Fate? Ehhh

	The first thing you should know about Terminator Genisys is that you should treat it more like a spinoff. Like the cute comic kind. As a franchise, Terminator's tended toward becoming less serious, and Genisys basically completes that trend: fate, which has loomed over the rest of the series, sort of weakly yelps here.

	 I'm not sure if anyone's ever articulated these into separate types, but time travel tends to have different conventions depending on how serious the work is. At the left end, you've got something like the ancient Greek tragedies, where every act someone does to change their fate in the past just plays into it. This is where Terminator 1 lies. Terminator 2 leaves things open, and 3 sort of negates it, but overall they land somewhere around Steins;Gate: fate is changeable, maybe? We don't really know. It's the kind of question that's better left unanswered.

	In Genisys, everything changes from the getgo, so it's sort of hard to take the struggle against fate seriously. If things can change to the extent that John Connor is walking around as Skynet's Avatar, then, well, it's pretty clear that everything's in a large flux and there's really no question about it.

	A great deal has been said about Genisys's plot not making sense, but I think people are more bothered about how the series has switched its conventions.


Good Clunky Action

	I couldn't talk about fight choreography if it killed me, but, fuck, I liked Genisys's action. Is it because of any competence of the director? I'm really not sure.

	The main thing to me is that everything's metal.

	I'm used to Marvel movies with faux-martial arts masters dancing around, and when they hit eachother it makes this really unsatisfying thwack that makes me feel like I'm watching a pillow fight.  When Schwarzenegger swings, it makes a loud clunky sound. When things fight in this film, they swing haymakers, they do form tackles through walls- they do everything mechanically and without grace and that's sort of freeing.


All in the family

	Terminator, more than any other Sci-Fi film I can think of off the top of my head, really has a mythos. John Connor – Jesus Christ, I really don't think I'm reaching here. Sarah Connor as the Virgin Mary? Kind of. Kyle Reese as Joseph? Ehhh, okay, you got me.

	The point is, these three figures, along with the T-800, form the backbone of the series. Everything revolves around them, and you can feel this sort of reverence for them, both within the universe since literally everything revolves around them, and as members of the audience- where you can recognize everything they're supposed to represent within the work. When I say that it's best to look at this is a fun spin off, it's because the main fun of Genisys is to play around with these figures.

	The big selling point of the movie is, of course, Papa Schwarz, and, honestly? It makes sense. It's the natural progression of the series, where he basically played a kooky uncle role in Terminator 2 and 3. I'm a fucking chump, so I thought Papa Schwarz and Sarah Connor as his adoptive daughter was fuckin' adorable.

	And that's kind of the point of the film- the weird relations that have developed between the characters as a result of time travel. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor are the parents of John Connor, who is also Kyle's mentor, and who was also mentored by the T-800 at least twice. Sarah Connor formed a sort of begrudging comradery with the T-800 in T2- which would be quite galling to Kyle, his victim, which is the basis for his throughline in this movie. And so you take the T-800, make him Sarah Connor's father figure, and everything becomes kind of wacky and fun and you sort of want to see them in a cute spinoff. Terminator Genisys is a sort of exploration of all the fucked up implications of the character relationships, and it does it by basically sitting them down at a Thanksgiving table.

	It's a fanfiction plot, yeah, and it's surprising to see it made into a movie.

	This is both the biggest draw of the movie and probably its biggest flaw- mostly because I think the centerpiece of the movie, Sarah and Kyle's romance, is sort of weak. Sarah's alright, I think. She does a better job as the T-800's daughter than as Kyle's lover, and I feel like her actress was specifically chosen for how young looking she was. This makes her a good daughter, but kind of creepy, again, as a lover, the way Ellen Page is creepy whenever she's cast with someone who doesn't look 10 years younger than they are.

	Kyle sucks. I'm gonna sound like a homosexual here, but whatever, first off, he should've been more handsome. He's rugged and cool in Terminator 1. Here he looked like a dopey fratboy; and that's really his main flaw. Kyle, I think, is supposed to be a hopeless romantic who believes in the ability of people to make their own fate. That's what makes him so tragic in T1. That he thinks fate can change, and he's inadvertently contributing to the closed loop of time.

	All the great character conflict that could've arisen between the T-800 and Kyle was dampened by how damn dopey the guy is in the movie. I understand that he was the center of perspective, with the whole timeline changing, but he's so lacking in coolness in this movie that the whole thing just had this young adult feel to it. It's not completely off or mirthless, just not anywhere near as great as it could have been.

	Arnold is of course fucking perfect in this movie.

	The last bit of the film is John Connor, turned into a Skynet dog and, honestly, I think it's a great idea. There's all kinds of irony there, especially that the whole series is about killing John Connor and in this movie they finally fuckin do it by the T-800s hands. Conceptually it's about the perfect way to escalate things in the Terminator franchise- but honestly they just didn't execute it that well. John Connor as the resistance leader was great, but John Connor as Skynet's avatar was just... too greasy. Too smarmy.

	He plays the archetypal smarmy, corrupted hero, and it's just played too straight. To some degree I think they could've done something with the fact that John Connor's supposed to have a relationship with the T-800- I know that we all ignore Terminator 3, but it's pretty fucking important in Terminator 2. I don't know why they leave that entirely alone.

	That aside, it just doesn't quite work and it's probably the most compelling conceptual element of the film. John Connor is like a lesser Jesus and Skynet is something like the devil. (It is something that I'm not sure I agree with the film on, by the way, that they decided to personify Skynet instead of leaving him as this ethereal and ambiguous evil) They could've made him more threatening... more tragic, maybe. It's fine having him as a totally corrupted villain instead of a salvageable one, but, basically, his dialogue needed another rewrite.

That's it.