Unreality Companion: Terminator Genisys

In which I develop on the content of my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

So last weekend's double-feature was Terminator Genisys and Magic Mike XXL.  The better of these two movies was exactly what you would think it is.  Despite a surprisingly good first film, Magic Mike's successor was every bit the sex-pandering trash that you'd expect it to be.  And, despite the rampantly negative reviews floating around on the internet, Terminator Genysis turned out to be an exceptional lot of fun.

On the eve of mankind's final victory over Skynet, John Connor - leader of the Human resistance - preps for the real battle.  Knowing that Skynet will send a Terminator into the past in order to assassinate his mother before she births him, he sends Kyle Reese - his second in command and, secretly, his father-to-be - back to 1984 to save her.

But nothing is as it was supposed to be.  Moments before Reese leaves for the past, Skynet infects John Connor with a reconstructive virus that transforms him into a Next Gen Terminator under the machines' control.  When Reese arrives in the past, he doesn't find a helpless teenager in need of rescuing, but a battle-hardened soldier who had already survived one assassination attempt and had been prepping for his arrival for decades with the help of her own T-800.  All the while, Reese experiences memories of a lifetime he never lived - one where Skynet had not yet assumed control and Judgment Day had to happen.

I cannot express just how pumped I was for this movie going in.  While admittedly not quite at Age of Ultron or The Force Awakens levels of hype, it was still pretty high up there.  It was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, a long-in-coming sequel to two of my overall favorite movies and exactly the kind of movie that I've wanted to come out of this franchise for well over a decade now.

In these regards, the movie fully lives up to the high expectations that its premise - and excellent (if spoiler-ridden) trailer - set up for it.  It brings the franchise full circle by sending us back to the setting of the first movie.  It gives us exciting new twists on everything Skynet (both in terms of an amped up T-1000 and the newly Terminated John Connor).  It changes everything that we've ever known about the franchise in ways that were both wholly unexpected but fully realistic.

It was exciting, well written and even gave us a Sarah Connor that was a worthy successor to Linda Hamilton's take on the character.  It had everything and then some and I simply cannot understand why its received such universally negative reviews from critics across the country.  It is really that good.

Does this mean that it was a perfect movie by any means?  No, of course not.  The mid-movie time-jump to 2015 - seemingly "just because" - is an out-of-place setting change that serves as an over-written continuation to what was already an excellent action romp.  It would have been more than enough to stick with a Judgment Day-style Sarah Connor, fresh off the boat Kyle Reese and an increasingly glitchy T-800 (named Pops) duke it out against a vintage T-800 in 1984.

I also get why Steve Jobs - and, by extension, Apple-style branding - is the current go-to for tech-based villains, but it's gotten old real fast.  It was tolerable in Kingsmen because it was purely surface-level aesthetics.  It's obnoxious in Terminator because it feels like a needlessly low blow in a franchise that has bigger - and more interesting - things to worry about.

Although not quite as big an offender in this regard as Chappie, Terminator Genisys is severely overwritten.  There's enough material for two movies crammed into a single two-hour chunk of time.  We have Reese returning to a radically altered 1984 and teaming up with a shockingly martial Sarah Connor and the protective Pops, but we also have the jump to contemporary LA where a newly roboticized John Connor ensures Skynet's creation in our present.  Rather than letting the two ideas breathe in their own movies, they're crammed into a single film and rushed through as if the inevitable sequels are where it's really at.

In this regard, Terminator Genisys is like a far superior version of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  Both are far more interesting it setting up possible sequels and spin-offs than they are in crafting the movie that they actually have to work with.  The difference between them is that Terminator Genisys still succeeds in giving us a fully realized story (even if it is overly crammed with plot points and narrative leaps), while The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was basically just an advertisement for movies that ultimately never came to be.

So although it's something of a mixed bag, Terminator Genisys is every bit the summer blockbuster that you've been waiting to see.  Sure, it's not nearly the movie that Fury Road or Jurassic World was, but few are.  It's a fun, action-packed sequel with a great premise and awesome explosions that's bound to get even more people to care about the first exceptional instalments to the franchise.

Rating:  8/10

Buy on BluRay:  It's a nothing short of a must-have for Terminator fans.

So what did you think of Terminator Genisys?  Was it better or worse than the four movies that came before it?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: Why Terminator Genisys' Twist Could Be the Best Thing to Ever Happen to the Franchise

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Before we get into this, I want to make it as clear as possible that this is going to be a spoiler soaked discussion of Terminator Genisys.  Granted, every so-called spoiler’s straight from the official trailer, but if you were somehow able to avoid it until now, this is your chance to bow out and be none the wiser before its July release.

A new Terminator Genisys trailer hit the internet earlier this week and, by God, was it a doozy.  Rather than save its game-changing reveal for its release, Skydance Productions (a division of Paramount) spoiled the movie’s big twist smack dab in the middle of its marketing campaign.  John Connor – champion of mankind – has betrayed humanity.  Throwing his lot in with the machines, he’s transformed himself into some kind of next gen Terminator and gone back in time to do what Skynet never could: kill his mother before he ever had a chance to be born.

And although the Internet is rightly embroiled at the thought of spoiling such a massive twist in a franchise built around the inherent heroic destiny of John Connor before anybody’s had the chance to see it, I couldn’t help but gush over just how awesome that twist actually was.  It’s everything that I’veever wanted to see inthe franchise come to fruition.

I’ve argued for this basic setup before: “if your central premise is something as wibbly-wobbly as time travel, why not bend the franchise back in on itself?”  Why not take its relatively simple premise of traveling back in time to destroy your unborn enemy (and conversely to save your unborn savior) and transform it into a temporal ouroboros: traveling back in time over and over again, mucking about with timelines and histories until the linear course of events warps into something grotesque and altogether unrecognizable?

While it is a leap in logic for the series, it’s no more farfetched than sending your father back in time to impregnate your mother with you.  John Connor was never a well-adjusted, model citizen.  He was the son of a teenaged mother whose father died before he was born.  Fearing the machines’ uprising, Sarah Connor’s admittedly well-meaning parenting robbed him of a stable home environment.  They moved constantly from place to place, going anywhere Sarah could learn something that might help John in the war to come.  And when you start to think about the kinds of people who would have the kinds of skills she was seeking out, it’s not hard to guess what kind of effect hardcore survivalists and likely domestic terrorists would have on him.

By the time he was 10, his mother had been incarcerated in a mental hospital and he wasn’t allowed to see her.  He was shipped off to uncaring foster parents and quickly accrued a fairly impressive police record using the skills that she had taught him.  After the events of Judgment Day, he lost the only real father-figure he had ever known (the T-800) and because his mother was still an escaped mental patient, they packed up once again and lived on the run.

His mother only survived another 6 years after that, 3 of which was spent battling leukemia.  Afterwards, he became a paranoid drifter: working odd jobs, stealing pet medication and living off the grid.  Terminator Salvation saw him develop into a disobedient officer within the human resistance that was all too willing to oppose his superiors if he thought that it would serve the greater good.

Is it really all that surprising that this habitually abandoned and systematically abused character would end up turning on a humanity that he had never truly been a part of except in opposition to extinction?  Is it really inconceivable that the machines could broker a deal with him, or that he would be so resentful of the mess that his life had become as a direct result of his mother’s poor parenting that he would be willing to kill her and erase himself from the annals of history altogether?

And don’t get me wrong.  I do not for one second think that the script’s main concerns were narrative.  It’s an obvious attempt to reboot a decades old franchise that’s finally caught up to itself.  This is the Days of Future Past of Terminator movies: one last temporal ride to unravel the franchise’s tangled continuity and justify as many more time-traveling sequels as they can squeeze out of the franchise before doing it all over again.

The thing is, though, that I simply don’t care.  Greed might not always be good, but it’s the only reason why we’re getting what’s shaping up to be the best film of the franchise (or at least as close as anything’s come to dethroning Judgment Day in that regard).  The twist, although poorly revealed through marketing, is intelligent, unexpected and yet completely plausible given the character’s broken childhood and the time twisting nature of the series.  I can only hope that the movie itself lives up to that promise.

So are you looking forward to seeing Terminator Genisys in theaters this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Unreality Companion: Time Travelling for Fun and Profit

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

So this week's Unreality article left me with a lot of different directions to go with for its companion piece, most of which dealt with the tedious nuts and bolts of its time travelling narrative.  But with as excited as I am for Terminator Genisys, I wanted to do something fun, if a little tangential.  And what fun is time travel without a few good paradoxes thrown into the mix?

Although there are a lot to choose from, my favorite has always been the Ontological Paradox, marginally better known as the Bootstrap Paradox.  This is the paradox where something comes into existence through time travel without any logical origin.  It's what happens if you travel back in time to give yourself blueprints for a time machine, built one using them, then travel back in time to give yourself the blueprints all over again.  The only justification for its existence is that it was fatalistically necessitated to exist, so where did the blueprints actually come from?

Ontological - if a bit technical a phrase - at least makes sense on its face.  Ontology is the study of origins and existence.  But why is it alternatively known as the Bootstrap Paradox?  This term actually comes from the very phrase that you're probably thinking of - to pull oneself up by his or her bootstraps - which was used in the Robert Heinlein's story "By His Bootstraps."  Given that that's what popularized the scenario in the first place, the name stuck.

So where have we seen this before?  It's actually really popular, given just how mind-bendingly fun the idea is and how it highlights the inherent complications of time travel as a concept.  Its appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is actually what introduced me to the scenario.

At one point in the game, you (in the future) go to a windmill that's chaotically spinning out of control.  Its proprietor rages on about a child who stormed in year previous and played the song (where he had learned it from).  He teaches you the song, at which point you can go back in time and, as a child in the past, play the song at the windmill, exactly in the manner that the man described to you.  The song, logically, should not exist.

Most versions of this paradox, however, are inherently seedier: involving characters travelling back in time in order to impregnate relatives of theirs (often with themselves).  This is exactly how Futurama's Fry ended up impregnating his grandmother with his father.  Later on, they even address his family's inbreeding by revealing that Fry lacks the Delta Brainwave (which determines the intelligence of all animals and robots and even some plants).

This particular scenario is taken to its logical extreme in Predestination, an adaptation of another Heinlen story: " - All You Zombies -."  The story follows a temporal agent who travels back in time to recruit his replacement: a post-op hermaphrodite whose daughter was kidnapped years before.  What starts out as a time travel mystery with an especially strong focus on its character's back story, however, proves to be the trippiest movie to come around in years.

All of the main characters in the story are Ethan Hawke's character at different stages of his life.  He travels back in time (as the temporal agent) to hook up his father (the post-op recruit) with his mother (his pre-op self), who ultimately gives birth to himself.  He then abducts the child, starting the whole cycle over again.  The time-jumping unibomber that Hawke is tracking also turns out to be him (near the end of his life) and I'm still not convinced that Hawke's boss isn't also him (after his retirement from the force, but before he goes rogue in his old age).

And the story's title, "-All You Zombies-?"  It's actually a line from the story.  The protagonist (sole character?) thinks to himself that "I know where I came from - but where did all you zombies come from?"  As the middle section of the line, it represents the character's narrative: with neither a beginning nor an end.

So what is you favorite time travel paradox in fiction?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: The Retro Blockbusters of 2015

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Is it just me, or do all of the films that are coming out this year look really familiar?  This isn’t me whining about how Hollywood’s running out of ideas, nor about how there are too many sequels or remakes or reboots.  I like sequels, or at least the good ones.  While the first film of a franchise is generally worried about laying out the ground rules and setting up the world, sequels are free to bend (and sometimes break) those rules and explore those worlds.  Even reviled sequels (like Alien 3) usually bear at least some worthy fruit (like the Xenomorph’s ability to appropriate physiological traits from those it impregnates). 

I’m commenting on the oddly specific type of sequels and remakes that are coming out in 2015: developing on or revisiting the same group of Generation X blockbusters that were ubiquitous throughout my and many others’ childhoods.  We’ve gotten latter day Star Wars, tired Jurassic Parks and increasingly convoluted Terminators before, but never quite like this and certainly never all at once.  They all seem less concerned with moving their various franchises forward as much as they are about returning to square one: exploiting what made the original films so appealing to begin with.

Take Jurassic World, for instance.  The series’ first film presented the absolute marvel of genetically engineering dinosaurs and putting them together in a high tech zoo.  Sure, there was corporate espionage and chaos theory thrown in for good measure, but the soul of the film was the simultaneous wonder and terror of bringing Earth’s most ancient monsters into the 20th Century.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park‘s concern wasn’t so much replicating the success of Jurassic Park, but on-upping it.  It wasn’t enough to revisit the theme park, they had to bring them to the mainland and let them run amok in downtown San Diego.  Despite its better intentions, Jurassic Park III was born of the same “one-up the original” mindset (although let’s face it, the God-awful script didn’t do it any favors).  It wasn’t enough to have the Tyrannosaurus Rex – an animal whose name translates into “Tyrant Lizard King” – as monster to beat.  They instead had to go with the Spinosaurus, a dinosaur that few people knew, let alone cared, about.

While it might appear on the surface to be following the exact same pattern of “Jurassic Park, only better” that the other sequels went with, what we actually see is a return to form for the series.  Despite their names, what was the one thing that none of the other sequels had?  A park.

Jurassic World begins with a functional, sustainable, dinosaur-laden theme park that has been around for so long that the novelty of its existence has worn off.

The eventual result of this – that the corporate powers that be engineer hybridized, designer dinosaurs – is more in line with the spirit of the first film than either of the sequels.  The reason why the dinosaurs were able to break free and terrorize the film’s protagonists was that splicing dinosaur DNA with sex-changing frogs resulted in giant, carnivorous lizards to spontaneously change their sex in order to reproduce at an unregulated rate.  Purposefully making them more dangerous is simply the next step in human stupidity.

While the problems with the Star Wars prequel trilogy are far too numerous to address here, suffice it to say that they largely boil down to the same general point: the films did not resemble the originals.  The set and ship designs were too slick, the CG too obvious, the action too omnipresent and the characters too obnoxious.  It was so focused on what it could do with modern special effects that it forgot what it was supposed to be doing with it: telling a compelling story with likable characters.

If the series’ creator couldn’t do Episodes 4-6 justice, what chance do a bunch of Disney executives looking to make back the more than $4 billion investment that they made on the franchise?  As it turns out, a really good one.  It’s easy to forget that between the billions spent to buy the rights to the series and the hundreds of millions spent to produce, advertise and distribute each film, Disney won’t make anything back if people do not like the movies enough to sit through all of the sequels and spin-offs that they have planned.

As a result, Disney has been hell-bent on making a product that people not just want to see, but will pay through the nose in order to do so (in many cases two and three and four times).  That’s why the film (and its surrounding marketing) have gone back to the series’ basics.  The trailer prominently features Tatooine; the ships and droids very closely resemble what were in the first films; the last twenty-odd seconds was completely devoted to an aerial dog-fight between Tie Fighters and the Millennium Falcon.

Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker are all reprising their roles from Episodes 4-6 and Abrams has been a broken record about the use of puppets and physical props throughout The Force Awakens‘ highly publicized production.  Disney knows exactly what Star Wars fans want to see and has no problem selling it to them at $10 a ticket.

The Terminator franchise has been so focused on moving the story of John Connor into the future that its creators seemingly forgot that series owes its whole existence to time travel.  Why have a lone robotic assassin attack one person along a linear timeline when you can send the second (or third, or fourth) one(s) to reinforce the initial one whose mission failed?  Why not send it back to just after the events of the first movie, when Sarah Connor is weak, alone and pregnant?  Why not revisit the same night again and again and again, like every Back to the Future film seems to revolve around November 5, 1955 in Hill Valley.

Obviously there are very good reasons to not do this, but my point remains: if your central premise is something as wibbly-wobbly as time travel, why not bend the franchise back in on itself?  Why not make it entirely about its own existence?  After the disappointing reception of Terminator Salvation, the stewards of the franchise must have finally asked themselves this same question.

Terminator Genisys turns the franchise into a temporal ouroboros: taking the present-day timeline (now the post-apocalyptic future of the first film) and bringing it back to that fateful night when Kyle Reese landed in 1984, only things aren’t quite how we remember it.  Something went wonky in the timeline, so now Sarah Connor is already the badass that she would become in Terminator 2,  with the Schwarzenegger Terminator in tow, and the T-1000 (or at least some approximation of it) is the opponent that they have to square off against.  It’s basically the premise of the first film meets the characters from the second one which, from the outside looking in, looks to be all kinds of awesome.

2015’s blockbusters aren’t concerned building off of the past successes of their franchises as much as they are about outright reliving it (literally, in Terminator Genisys‘ case).  It’s not about being the next film in the series, but about keeping as closely to the first as possible.  It remains to be seen exactly how well this year’s trend will pan out, but I expect that we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the summers to come.

So what summer blockbuster are you most looking forward to this year?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Trailer Park: Terminator Genisys' New Trailer

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

I've mentioned before how, after getting hooked by a new movie's trailer, I try to avoid everything else related to the movie until I actually see it in theaters.  It keeps any potential spoilers to a minimum and prevents me from being Tomorrowlanded with too much information about a movie I was already planning to see.  And although Terminator Genisys let some major cats out of the bag that might have better been kept under wraps for the next month and a half, I can't really say that I didn't love every second of it.  Check it out here:

So, yeah.  That happened.  In a desperate bid for survival, John Connor turns traitor to humanity: converted into a next gen, T-1000-esque cyborg and going back in time to destroy his own lineage (presumably, paradoxically, erasing himself from existence).

Like I mentioned earlier, this is the kind of world-shaking plot twist that I would have preferred to not have seen going into the movie.  I would have much preferred being caught with my pants down in the theater than walking in knowing what exactly went wonky in the timeline to screw everything up.

But Jesus, if this doesn't change everything that you ever thought about the franchise.  John Connor - the savior of mankind - humanity's champion against the tyranny of the machines, has finally turned on everything he swore to protect his entire life.  It's a dark twist on one of cinema's most iconic action heroes, and yet doesn't feel like the rage-quitting betrayal that it could have been.  After watching this trailer, I'm just as - if not more - stoked about the movie than when I went into it.

This is everything that I've been hoping for since I saw the first trailer: a temporal ouroboros feeding endlessly off of its own increasingly delineating timeline.  With every pass the franchise makes at sending a Terminator back to either save or murder John Connor, it sends the course of history increasingly out of whack until it becomes hopelessly unrecognizable.  It's finally become the creature that it always had the potential to be: essentially James Cameron's Madoka.

This is undoubtedly not quite what they were going for.  Sure, it's obviously using time travel to horrifically twist its own timeline around on itself, but let's be realistic here.  It's trying to reset its franchise the same way that X-Men: First Class did: with a splashy, crowd-pleasing blockbuster that untangles its decades old continuity to make way for future sequels.  The fact that it's not only awesome, but exactly what I've always wanted to see out of the franchise, is ultimately symptomatic of its blockbuster status.

Still, you won't find me complaining about this turn of events.  I'll be the first in line to see this blockbuster franchise find its footing again.  And for the love of sci-fi, I hope that you're right there in line with me.

So are you excited about the spoilers in the new Terminator Genysis trailer?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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