Reviewed: Terminator Genisys...

Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent back in time from a war-torn world to 1984 by future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) to protect John's mother Sarah Connor (Emily Clark) from the machinations of a cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent to kill her before John can be born. It completes a circle of destiny that John knows was predetermined along time ago.

Except it doesn't.

Because this time when Kyle Reese arrives in 1984, Sarah Connor is not a meek waitress with no idea she's historically so important, but now a hardened, pragmatic fighter with a Terminator as her protector. Kyle quickly realises that something has happened between his departure and arrival that has vastly altered the original timeline. With apparent further incursions from the future and visions of a timeline he shouldn't be able to experience, can Kyle and Sarah work out what further problems have happened to the timeline and jump forward far enough to change them again?

Less than a year after The X-Men sent their own chrome-boned warrior back in time to save everyone from a robotic future - Days of Future Past ironically riffing on its own version of the Terminator - its time for that original James Cameron franchise to bend so far backwards to the future that you can positively hear its adamantium-laced spine (okay, wrong franchise), getting bent out of shape. A degree in quantum mechanics and a major in yoga may not be essential in trying to get your head around the timeline shenanigans on show, but it would surely help.

It's tempting to say that you admire the ambition on show here, the franchise has never been short of bravado, but the film's main problems is the sheer lack of ambition, preferring instead to essentially plunder its own vaults and then merely switch around a few of the key pieces to see what happens... essentially a 'best of... what if a what if story was different'. Or is different. Or will be.

What initially feels like a potentially clever companion piece to the original film (and an effort to smooth out some of the contradictions that have come into being since the closed-loop nature of that initial outing), it simply can't keep up the facade. Like a reproduction of a piece of art started with the best of intentions, the production throws the best paint at the canvas but fails to join the dots with any kind of real emotion or panache. One minute logic dictates the plot, the next some scientific technobabble to explain a convenience and then there comes a point where even the main characters are speaking to how unfathomable it's all become. Things happen... because. Essentially Terminator: Genisys is a series of decent-enough set-pieces joined together by very familiar looking string which unravels as quickly as it's being knitted together.

If you're looking for a Terminator tribute-band, then Genisys is a decent-enough outing - all the right notes, if not necessarily in the right order and with the irreplaceable Arnie surrounded by new faces stepping in to familiar characters. But there's a literal 'been-there-seen-that' element dogging its every other move and the 'look-at-this' variations it makes to that narrative aren't inspired enough to stand on their own. A selling point is two 'Arnies' fighting for the price of one (one being a largely convincing CGI performance-capture snthesbian), but the 'real' Schwarzenegger creaks through proceedings, playing up to that age factor and repeatedly talking about being 'old but not obsolete' as if it were a contract negotiation.

Emilia Clarke - unrecognisable from her silver-haired Game of Thrones look - is the spunky heroine, a more immediate mix of warrior and ingenue than Linda Hamilton and handles everything thrown at her with aplomb. Jai Courtney is also a decent-enough actor but far too often thrown into roles of generic hard-men, nice-guys supporting roles that could be played by any number of similar actors (think A Good Day to Die Hard). Jason Clarke is a good actor as well - the likes of The Chicago Code and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes showing he can hold the screen - but here given much less than promised to do. Alan Taylor's direction (honed on projects like Thor: The Dark World and Game of Thrones) is journeyman, somewhat a slave to the stunts and explosions required to punctuate proceedings and which overshadow the story and performances themselves.

Not then an unmitigated disaster, simply a bit of a missed opportunity, a summer slam-dunk turned into a nostalgic no-brainer - a formulaic revamp that will certainly pass the time and have you dashing to re-watch the original... and finding that far superior.

Terminator: Genisys is released by Warner Bros. and is out now.  

Thanks to the Vie @ The Light, Leeds.