It didn’t have to be this way. With all their apparent understanding of time travel, the makers of
this absurdly convoluted turkey can still go back and abort it
Terminator Genisys is not doing terribly well at the box office. Some say this is because the
insanely complicated plot is too hard to follow; some fault the disastrous decision to cast the
bland, useless Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese, the putative saviour of mankind; some fault the
curious decision to cast the perky but not especially intimidating Emilia Clark in the role made
famous by the fierce Linda Hamilton; and some say the series has simply run out of gas. All of
these criticisms have merit – the film is just plain awful. The question is: could this catastrophe
have been avoided? The answer is yes. If only the producers had used time travel for the benefit
of mankind.
First, a quick autopsy of the $150m cadaver. Movies involving time travel are always hard to
follow, but Terminator Genisys is demented. In the year 2029, a group of feisty rebels finally
defeat Skynet, the evil artificial-intelligence system that took over the world 12 years earlier. But
because Skynet has already sent a murderous cyborg back to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor,
mother of the rebel leader John Connor, so that he never gets born, Connor is forced to send his
best friend Kyle back to that same year to keep his mother from being murdered by the original
Terminator – the young, glacial, impossibly ripped Arnold Schwarzenegger. Otherwise there will be
no one to lead the feisty rebels in the year 2029. Clear?
There are complications. By the time the Terminator from the future arrives in 1984 – or an
alternate version of that memorably Orwellian year – the original Terminator has switched sides
and become a loving, avuncular old coot nicknamed Pops. This means that the two Terminators
must now face off against one another, even though one of them is old enough to have been
voted out of the California governor’s office after a single term.
Sarah, still only a teen, wants to travel forward in time to the year 1997 to prevent Skynet from
ever getting started, but Reese says no, let’s go to the year 2017 instead, because then we can
disable Skynet forever on the day it is supposed to go online and become fully operational. This
will give Kyle a chance to spend some inter-chronal quality time with himself as a young boy.
1997, by the way, is the year the original Sarah Connor died of leukaemia, somewhere between
Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, so technically speaking she is already dead. But thanks to the
vagaries of time travel, nobody ever stays dead for long.
As if things aren’t messy enough, a scant 12 years in the future, trouble is a-brewing. John
Connor, the rebel leader, has become an evil Terminator himself. He thereupon travels back to
2014 to get a job with the booming startup Skynet, help them get Genisys up and running, and
then wait three years for his mother to blow through town so that he can kill her, even though
she already died of leukaemia 20 years previously. He does this not because he doesn’t like her,
but to prevent her from marrying his best friend Kyle, who is bland and useless. In other words,
Kyle is not only his best friend, but his father. Be that as it may, John will not hesitate to engage
in deliberate self-orphanising. Otherwise, Kyle might go back to 1984 and warn Pops that the
people of California are secretly planning to vote him out of office.
Without a degree in quantum mechanics, nobody could possibly follow this byzantinely moronic
plot. But people with degrees in quantum mechanics don’t go to see movies like Terminator
Genisys, which means there is no one on the face of the earth who can possibly explain what is
going on in this ridiculous movie. Not even the screenwriter, who was probably just winging it.
This is where time travel comes in. Knowing that Terminator Genisys is a dud, the producers need
to build themselves a time machine and go back to the past to reshoot it. By travelling back to
2013, when the film was green-lighted, they could fire the charisma-challenged Jai Courtney and
replace him in the role of Kyle Reese with someone the moviegoing public finds more attractive.
Chris Pratt would do nicely, as would Chris Pine, or Chris Walken or even Chris O’Dowd. If they
wanted to be really daring, they could travel even farther back in time and get Chris Farley to
play the role before he died.
For similar reasons, they should dump Emilia Clarke and replace her with the tough-as-nails
Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence spent part of 2014 making Serena, a movie so bad no one even
wants to admit that it exists. By travelling back in time and showing Lawrence footage of the
stupefyingly crummy Serena, and maybe even a few horrifying movie reviews or blogposts by
powerful, prescient amateur critics, they could probably persuade her to ditch that film and join
the cast of Terminator Genisys instead. Bradley Cooper, who co-stars with Lawrence in Serena,
might also be willing to take the role of John Connor. Or the role of Kyle Reese. The possibilities
are endless.
One other thought presents itself: if the original Terminator had bypassed 1984 and traveled all
the way back to 1491 to kill Christopher Columbus, the US would never have come into being,
and Schwarzenegger would have just stayed in his native Austria, and perhaps made a German-
language version of The Terminator, which would have been just fine with everybody because
nobody in the rest of the world ever sees Austrian movies. And if Columbushad never made it to
America, I would never have been born, so I wouldn’t have had to watch Terminator Salvation in
London’s Leicester Square at midnight surrounded by a bunch of thugs, much less Terminator
Genisys in an empty theatre in New York’s suburbs. (Courtesy: The Guardian)
