Terminator Genisys: 'murdering memories' of a great film

The Terminator is back but fans of the sci-fi classic may wish he hadn't bothered.

Terminator Genisys, a reboot of James Cameron's 1984 hit, sees Arnold Schwarzenegger return to the role that made him a star, but reviewers are calling the film "confusing" and "tedious" and say the 67-year-old actor shouldn't have bothered.

Terminator Genisys, the fifth movie in the Terminator series, stars Schwarzenegger as the famous cybernetic assassin, and Game of Thrones's Emilia Clarke in the role of the human resistance fighter Sarah Conor.

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The film returns to the beginning of the Terminator story, set in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where humans battle with machines to control the destiny of humanity. Part sequel, part remix, the story hops time frames from 1984 to 2017, where Sarah must again battle Skynet, who this time has morphed into a killer app, Genisys, that intends to destroy humanity for good.

But critics were largely unimpressed by Alan Taylor's reinterpretation of the sci-fi classic.

In The Times, Kate Muir writes that Terminator Genisys is "as ill-conceived as it is ill-spelt". The movie, she says, "fires a rocket-propelled grenade into its own franchise".

Yet like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 robot killing machine, Muir says, "the Terminator series seems dumbly unstoppable, even when it makes no sense whatsoever".

In the Daily Telegraph, Robbie Collin agrees that the movie is baffling. "To anyone without a reasonable working knowledge of the first two Terminator films, it will be nigh-on incomprehensible," says Collin. He says that Terminator’s super-fans will find the film "runs counter to the chrome-plated directness of James Cameron’s original vision" and seems to be aimed at people who know the original films, but hate them.

There is a shot-for-shot recreation of the opening of the original Terminator, assembled with a "tweezer-like attention to detail", adds Collin, but it transpires the events are playing out in a parallel timeline. Also Arnie turns out to be Sarah's adopted father. So, as sequels go, Genisys is "slavishly disrespectful", he says.

In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw adds to the chorus of disapproval, calling the film "intensely unnecessary" and "fantastically irritating". Bradshaw says that it as if this Terminator "has gone back in time to murder our memories of the ancestral first film" and crush the reputation of the series.

"The whole dreary business drags interminably on," adds Bradshaw, "with not a single amusing or ingenious idea in its echoing metal head". He concludes that it is "a cynical franchisebot" designed to "gouge money out of people".

A rare good word for this Terminator comes from Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent, who says that the film works on some levels. As a spectacle, Genisys "passes muster", says Macnab. There are plenty of startling scenes in which Terminators are scorched, blown up and pulled apart by magnetic forces, as well as car crashes, helicopter crashes, and some clever changes in costume and production design.

But the real problem is that the Terminator concept is becoming "creaky and arthritic", says Macnab. "It's a bad sign when a film series once heralded for its post-modern harshness begins to trade in cosy nostalgia."