Terminator Genisys

I was going to skip this movie. My husband wanted to see it, so I reluctantly went. I have not seen any of the previous movies in the series. This is one of those experiences I am very glad to have been wrong about. I loved this movie.

We start out in a post-apocalyptic world in which machines are destroying humans, but there is only one hope left. I started thinking of Days of Future Past at this point, and the comparison isn't too far off. Basically, what happens is that one guy is sent back into the past to protect the mother of the character who provides humanity's salvation. Apparently we're operating under the assumption that while the robot can change history drastically the human will not and will just restore the timeline. The humans in the original timeline, most notably Sarah (Emilia Clarke)  don't agree with this assumption, and believe that they can stop SkyNet from coming online by blowing it up.

In a major plot hole I could drive their stolen school bus through, Kyle (Jai Courtney) just happens to know that some unexplained thing has happened to change the date of Genesys from 1997 to 2017. With very little explanation, the characters change their plan and go to 2017, which, surprise! just happens to be when the SkyNet/Genisys system is supposed to come online in the new timeline.

This movie was really about two things: car chases and explosions. I mean, that's what you really want when you have an action movie, right? This movie provided a chase scene with a school bus, and car accidents when the time traveling bubble arrives. It also provides the right amount of humor to lighten the tension just enough. I'm not saying it was a funny movie but it definitely made me laugh on a few occasions.

The special effects were well done, and not over done, but some of the characters were a little hard to tell apart with face blindness being a factor. Kyle and John (Jason Clarke) look enough alike to be a little confusing.

You did not need a lot of background information to watch and enjoy this movie. Although my husband tells me there were moments that were meant for the fans, the story made sense without having seen any of the 1980s material.

Overall I give it an A.

Timeline

I was excited that this movie was made, because I really enjoyed the book. When my husband told me there had been a movie made of it, I didn't know how I had managed to miss it. I was excited to watch.

This movie started out poorly, with a man running through the forest, and winding up in the dessert, dying, accompanied by scary music. We come to find out that he's a time traveller, but we never get an explanation for why he wound up in the dessert when our other time travellers all wind up back in the lab.

It is really over-acted. They also start out by killing a whole bunch of characters right at the beginning. I guess this is a good time to do it because it saved me from starting to care about the dead characters. However, it did seem over done, and by the time the movie was halfway over, I couldn't care about any of the characters because they'd killed too many of them.

Some of the actors looked too much alike and it was hard to tell them apart. It was also, therefore, hard to care about them. By the time the movie was halfway over, I was looking at my watch waiting for it to end, and looking online for someone to chat with through the rest of it.

Michael Crichton, the author of Timeline, wrote in Jurassic Park, "just because scientists can, does that mean they should," or something along those lines. I feel like this movie was another excuse to say the same line, and that really all of Crichton's work falls along these lines. Just because scientists can invent time travel doesn't mean that they should. As a part of the larger body of works, this fails because it becomes cliche.

The movie did do a semi-good job explaining itself if you hadn't read the book, which is good because I think most people didn't read this book. However, it failed to give plausible explanations for anything that happened. I think that may have been a flaw in the book, too.

I'm trying hard to find a redeeming quality about the movie, but I really can't. I give it an F.