TERMINATOR: GENISYS (2015) review: "I've been waiting for you..."

Just pretend it's Friday.

If you haven't seen the trailer, consider yourself lucky...

TERMINATOR: GENISYS is the fifth film in the franchise that frankly should have ended after the second, but nevertheless here we are...

Horrific marketing campaigns aside, this film, I probably shouldn't defend it, but I honestly didn't find it anywhere near as bad or unenjoyable as other critics and audience members alike have been telling. It suffers from an unnecessarily convoluted and borderline silly plot, but only just barely saves itself with some bizarrely unexpected humour. There's a lot of it sprinkled throughout the film, and whilst humour has been no stranger to the Terminator franchise in the past, it's utilised far more in Genisys as an obvious tip of the hat for fan service, and it worked to an extent. That's as far as I can go - to an extent. 

As with everything that this does well, there's about a dozen other problems to counter-act it. For one, the lead characters with the exception of Schwarzenegger, lack charisma in almost every conceivable way. Acting is not the strong suit of this film, I'm not necessarily cutting Schwarzenegger slack for his acting ability, as he is safe to say, not the greatest. However, when he appeared on screen, all was well. Until he left and then it's back to the jarring and uninteresting plot that fiddles with the entirety of the Terminator timeline. Back to the same old and honestly incredibly repetitive premise of the two Connors and their quest to stop Judgement Day.

Yes. It's a Terminator film, but does it always have to revolve around these characters that have already been done to death? Why can't it refresh itself with a new slew of characters, perhaps a smaller division of the resistance and their struggles? There would at least be something to admire there, even if it flopped, you could say that they at least tried something new - but no, they bend and change everything that the previous films set so their plots can fit in between and it glaringly shows. This insignificant plot is squished in between all of the other Terminator timelines.

Flipping back onto the love-hate relationship with this film as the plot could be rambled over all day, with the action sequences falling flat and serving as bland for entire sequences, and some of it being unintentionally laugh out loud hilarious and mind-numbingly entertaining. The latter involving everyone's beloved Arnie, without a doubt. 

Special effects deserve a shout out also, with a majority of it looking top notch, all thanks going to the flashy budget that Genisys boasts, delivering some pretty believable set pieces and computer generated imagery, with the only thing stopping it being the uncanny valley that all humans stand upon. A sequence involving the T-800 circa 1984 is near perfect looking... until it moves. However, you could take individual frames and you could be mistaken.

"Smile..."

It is what it is, and after reading all of this you probably think that I hate Genisys, but the truth is, I don't. You could consider it the guiltiest of pleasures for Schwarzenegger alone, and that is it's saving grace, with the exception of very nice visual effects and dips and dabs of acceptable action thrown in here and there. I'm probably letting Terminator: Genisys slide off the hook too easily, probably far too easily, but after all, the Terminator franchise has seen much, much worse times. One word: Salvation.