This post contains spoilers related to the plot of Terminator: Genisys.
Last night, for the second time in recent weeks, I went to the theater to see Terminator: Genisys. I had in mind a particular kind of question (that was raised, two weeks ago over lunch with two of my buddies), what is it about this movie that prevented it from making money on the scale of Jurassic World? Both are contemporary reboots of important and well loved franchises. Both play a similar trick in pretending that later films (The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III, and the two most recent Terminator installments). Both reboots try to draw from the same well of nostalgia that was palpable in the abysmal Pixels, what Grantland's Wesley Morris described as a "'was' is better than 'is'" mindset that runs through all of these films, a sense that the system of production has robbed these films of their core integrity. Now, before I go further I should admit that on my first viewing, I was not in love with this movie. In fact, I was on the record as saying that I thought Jurassic World was the better picture (I couldn't even muster up the will to write a review of the movie the first time that I saw it). The underlying thought here was that dinosaurs, even in a film that is totally uninteresting on every other level, are still boss, but that after two dips in the fetid waters of the Terminator franchise, Terminators were not. I was wrong.
I rarely swing so far in my opinion of a film from one viewing to the next. But I walked out of Terminator: Genisys last night in love with this movie, and I think I know why (on a cosmological level) this movie didn't run rough-shod over the box office, but we'll get to that in a minute. Because to start talking about Terminator: Genisys in a meaningful way, one first needs to think about Einstein, matter, and the curvature of space.
When Einstein first proposed the theory of special relativity in 1903, it was with the belief that space-time, as a construct bends around matter. Objects in space with mass, bend space towards them, generating the force of gravity. But when Einstein moved forward to a broader theory of general relativity, he changed his mind about the directionality of that relationship. Now it was the curvature that was pre-eminent, and matter was the result of objects existing in these wells and eddies of space-time. The universe wants things to roll a certain way, to configure themselves in a certain way. On the level of relativistic physics, there is a Dao, a path, a way that the universe wants to configure itself.
The universe of the Terminator movies has a Dao of its own. Sarah Connor (played by Emilia Clarke) points this out to Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney, who must have the best agent in Hollywood), when she points out that in every configuration of the Terminator universe there has been a single constant. The love between Sarah and Kyle results in a birth, and ends in his death. Over and over again, through various possibilities and permutations, from Linda Hamilton to Lena Headey, the pattern has played itself out. Across all the interdictions of the future into the past the rivers of time have flowed towards a single headwater, the death of Kyle Reese and the birth of John Connor.
To this day, the best representation of John Connor is still as the unseen savior of mankind. While the movies have navigated around the problem of showing his face with differing degrees of success, ultimately he is better off as a cypher. Asking anyone to represent the warrior-prophet of the future is a high task, and few (but especially not Christian Bale) have been up to it. Jason Clarke does an admirable job in Genisys, but it is still lacking because no man could possibly be what John Connor is. He is the like the hero of a fantasy novel, a machine destroying Gandalf, but no one who has ever written lines for him has had the faintest sense of what a character like that should say. The worst part of Genisys is his speech to the troops at the very beginning. It reminded me of someone who saw Independence Day ten years ago trying to summarize Bill Pullman's speech to a buddy in a bar after three drinks.
What Genisys does with the idea of John Connor though, is what makes this movie brilliant. At a certain point Connor says to Sarah and Kyle that the three of them are "castaways in time" living outside of any of the film's multiple and convoluted timelines. The three of them (I would also have included the T-800 on this list, but I didn't write the movie) are paradox, they are the whole universe, and their relationships, their family, forms the Dao. What they do shapes the future and the past, the nexus point, the perfect inflection. When John and the T-800 come into direct conflict in the quantum destabilizer at the film's climax, what we are watching is something like the Big Bang itself. We are watching the two primordial forces of this narrative universe caught in a timeless state of total conflict. It is the philosophical apotheosis of the franchise, as John Connor and the Terminator strive to determine the nature of reality itself.
Is there some dumb stuff about this movie? Sure. Is it a little hard to follow if you aren't well versed in the mythology? Yeah, of course. Audiences hate being confused, and to not be confused you have to have immediate access to 24 and 31 year old minutiae (which most people don't). But ultimately I don't know if that is why the people didn't flock out to see it they way they did Jurassic World. I think they didn't come out because on some cosmic level they weren't meant to. Because this is the perfect place for the Terminator story to end (minus the disappointing mid-credits bumper that exists only to offer the possibility of more movies to come), and because if it had succeeded like Jurassic World did at the box office, we would keep seeing iterations of it forever. With China lifting the blackout on western movies ensuring that Genisys will get a Chinese release, there is now a possibility that this story may continue, but I hope not. I hope that the path of the universe rallies against it, so that the final chapter of this story will remain pristine.
So I guess I didn't really walk away with an answer to my question. But I did walk away with a greater appreciation for this film, and that's probably just as good.
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