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'€˜Terminator Genisys'€™ Arnie is back with a bang

Arnold “Arnie” Schwarzenegger has mostly developed his movie career using his huge muscles and athleticism

Hans David Tampubolon (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sun, June 28, 2015

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'€˜Terminator Genisys'€™ Arnie is back with a bang

Arnold '€œArnie'€ Schwarzenegger has mostly developed his movie career using his huge muscles and athleticism.

But at 67 years of age, even the seven-time Mr. Olympia champion Arnie must come to terms that he too cannot compete with time.

With that in mind, one might wonder how Arnie can properly and convincingly reprise his role as the time-traveling and muscularly strong T-800 Terminator cyborg in 2015 in Terminator: Genisys, the fifth installment of the Terminator franchise.

The answer is simple: in Terminator: Genisys, Arnie shows that wrinkles and body fat cannot stop him using his charm and charisma in building his on-screen character.

Decades of playing action-movie heroes have given Arnie that certain aura that makes audiences, regardless of which generation they come from, believe they are watching a legit action hero.

Rather than leaving the Hollywood make up and special effect department to do their magic to make the T-800 look young again, Arnie has allowed his character to grow old while maintaining the ability to kick butt relentlessly, or as he puts it in one of his lines in the movie: '€œI am old but not obsolete'€.

Arnie'€™s real success in living up to the old version of the T-800 cyborg is its massive character shift. The cyborg shifts from a much more violent and trigger-happy original version to a very warm and gentle, but still butt-kicking, version in Terminator: Genisys.

Terminator: Genisys also scores some impressive work in making the plot properly connect with the previous series and keeping the past and current context of the various issues in the franchise relevant.

To fully understand the Terminator: Genisys storyline, however, there are a couple of requirements that are necessary, such as watching the original Terminator and its sequel; Terminator 2. This is because the whole universe of the Terminator deals with time travel and missing out on the first two installments could make the Genisys storyline somewhat puzzling to follow.

The Genisys storyline kicks off in the year 2029, a time when the war between the human race, led by John Connor (Jason Clarke) and the machines, led and powered by a sophisticated artificial intelligence program called Skynet, reaches its peak.

Connor and his trusted right-hand man, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), manage to lead the remaining humans to destroy the Skynet'€™s core and end the machine'€™s domination on earth.

However, it turns out Skynet has managed to send an evil version of the T-800 back to 1984 with a mission to kill Connor'€™s mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), so that the human resistance movement leader will not be born in the future.

Reese volunteers to travel back to 1984 using Skynet'€™s time machine in order to save Sarah. Connor warns Reese he might face difficulties in convincing Sarah to believe in his story but he must be able to do so for the sake of humanity in the future.

Just when Reese enters the machine, he sees Connor being attacked by another cyborg. It turns out that Connor is infected and is turned into a cyborg himself and he will later on become the evil T-3000 model that will also travel back into the past in order to ensure Skynet'€™s survival.



Things get even more complicated when, as the movie progresses, the plot shows that an alternate past has been created due to the events that took place in the original Terminator movie.

In the original movie, Reese (portrayed by Michael Biehn) managed to save Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and fell in love with her. Together, they would make love and conceive John. What happened here creates a time crack in the Terminator universe, with the Genisys version having Reese returning to 1984 and meeting with Sarah who already knows about him, the future and Skynet.

Sarah is also now protected by the old version of the T-800, which was sent back to 1973 by an unknown entity and was programmed to protect then nine-year old Sarah from a liquid metal cyborg, the T-1000. The old T-800 is also the one that intercepted the evil T-800 in 1984 before it could get to Sarah and kill her.

The alternate past eventually creates an alternate future. In the original Terminator, Skynet wakes up and starts its attempt to destroy humanity in 1997 but due to the time crack created, an alternate future is created and in here, Skynet is a by-product of a highly integrated operating system that launches in 2017.

Feeling confused already? Don'€™t worry. Scriptwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier execute a terrific job to present the plot clearly in 125 minutes of action.

Genisys features non-stop action sequences from the start. Every five minutes there has to be some sort of explosion or shooting scene taking place.

The special effects and CGI keep that old-school 1980s action-movie feeling, without looking cheap. They allow old fans of the franchise to have an enjoyable nostalgic ride. The new generation might not be impressed much but they likely do not mind since after all, despite the massive amount of action scenes, they only serve as a perfect complement to deliver the plot and the telling of the script.

The magic of the script also lies in the writers'€™ successful attempts to connect the dots.

Genisys basically proves why the original Terminator, with its timeless relevance, deserved such high acclaim at its release in 1984.

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Terminator: Genisys
(Paramount Pictures, 125 minutes)
Directed: Alan Taylor
Produced: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, Lee Byung-hun, JK Simmons

'€” Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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