Sarah Connor was one of the first strong females I saw on as a kid.  She had muscles.  She fought back.  Her voice was raspy.  She saved the world – sort of.

Terminator Genisys brought home the Mary/Jesus allegory for me.  I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner.  But when Sarah says that she’s not just going to birth the man who saves the world I went ‘ohhhhh, I get it now.  he’s Jesus, sort of.  Saving us from ourselves, what we create that takes over the world.”

The basic plot is.  .  .a bit hard to type out without spoilers.  But here goes – Reese gets sent back by John Connor to save Sarah.  Only, when he goes back in time Sarah has the good terminator at her side (she calls him Pops) and is already a fighter, even though she’s still a precocious teen.  So the timeline has changed.  And it’s changed again because Reese remembers meeting Sarah when he was a kid now, too.  And then other terminators come back, and people come back, and Skynet is now Genisys, a user system that will become the standard and thus have control of everything.

The Good:  Schwarzenegger is owning his role.  There is bad CGI in the opening when the current timeline Terminator battles his original bad ass self, but other than that he’s gold.  It’s explained that the human part of him ages, which is why he looks like the Schwarzenegger of now.  He’s having fun and it shows.

Matthew Smith is in it.

J.K. Simmons has a role, although it feels pieced in sort off, like he could have been edited out or more put in.  Either way, I dig him.

The Not So Good:  This feels like a CTV made for TV movie to spawn a new series, rather than an actual movie movie.  The acting is quite deadpan throughout and I don’t sense real emotion from any, even in the scenes where the music tells me I should feel something, or the words coming out of their mouths seem emotional.  It’s just kind of . . there.  The special effects are also rather hit and miss.

Remember when those two kids remade Indiana Jones shot for shot in their backyard and it was viral news for like, a minute?  That’s how this feels as well.  Many scenes were redoes from other terminator movies only weren’t as cool anymore.  Scenes like when the liquid terminator is shot in the head and the camera lingers.  In the first movie that appeared in – super cool.  Now it’s like ‘huh, again?’  There were many scenes that were simply repeats (the liquid terminator turning around my morphing through himself, Arnie saying ‘I’ll be back,’ etc.) and that knocked me out because they just weren’t where the story was going and not done as well as the original.

The Female:  Yeah. There is one female in existence and that’s Sarah Connor and she’s there to birth the male who saves the world.  Only at least here she fights that idea a bit more, but she and Reese still hook up.  There is one other woman who appears first as a cop/fbi and then terminator, played by Sandrine Holt- who I loved in CTVs series Once a Thief.  She just doesn’t really speak.  I never understand why she doesn’t get more screen time in these films.

As an homage film, it works, but as a film film my mind wandered.  I was walking away from it and coming back when I heard crashes.  I wasn’t fully engrossed, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend a dollar either (I watched it through Amazon streaming.)

Let me know what you thought!