to Sarah in this movie was when she pulled a half-donut in the semi cab, swung open the door, and said, “Come with me if you want to live.” But the trailer ruined that moment, and the several minutes with her in the movie would have ruined it if the trailer hadn’t.
I like Emilia Clarke, and she is improbably cute. But her acting skills are only sometimes appropriate for the role (which could all apply to Linda Hamilton in T1). But would it have been so hard to have her work out once or twice a week during filming? Fucking spaghetti arms.
Not to mention the nearly completely incoherent plot.
Oh, well. I really wanted to like this movie.
I didn’t see it that way, I saw it just as the film’s T-800 said, “Judgement day is inevitable at this point”. IOW Dyson dying and destroying all the Cyberdyne material in T2 simply wasn’t enough. Too many things had been set in motion by that time to stop it from happening. I thought it was incredibly original and gutsy to have T3 end the way it did, with Skynet winning and the nuclear holocaust happening. It left an interesting set up for T4 to take place in the barren future, an opportunity that it completely wasted (as soon as I heard that T4 had been handed over to some music-video directing bozo named ‘McG’ I knew it was doomed to suck)…
I got this movie from redbox and I’m glad I didn’t pay too much.
As with all movies now days, it looked good. There was no plot worth talking about. I just didn’t care if they all got killed.
I like that no matter how advanced things are, the terminators still wind up in a fist fight.
I, also, liked how often people were pointing guns at each other and talking. They keep using those crappy little 9 mm sub-machine guns that use pistol ammo. ( but, they look cool.)
They are all set up for the next movie.( as long as this one makes a couple of bucks.)
You can tell who had nothing to do with this movie.