<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Alan Taylor. Starring Emilia Clarke, Jason Clarke, Jai Courtney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, JK Simmons, Dayo Okeniyi, Byung-hun Lee

They’ve flogged this franchise to death and made a fucking mess of our childhood memories of two great films: the original Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Three cheers for altering the timeline and to Star Trek for giving Hollywood this nifty little device to help them churn out remakes and reboots of classic films and turn them into piles of molten rubbish.

After his brilliant performance in the un-Zombie film Maggie, Arnie is back to what started it all but his presence feels more like an apology with absolutely nothing new to offer in terms of dialogue or character depth.

I don’t know what aspects of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series have been incorporated into this film apart from the fact that it focuses more on Sarah Connor’s earlier life. Emilia Clarke is a sorry stand in for the original Sarah Connor: Linda Hamilton. She’s bland and boring. Jai Courtney’s acting skills have not improved one bit and he’s just as vapid.

Going to the future and then coming back and altering a timeline, blah-blah, becomes so confusing and uninteresting that after a while you wonder if even the filmmakers knew what they were doing or were they simply borrowing scenes from the first two Terminator films and rehashing them here. Stories about altering the timeline can be done well as the rebooted JJ Abrams Star Trek films have shown us. But if there’s a case to be made against them then Terminator: Genisys is a prime example of a failure of gargantuan proportions.

While the inclusion of a CGI Arnold is interesting, that whole scene showing them facing off lacks any meaning. And then you have the T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) doing exactly what the original did in Judgment Day but with far less finesse. No surprises, no character, no fun.

Long stretches of dull, techy, garbled, nonsensical dialogue ensure that you blank out and forget that you’re even watching a Terminator movie. Calling Arnie ‘Pops’ is simply the lowest point in the movie where the only actor that qualifies for that title is the CGI kid that plays Skynet. It is absolutely deplorable that they would even consider having a sequel to this movie, one of the worst films I have ever seen.