First off I have to say congratulations to Matt Smith’s agent. I’m sure he was paid a good amount of money to be in the tent pole movie. Of the whole two hours, I think he was literally in the film for one minute! His voice was used for maybe three to five minutes. That’s great work if you can get it.

Terminator Genisys is a great example of why you don’t do time travel movies. Time travel movies, for them to work right, have to have a set of rules for time travel. Once you set the rules you can’t break them for plot convinces. This film started with one hand tied behind its back. The rules of time travel had been set in the first and second movies. It helped that the creator of the first two films was the same person and was someone who wasn’t going to break his own rules. Since Cameron, people who have worked on the films and the short lived series have tried tweaking the rules.

This film had the nerve to have an honest to goodness Time Lord in the production and still managed to throw logic out the window when it came to time travel. Before I get comments about how time travel isn’t real, remember what I said about the rules of time travel. You can make up the time travel rules anyway you want to, but like physics you have to have hardened rules for it to make sense.

My first big problem going into the film was the blatant Back to the Future II style. We end up in Los Angeles at the time of the first Terminator movie. The film decided not to use the old footage from the first movie and insert the new actors. They redid scenes with new actors, saying the exact same lines with an approximate look of the time. Remember the old black man in the garbage truck who says, for me, the classic ‘What the hell,’ line? The guy they got to say the line didn’t sound good to me. What killed it for me in the first of these repeat scenes were the punk kids Arnold first encounters for their clothes. Did anyone on the production team of the new film live in the early 80’s as a young adult? Did anyone bother to watch the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization? Honestly they looked like a Halloween version of what true punks of the late 70s and early 80s looked and acted like.

Another problem I had with the movie was it kept referencing other movies. There was a sewer scene that reminded me of Amazing Spider-Man. The fight on the Golden gate bridge reminded me of the first Spider-Man. Man, did they go for the references of the first two Terminator films! I shouldn’t be surprised because Arnold is known for his catch phrases and he did a whole lot of them in this film, as well as similar scenes he did in the first two Terminator films.

Speaking of messing with the timeline, there was an incident in the movie crucial to the plot. It was put there seemingly out of midair, but by this point there were a couple of things that didn’t make sense to me that were supposed to be cleared up later in the film and never were. In any case, and this is why I say rules have to be adhered to, it had been established that the time machine could get you through time and space, meaning you could lock onto a location as well as a timeline. For some reason, even though later it is established that there is a very good safe location they can hide out at, they don’t use the time machine to put them in that safe location in the first place. Because that didn’t happen, forty five minutes of the film is spent on them getting out of a bad situation, then some time later getting back into a similar situation. For the plot, if they don’t get caught in the first instance, it wouldn’t allow for the introduction of a character that for the life of me, other than for a plot device, doesn’t belong. I don’t want to spoil it, but that set of events didn’t fit logically for me.

By the time we get to the helicopter chase scene that could never happen in real life, I was done with the film, and there was still another half hour or so of movie to go. Like I alluded to earlier, there is a nagging question that comes up near the beginning of the film and I believe was never answered. At the end of the film, it is hinted that more answers are to come, which is the not so veiled message the producers want a sequel. I’m good with not knowing the answers to those questions.