Terminator: Genisys (2015)

Plot: John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect Sarah Connor from The Terminator in the year 1984. But while he is starting his mission in that year, he is attacked by a T-1000 and rescued by Sarah Connor and a reprogrammed T-800 nicknamed "Pops". Eventually they somehow discover that they need to travel forward to the year 2017 to stop Skynet from starting Judgement Day.

My first and foremost feeling is that, if anything, I admire this movie more than I really like or hate it. And that really comes from the story itself. While I cannot deny how it is undeniably clunky, I still like it because it has a lot of great ideas. Even if  you take into account whatever information you were given from the trailers, they still had a twist or two that were admittingly hard to swallow, but still interesting. They wanted to basically forget about T3 and TS and make this movie its own thing. They easily could've just given it a half effort like Terminator 3 and -in some respects - Terminator Salvation. But while they do that too here, you can tell that they gave a lot more thought into this movie. In fact if anything, Johnathan and I felt that it just needed a little more thought to become something stronger. Especially with the dialogue. That needed a fair amount of work. But for what it is, it's enough to be a fun movie. The action was decent, and  the performances where fine -though in retrospect, I have to agree with Johnathan that Jai Courtney was not really the best choice to play as Kyle. But what really gave this movie the right kind of heart was Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Pops". You can tell that he was well in his element, and had a lot of fun giving us the T-800 that we've grown to love. As Johnathan basically put it, this would have been a total mess without him.

And that's my review for Termintaor: Genisys. It's clunky with its story and dialogue, but as a Terminator movie, it has some good ideas that at least make it appear as its own, more thoughtful, movie while still staying true to some of the basics of being a Terminator movie that makes it at least more enjoyable than Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation. Officially speaking, I should call it a bad film, but I found it an enjoyable enough film to give it a high-ish enough rating to state that I"m glad to have seen it at least once.

Rating: 60%