So, Matt Smith is in this as the physical embodiment of Skynet — a celebrated terminator, essentially — and he fights with John Connor’s group to try and capture the time machine before they can send the first Arnold Schwarzenegger back. How did he get there? Skynet communicates as a hologram later and that hologram looks like Matt Smith, so it’s clearly a preferred form of the program and not a real person who was turned into a terminator like John Connor was. Did they hit the green light on a highly sensitive military operation with this guy nobody knew? Had he already infiltrated the resistance without being noticed like every other terminator? If so, why didn’t he just waste everybody before they won? What’s going on here? Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.
After fans refused to take to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, the series was to be rebooted into a new trilogy for a new generation with 2009’s Terminator Salvation. When fans didn’t take to that either, it was rebooted again into Terminator Genisys, which is also advertised and clearly thought of as part one of a trilogy. The Independence Day release is already bombing, and without a doubt, another reboot that will also be supposedly part one of a trilogy will hit sometime in the early ’20s.
Terminator Genisys branches off from the original movie’s timeline, sending Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect a very different Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), one who had already been attacked by machines from the future years earlier and had been saved by her own personal terminator, “Pops” (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Pops had been sent back by parties unknown to protect Connor from an as-yet unheard of 1973 attack, and they’d been planning to prevent Skynet from causing the apocalyptic world Reese grew up in by stopping the scheduled nuclear apocalypse in 1997. However, as Reese is traveling to 1984, he sees an alternate past, one that he never lived through, which tells him Skynet pushed its timetable back to 2017, for some reason. After the trio fight off the T-800 — and the T-1000, which is also in 1984, again without explanation — they travel to 2017 to stop Skynet, but are faced with a foe they weren’t prepared for.
Wait, they spoiled that? Wow, what a bunch of idiots — it’s John Connor (Jason Clarke). Sarah’s son and legendary leader of the resistance has been turned into a terminator by this new, weird flesh-infecting virus Skynet developed. They also changed it to where he wrote the Skynet program himself and nobody else could understand it, despite it being achieved 20 years earlier when he was just a little kid in previous movies, and to where they’re already playing with time machines and that liquid metal stuff pre-apocalypse.
OK, so this plot is really half-baked and there are a ton of things that are distracting and wrong with it, and we’re going to go through all of them because fuck this movie.
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