The original Terminator, released in 1984, was at the sweet spot of American sci-fi cinematic history. Right before it, George Lucas created Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi in 1983. Just after it, Steven Spielberg released a personal favorite, Back to the Future. Under the direction of James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic), moviegoers of the 80’s found that the action-packed time travel love story of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator deserved a reputation on par with the cinematic works of Lucas and Spielberg.
The story follows as such: nuclear warfare forces mankind to create indestructible cyborg weapons that unfortunately and rather predictably turn on the human race, and it appears that all hope is lost until John Connor, leads a retaliation of humans against the cyborgs. A terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to kill John’s mother, Sarah Connor, so that John will never be born. John sends his right hand man, Kyle Reese, back in time to protect his mother from the terminator and insure the future of the human race. Kyle ends up falling in love with Sarah and fathers the future John. The terminator is eventually defeated and Kyle dies trying to save Sarah.
Now let’s move on to what you really came to read about: Terminator V: Genisys. This movie was so unbelievably confusing, unoriginal, and irritatingly overcompensating that it became simple to find oneself giving up on trying to follow the storyline and focus instead on how hilariously little chemistry there was between the Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) and Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) characters. The two followed the cheesy cliche of hating each other at first, and then fall in love at the end on the basis of appreciating the things that they couldn’t stand about each other five minutes ago. Explaining the plot would be pointless, as very little of it could be understood; only that the beginning loosely followed the plot of the original, in that Kyle Reese, who now lacks acting ability and is shirtless most of the time, is sent back in time by John Connor to find Sarah. However, upon locating her, the two almost immediately embark on an unspecified mission that takes place in either 1997, 2014, 2017, or 2029, all of which this film mentions, but never clarifies, furthering the confusion. Then, John Connor comes back from another unspecified point in the future and is somehow the villain trying to kill his parents (the only clear objective in this movie, which is accompanied by unnecessarily dragged-out violence) who never end up having sex anyway. So doesn’t that mean that John was never born? Who knows? In addition, an avid fan of the original Terminator would be outraged to find that some scenes from Terminator V were so similar to the 1984 Terminator that it unforgivingly spewed the idea that the directors, one of which was unfortunately James Cameron himself, couldn’t think of anything imaginative for this movie.
You are urged instead, moviegoer, to stay at home and rent the Terminator from 1984 and its 1991 sequel, keeping in mind that the third and fourth prequels are missable, and the fifth should be avoided like the plague.
