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.

MISGUIDED MOVIE TRAILERS: the marketing teams that show too much...

An insightful look into the wrong doings of movie trailers...

Most recently came the trailer of Terminator: Genisys, the newest and hopefully last (although probably not last) film in the Terminator franchise, notable for spoiling the film's most pivotal plot points, to the point where even the director Alan Taylor stepped in to say that the "marketing gave it all away".

The Terminator franchise is no stranger to spoilers in it's marketing: the previous entry, Salvation, also suffered a similar fate, detailing a twist pertaining towards the lead role.

These two examples and the many other examples out there stand as the reason as to why directors should be able to dictate what plot points should and should not be used for marketing. Guidelines as the video above suggests, per say.

When entire plots aren't being given away, there's the formulaic and repetitive structure that trailers seem to follow. Don LaFontaine during his lifetime cemented himself as the quintessential movie trailer voice-over, and you'll be hard pressed to find yourself a person who hasn't had the phrase "In a world..." burned into their brains. A film has had that phrase dedicated to its title. That pretty much explains it all.

Back on to the titular topic at hand, it is an issue that's occurred in trailers from their inception, with a very simple solution, yet it's never been addressed. For one - these films still do good business regardless of their marketing, not to use the recent Terminator films as a scapegoat but they both made and are currently making money hand over fist. That serves as an incentive for the marketing departments to continue as usual, as there are no negative effects to the process. There may be complaints, but the vast majority of viewers voting with their wallets are still opting to go see the movie anyway.

It's a fine balance that needs to be achieved, show enough for an audience to gain interest, but not too much so as to deter the audience, in theory. Then there's ridiculous practices such as one The Amazing Spider-Man 2 employed: watch the first 10 minutes of the film. It is the laziest and silliest marketing practice possible short of releasing the whole movie for free. So when you do go and see the film, you can just sit and let your mind go numb for the first 10 minutes whilst you wait for the boredom to pass and get on with the parts that you haven't seen. There's spoiling a scene, then there's spoiling an entire chapter.

After you've thought that I've lost focus, I pose a few points, some of which are in common with the video most nearest to the top. Restrict the length of trailers, don't give yourself the chance to give too much away. Provide a guideline that allows directors to choose which specific scenes or timecodes that cannot be altered and for the love of god, don't release the first 10 to 20 minutes of the film and call it an "extended preview" or even for that matter "good marketing".

Behold! How not to "market" your film!