Terminator Genisys wants to have it both ways. It is the fifth film in the Terminator franchise and also a reboot, a standalone entry with no canonical connection to the movies that came before it. The tagline tells you to “Reset the future.” The result resets almost nothing, and what it does reset it resets badly.
Directed by Alan Taylor from a screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, Terminator Genisys runs 126 minutes. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, returning as the Terminator for the fourth time in the role. It scores 3.8 out of 10.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures UK.
Kyle Reese Arrives in an Occupied 1984
The premise is the one James Cameron built in 1984, flipped once more. In 2029, Resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) launches a final offensive against Skynet, the artificial general intelligence trying to wipe out humanity. Before the Resistance can win, Skynet sends a T-800 back to 1984 to kill John’s mother, Sarah. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) volunteers to follow and protect her.
Then the film starts rearranging furniture. Floating in the time displacement equipment’s magnetic field, Kyle sees John attacked by another Resistance soldier. The paradox scrambles the timeline and drops childhood memories from a parallel Kyle into his head. When he lands in 1984 Los Angeles, the past is already occupied.
Skynet’s T-800 gets jumped by “Pops,” a reprogrammed T-800 played by Schwarzenegger. Sarah (Emilia Clarke) shows up and shoots the Skynet machine until its system crashes. She has been raised for this. An unknown party sent Pops to 1973 to protect her when she was nine, after her parents were killed by a T-1000. The film never properly answers who sent him.
A Sewer, a Shapeshifter, and Two Possible Years
Kyle steals a homeless man’s pants, gets intercepted by the T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun), and is cornered until Sarah and Pops pull him out. The three flee into the sewers. Sarah and Pops melt the T-1000 with traps. That is the film’s best sequence, and it is over early.
Sarah has built a makeshift time displacement rig and plans to jump to 1997, the year Skynet becomes self-aware. Kyle, convinced the future has already shifted, argues for 2017 instead, citing a warning from his childhood vision. Pops can’t make the trip. His exterior damage from the T-1000 fight rules it out, so he stays in 1984.
Emilia Clarke and Jason Clarke Carry the Load
The cast is not the problem. Emilia Clarke plays Sarah as a trained soldier, not a waitress who needs rescuing, and that is the one idea Terminator Genisys commits to. Jason Clarke’s John Connor gets turned into a T-3000 Terminator of machine phase matter after a T-5000 attacks him, which gives the film its only real betrayal.
J.K. Simmons plays O’Brien, an alcoholic San Francisco police detective and former Marine who investigates time travelers. He is funny and completely stranded. Matt Smith, credited as Matthew Smith, plays Alex, an advanced T-5000 who embodies Skynet. Courtney B. Vance plays Miles Dyson, Cyberdyne’s CEO, funding the Genisys project. Dayo Okeniyi plays his son Danny, Cyberdyne’s president, who co-creates the Genisys operating system with John Connor.
The Numbers Behind Terminator Genisys
- Title: Terminator Genisys
- Year: 2015
- Director: Alan Taylor
- Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, Patrick Lussier
- Runtime: 126 minutes
- Genres: Science Fiction, Action, Thriller
- Tagline: “Reset the future.”
- Score: 3.8 of 10
Two Timelines, One Franchise
The film’s central mechanic is that Skynet attacks John Connor from both fronts, past and future, and that the interference changes warfare permanently. That is a real idea. It is also an idea the film states rather than dramatizes.
| Element | The Terminator (1984) | Terminator Genisys (2015) |
|---|---|---|
| Sarah Connor | Targeted for death | Raised by a Terminator from age nine |
| The Terminator | Skynet’s assassin | Pops, reprogrammed guardian |
| Kyle Reese | Sent to protect Sarah | Arrives to find the timeline already altered |
| Target year | 1984 | 1984, then 2017 |
| Status | Original | Reboot, standalone entry |
The comparison is the whole pitch, and it is also the whole problem. Genisys keeps the iconography and discards the dread.
A Franchise Rebuilt After a Bankruptcy
The backstory explains the finished product. Development began after the Halcyon Company, then owners of the franchise, filed for bankruptcy following the underperformance of Terminator Salvation in 2009. Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures acquired the rights in 2011 and partnered with her brother David’s Skydance Productions. Annapurna later dropped its involvement, though Megan kept an executive producer credit. The producers consulted original creator James Cameron and drew inspiration from the first two films.
Casting was equally unsettled. Schwarzenegger confirmed his return on June 13, 2013. Garrett Hedlund was considered for Kyle Reese. Taylor wanted Tom Hardy for John Connor. The Sarah Connor choice came down to Emilia Clarke, Tatiana Maslany and Brie Larson; Paramount wanted Larson, Taylor preferred Clarke, and Clarke won in December. Jason Clarke, no relation to Emilia, was David Ellison’s first choice for John Connor, based on his work in Zero Dark Thirty. Jai Courtney beat out Boyd Holbrook for Reese. J.K. Simmons began talks in March 2014.
What Terminator Genisys Gets Wrong
Terminator Genisys is not a disaster. It is worse than that in a specific way: it is competent and pointless. Taylor stages the 1984 material with real affection, Schwarzenegger’s Pops has a genuine comic register, and the T-1000 sewer fight is the only stretch where the film feels like it has a pulse. Everything else is exposition delivered at a run.
The reboot logic is the fatal flaw. By declaring itself a standalone entry with no canonical connection to the prior installments while mirroring their events beat for beat, Terminator Genisys asks to be judged as a new thing and then refuses to be one. The paradox that alters the timeline exists to free the film from continuity. It uses that freedom to re-stage 1984 with a Terminator who makes jokes.
The 2017 detour is where the film should earn its premise, and it does not. Skynet as a holographic avatar, Genisys as an operating system co-created by John Connor — these are fine ideas buried under a plot that has to keep explaining itself. The audience is told the future has changed. The audience is never made to feel it.
Schwarzenegger is the reason to watch and the reason the film can’t move. A franchise that keeps resurrecting its own star cannot reset anything, because the star is the reset. Terminator Genisys wants a new future and keeps renting the old one.
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