Terminator: Genisys
Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2015 12:30 am
For the TLDR crowd.....Thumbs up.
I think the original Terminator is one of the best action/sci-fi films ever made, period. It is a triumph of taut storytelling, engrosing story, world-building, charicterization, and balls-out action. There is not a wasted second of film. Every bit of exposition is delivered dynamically during a firefight or a chase, and the only time the movie takes a breather is for a sex scene (which is integral to the story). It, like Jaws and Die Hard, is a perfect action film.
Though T2 gets an awful lot of love, I think it's a steaming pile of excrement. There are a couple of beautifully realized action set-pieces, but the movie as a whole is a dire affair....There's that horrible squealing child, and then there are the gawdawful lulls that the director engineers to inject his overbearing narrative. The story stops flat too many times in order to pontificate about the horrors of nuclear war, and how terrible men are.
T3 has some really interesting ideas and some great action that's unfortunately overwhelmed with a too-campy take on the Terminator mythos. Even still, I prefer it to T2, if for nothing else than the dependence on practical effects and the realization that these terminator folks are heavy.
Terminator Salvation expanded the story in an interesting way, but was dragged down by a combination of the "gritty, dark" mandate of the era and the insufferable Christian Bale inisiting on script control.
And then there's The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was cut way too short.
T:G lavishes loving homage to the first film, then goes completely off the rails, yet manages to channel the best parts of TSCC while re-inventing the series. It embraces the conundrum(s) of time-travel and infuses new life into a series which was treading water. It gives us a logical explination for Arnie's advanced age - "old, not obsolete" - and creates a plausable path forward (since, you know, we didn't all die in 1997).
I'll grant that the CGI work is terrible, especially the helicopter chase. Stan Winston and his practical effects team are sorely missed. And there's an awful lot of talking. But the talking is necessary to explain what's happening within the framework of the existing mythos.
It's nothing short of exhillerating to see full scenes from the original movie reinterpreted into the revised timeline(s). Emilia Clarke channels Linda Hamilton so well you'd think it's her. Jai Courtney ilacks the emotional vulnerability of Michael Biehn, but he makes it work. J.K. Simmons makes for a much better audience surrogate than Earl Boen could muster. And Arnold....He just damn steals the show. The camp is kept to a minimum (though it's still there as it always was), and the story is surprisingly tight.
In other words......This is a surprisingly good film. It all but negates the third and fourth films, and it pays little notice to the second one (other than the smiling from the Director's Cut). And it makes for both a good stand-alone film, and a good jumping-off point for a new series of movies (unlike T:S which was needlessly bleak). One can oly hope that they get people like Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruf, Jr. to infuse more practical effects for a hopeful sequel.
I don't see many movies in the theater anymore, and I'm glad I saw this one in IMAX. It's far better than it has any right to be, and it's a worthy sucessor to the first film.
Big, big thumbs-up.
I think the original Terminator is one of the best action/sci-fi films ever made, period. It is a triumph of taut storytelling, engrosing story, world-building, charicterization, and balls-out action. There is not a wasted second of film. Every bit of exposition is delivered dynamically during a firefight or a chase, and the only time the movie takes a breather is for a sex scene (which is integral to the story). It, like Jaws and Die Hard, is a perfect action film.
Though T2 gets an awful lot of love, I think it's a steaming pile of excrement. There are a couple of beautifully realized action set-pieces, but the movie as a whole is a dire affair....There's that horrible squealing child, and then there are the gawdawful lulls that the director engineers to inject his overbearing narrative. The story stops flat too many times in order to pontificate about the horrors of nuclear war, and how terrible men are.
T3 has some really interesting ideas and some great action that's unfortunately overwhelmed with a too-campy take on the Terminator mythos. Even still, I prefer it to T2, if for nothing else than the dependence on practical effects and the realization that these terminator folks are heavy.
Terminator Salvation expanded the story in an interesting way, but was dragged down by a combination of the "gritty, dark" mandate of the era and the insufferable Christian Bale inisiting on script control.
And then there's The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was cut way too short.
T:G lavishes loving homage to the first film, then goes completely off the rails, yet manages to channel the best parts of TSCC while re-inventing the series. It embraces the conundrum(s) of time-travel and infuses new life into a series which was treading water. It gives us a logical explination for Arnie's advanced age - "old, not obsolete" - and creates a plausable path forward (since, you know, we didn't all die in 1997).
I'll grant that the CGI work is terrible, especially the helicopter chase. Stan Winston and his practical effects team are sorely missed. And there's an awful lot of talking. But the talking is necessary to explain what's happening within the framework of the existing mythos.
It's nothing short of exhillerating to see full scenes from the original movie reinterpreted into the revised timeline(s). Emilia Clarke channels Linda Hamilton so well you'd think it's her. Jai Courtney ilacks the emotional vulnerability of Michael Biehn, but he makes it work. J.K. Simmons makes for a much better audience surrogate than Earl Boen could muster. And Arnold....He just damn steals the show. The camp is kept to a minimum (though it's still there as it always was), and the story is surprisingly tight.
In other words......This is a surprisingly good film. It all but negates the third and fourth films, and it pays little notice to the second one (other than the smiling from the Director's Cut). And it makes for both a good stand-alone film, and a good jumping-off point for a new series of movies (unlike T:S which was needlessly bleak). One can oly hope that they get people like Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruf, Jr. to infuse more practical effects for a hopeful sequel.
I don't see many movies in the theater anymore, and I'm glad I saw this one in IMAX. It's far better than it has any right to be, and it's a worthy sucessor to the first film.
Big, big thumbs-up.
