After yet more behind the scenes drama and rights wranglings, the intended trilogy begun with Salvation was dropped, but appetite for another Terminator movie remained. With input (and apparent support) from franchise creator James Cameron, the involvement of Arnold Schwarzenegger (now free of his obligations as a public servant) and some bold ideas, a new trilogy was ready to go – but could this really be the rebirth of the franchise?

I feel quite sorry for Alan Taylor. Sure, he’s worked on some of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows of modern times. But when one considers his movie directing career, the two biggest, most well-known pieces he’s been involved in have not only been some of the most poorly received of their respective franchises (I maintain Thor: The Dark World is the poorest MCU movie to date) but also involved him taking over from other directors who have themselves gone on to better things. Patty Jenkins left Dark World over creative differences and went on to make Wonder Woman. Justin Lin pulled out of Genisys to make the ridiculous but well-received Fast & Furious 6. If you’re wondering what that all has to do with the Terminator franchise then congratulations, you’ve arrived at the same sort of feeling I had watching Genisys.

I jest, but not too much. Genisys has the weird distinction of being easily the dullest of the Terminator movies by quite some stretch. Rise of the Machines was risible but compellingly entertaining in a sort of slow-motion car crash way. Salvation took itself far too seriously and had way too many subplots going on but at least had indications of ambition. Genisys feels like the writers got as far as ‘re-shoot some of the scenes from the original Terminator’ and then gave up and went for a coffee break, leaving one of the interns to finish. It’s filled with half-baked ideas, convoluted nonsense plotting and it gives Arnold Schwarzenegger far too much metaphysical mumbo-jumbo exposition dialogue to spew at the screen. It also fundamentally misunderstands the two central characters it seeks to recast, not only giving utterly unsuitable actors to the roles but then writing them as if the original movies had never happened. But I get ahead of myself, much like Genisys.

Early indications from trailers were interesting, and it’s true that there is a certain nostalgic kick to that one part where the digitally enabled younger Terminator strides towards the re-cast trio of punks to demand their clothes. There’s also a certain level of intrigue when old Arnie turns up to meet him and they square off. But honestly, that one couple of minutes is the single time that Genisys manages to do anything of even vague interest, and it’s aping a better movie that came before it. In the one high(er) point of its own run time, its best achievement is making the exact same mistake that the previous movies made.

The casting of Jai Courtney as Reese is perhaps the film’s single biggest error. I have nothing against Courtney – he was one of the few bright points in the risible Suicide Squad – but physically and emotionally he proves himself unsuited to inhabit the role made famous by Michael Biehn. He has entirely the wrong build, being bigger, broader and heftier, and none of the sense of wired, frazzled energy that Biehn brought to the role. In its place we have this oddly laconic version of the character who spends more of the film looking quietly bemused than anything else. Courtney looks too well-fed and relaxed to be a shell-shocked soldier who has spent his life fighting an unbeatable foe, and even the scars the makeup department have added to him look utterly fake. I can’t buy him as the stand-in for Biehn and that’s an issue because the film makes it one, by seeking to recreate certain key scenes and visual cues from the original film. The aesthetic choices the movie makes early actually work against everything that it’s trying to do.

Opposite Courtney you have Emilia Clarke doing her best to be Sarah Connor. Now, it must be remembered that Sarah in the first film is very different from the Sarah of T2 who is lodged in the collective pop culture consciousness. She was a young girl working as a waitress, studying for college, and not really ready for what was about to happen to her. It would seem unfair then to compare Clarke’s performance here with anything other than Hamilton’s original portrayal, except that’s exactly what the film’s plotting invites, by having this ‘version’ of Sarah be one who has already been surviving Terminator attacks since she was a small girl. This is precisely the Sarah who already has it all worked out, is a trained soldier and confident handler of weaponry. The issue is, it’s still Emilia Clarke, a slightly built young woman with none of the physical conditioning Hamilton undertook to play that version of the character in T2. It leaves one with the confused impression of a young woman who looks like the Sarah Connor of The Terminator but is trying to act like the one of Terminator 2, and Clarke, for all her talents, can’t quite pull it off. It feels like she’s cosplaying the character rather than actually becoming it.

Jason Clarke, being the fifth person to don the cinematic mantle of John Connor at this point (including Michael Edwards’ brief onscreen appearance as General John Connor in T2) perhaps has the most thankless task of all – John has never really been all that well-defined as a character by the series so much as a series of walking clichés, and the plot of Genisys tries to give him an interesting twist but fumbles it on a number of levels. Firstly, it’s not really at all clear why the new ‘John’ travels back to oversee the creation of Genisys (this movie’s progenitor of Skynet). Secondly, any tension that might have been created by the scenes leading up to his ‘reveal’ as… I think it’s Skynet but the film itself is never quite clear on this point, is robbed by the fact that it was already spoiled in the trailers and promotional material for the movie.

Thirdly, Clarke doesn’t really get given anything to work with in terms of making the character his own. There’s the opening scenes of him and Reese taking the base where the Time Displacement equipment is in which we get to see something of their relationship (here the age difference seems much more pronounced than before, Connor seeming more like a father figure to Reese) but they really tell us little of the man himself, and then after that he’s just possessed or changed or whatever the film is trying to sell us here and goes about the place more like the standard two-dimensional cackling bad guy from an 80s children’s cartoon than anything else. There’s no real sense here, at this point, of what the self-aware super genius computer Skynet is actually after. Why does it want to exterminate the human race and begin a war that will murder billions? Why does it think that taking over the body of John Connor will help this, especially if rather than making use of him in the future it sends him back to the past?

At this point you may think ‘well, it’s an action movie, it doesn’t have time to spend on philosophical navel-gazing and mumbo-jumbo sci-fi nonsense’, and were this a usual Terminator movie you’d be right, but somewhere that hypothetical intern the scriptwriters left to finish things off obviously watched a few too many YouTube videos on cod-philosophy.

What this leads to is a bunch of the most confused writing the series has yet seen on the nature of time travel, alternate timelines and the like which would make anyone who complained about Avengers: Endgame’s treatment of similar issues feel suddenly like they were dedicated MCU fans. It’s bad enough at the start when the plot just waves through this idea that another Terminator was sent to Kill Sarah Connor when she was a kid but she was saved by another reprogrammed T-800 sent back by the resistance and so now she’s not the Sarah Connor Reese expected to find. But then it really starts to go off the reservation with a subplot about Reese remembering things that haven’t happened to him but to an alternate Reese in his past/the movie’s future, relating to actions that the Sarah who now paradoxically exists in his past even though John didn’t remember her that way when he sent Reese back. Things which will become central to the second and third acts of the plot. Things which make no actual sense but then get deciphered by ‘Pops’, the ancient T-800, who has apparently graduated from a machine designed to kill people into an amateur science geek/time travel philosopher.

And then, just to try to shake things up even further, the film decides to make our heroes time-travel again – forwards. The genius idea behind this is that they will hop to just before Genisys – the thing which becomes Skynet and we’ll get to that – launches to stop it. They are forced to leave Pops behind because he loses all the flesh on one arm in an escapade, so he will prepare for everything and pick them up when they reappear in the future. It’s fairly easy to spot the glaring flaw in this plan – we already time travel forwards. That’s called existing. Yes, you may argue, but by 2017 they will both be much older – 33 years older in fact. But why do they have to wait until just before Skynet goes online? Why not work in the 33 years’ head start they have with their new information to track down the very genesis (see what I did there?) of the damned thing and snuff it out? Because the movie got tired of recreating 1984 LA, I guess…

And on the subject of Genisys – if your goal is to bring a franchise bang up to date, perhaps don’t thread in a storyline about something which is already old news. Genisys is an app which will link your phone, your tablet, your home computer and every other gadget in your life. So it’s Google. Or Amazon Alexa. Or the iCloud. Basically, this is a plot device that might have sounded revolutionary in the nineties but just seems oddly anachronistic here, making it even more baffling that the movie has them go to 2017 instead of, say 1997. No, the timelines have shifted now, says the plot, 1997 is no longer when it all happens, you must go to 2017 the week before it happens so you have an artificial deadline to work against. Oh, ok…

And so it goes on. J.K. Simmons is criminally wasted as the older version of a cop Reese meets in 1984 briefly, and the only person who knows/believes who Sarah and Reese are in a subplot which actually goes absolutely nowhere. Arnie is left to try to carry his own subplot about the obsolescence of his form versus the newer, deadlier models of Terminator (first a T-1000 also inexplicably sent to 1984 and then the John Connor/Skynet hybrid thing) and make large exposition dumps of dialogue about the convoluted plot which I’m not sure even the writers understood. Emilia Clarke is required to act as if she’s about a foot taller and several years older than she actually is with an accent that wavers all over the place and none of it, for one second, actually manages to hang together or make any sort of narrative sense.

It’s perhaps no surprise, given its reception, that the mooted trilogy which would begin with Genisys was abandoned in favour of the new instalment. What’s shocking really is how so much talent was assembled onto a project which turned out as badly as this did. Unlike Rise of the Machines or Salvation, there’s no hint here of grander ambition or big ideas that just weren’t quite realised. Instead we have what feels like a hollow shell – an exercise in cynical deployment of nostalgia to sell something which relates in no way to the source material it cites.

Judgement Day may well be inevitable, but for the moment it seems, so are endless sequels to an idea that was never really fully realised in the first place, which overestimate all the wrong parts and misunderstand the core appeal.