TERMINATOR GENISYS: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

It’s not a sequel, it’s not a prequel and it’s not a reboot... it’s kind of an... "inbetweenquel". Yes, because time travel solves everything and sequels, reboots and remakes are easier to make than original ideas so why not have another Terminator film? Thankfully, this one is better than the last two, but can’t quite capture the magic of the original two.

Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as the Terminator, only in this film he is sent too far back in time and becomes the guardian of a young Sarah Connor thus changing the original timeline forever. So essentially, he’s pulled a Wolverine from X-men Days of Future Past to try to erase our memories of Terminator 3 and Salvation - an idea that was also borrowed from J.J. Abram’s 2009 Star Trek movie. Even though this also removes the events of the James Cameron films from the cannon, Genisys still works hard of reminding us of these gems. 

Game of Thrones Director Alan Taylor has done a great job of lovingly recreating some of the key sequences from James Cameron’s original film, so much so that I had to go back to the original just to make sure that they weren’t just replaying the first film. Another thing that Taylor has done well here is finding balance between the action and humour. Whereas Terminator 3 went too hard on the comedy and Salvation went too heavy on the gritty seriousness, Taylor has found the balance that made Judgment Day so appealing.

Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator as well as he has done in previous films but this time there is even more humanity to his character by playing a father-figure to Sarah Connor, even if it feels a little creepy when she calls him “Pops.” He has some nice moments that really feel like this could be his swan song, which makes this film a better send-off than Terminator 3 ever could have been. Game of Thrones Emilia Clarke plays Sarah Connor and to her credit she has managed to portray both sides of Linda Hamilton’s depictions across her two films showing both vulnerability and strength where needed. Then there’s Jai Courtney...

Now look, this guy must have some serious dirt on someone in Hollywood, because that is the only logical explanation for why he keeps getting such big roles. He hasn’t even attempted to emulate Michael Biehn’s portrayal in any way shape or form and his performance just saps any possible chemistry Kyle and Sarah could have out of the film. Michael Biehn brought such pain to the role of Kyle Reese and you can feel the heartache in his voice when he confesses to traveling back in time for love, here, Jai Courtney makes it sound like he’s just delivering a pizza or installing a light bulb.

The rest of the cast are rounded off in mostly thankless supporting roles that serve very little towards the overall plot or momentum of the narrative. Beside Jason Clarke playing the fourth depiction of John Connor, we have Byung-hun Lee playing the new T-1000 for the sole purpose of appealing to the Korean market for all of five minutes. We have J.K. Simmons playing a detective who helps our key cast and provides the occasional laugh and then we have Doctor Who’s Matt Smith in a role that is important to the story, but to be fair, does not make good use of his skills and could have easily have been played by anyone else.  

The movie does have some good action sequences and does well at repurposing some of the classic lines from the original two films but this is far from a perfect film. As I said, the action is good, but mostly through CGI enhancements. What made Cameron’s originals so thrilling was that you could tell that they were flying helicopters through low tunnels and flipping trucks on their sides with stuntmen holding on for dear life. Once again, battle-damaged CGI Arnie never looks as impressive as the make-up jobs you used to get from the Stan Winston Workshop. Outside of this, there are massive plot holes, confusing character motivations and so many head scratching time paradoxes that trying to find a starting point for how the ‘timey-whimey‘ stuff all began will likely cause an aneurysm.

The big twist of the movie would have been fantastic to see on the big screen had the marketing department not screwed the pooch on that one, but it’s not the first time the Terminator franchise has done that: Judgment Day revealed that Arnie was a good guy in trailers back in 91 and Salvation showed us that Sam Worthington was a Terminator long before the official release. My big issue with this type of marketing is that the films are always presented like this will be a big and unexpected reveal, but spoiling the fact that John Connor is now a Terminator in the trailer just makes you wonder why he didn’t reveal himself sooner considering the audience already knew he was the villain.    

In a box office season filled with film franchises returning from the dead, Terminator Genisys falls more in line with Jurassic World than Mad Max Fury Road but if you’re a true Arnie fan then I don’t think you’ll care either way.

Terminator Genisys get Three out of Five Stars (or Three out of Five warnings to not install tat next ‘killer App’ on your phones)

TED 2: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

So the ‘Thunder-Buddies’ are back and this time the short and furry Peter Griffin and Marky Mark are here for more dick and fart jokes but the biggest question on most people’s lips: Is this more Ted 1 or more A Million Ways To Die In The West? It’s not as bad as the critically maligned box office flop that was A Million Ways to Die in the West, but it’s also not that good.

MacFarlane brings us a second round of John and his lifelong buddy Ted, who are pretty much in the same position as they were in the first film; they have made no progress as characters whatsoever. Only this time Ted and his now wife from the first film, Tami-Lynn, want to have a baby but unfortunately for Ted this does not work out to be that easy. After several scenarios involving too many body fluids, Ted finds himself in a position where he needs to prove himself, in the eyes of the law, as a person.  

Now look that’s essentially the crux of the story but that is it in its entirety. The rest of the film is just a series of short and punchy jokes and sequences that often make no sense and have no real link to the film. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of laughs and you will feel guilty laughing at many of these jokes but honestly, the best joke of the whole film shows up in the first five minutes and then it pretty much plateaus after that. Much of the movie plays out like a series of sketches that never made it into Family Guy and often they feel very out of place in relation to how the comedy and cutaways were handled in the first film.

One saving grace for the film is the comedic timing of Mark Wahlberg and the banter that he has between himself and Ted but often when it’s not Wahlberg telling the joke, the film really isn’t that funny. There’s an extended dance sequence at the beginning of the movie and for a second you laugh, and then it sinks in that this isn’t a joke and we’re being made to watch this well choreographed but completely unnecessary sequence for the next five minutes. There are also many other sequences that feel like they are a set-up for something else but are then just forgotten about and never referenced again. Seriously, Liam Neeson makes a cameo and references that he might be back but that never eventuates; they come across a farm that feels like it is setting up to reveal a funny celebrity cameo but nothing happens and there are just so many other plot holes and moments that lead nowhere that you often wonder if the joke is supposed to be on us as the audience.

Honestly for me though, I feel that Seth MacFarlane lost what made his art form popular long ago. Family Guy hasn’t really been funny in a long time and most of his jokes and statements are often based on his own personal politics, I mean don’t get me wrong, I agree with most of the things he believes in, but often he does this at the expense of a good joke. As a storyteller, he conveniently wraps up plot points the same way they would be done in Family Guy or an Adam Sandler movie, as a joke-teller, MacFarlane seems to only be comfortable with a joke when it’s being arbitrarily mean towards another person, even if that person is a member of the cast.

And just touching back on that Adam Sandler thing: if Mark Wahlberg had been played by Adam Sandler, or Ted had been voiced by Adam Sandler, people would be tearing this film apart for the disrespect Sandler shows to his audience in his movies; so I don’t think Seth MacFarlane should be getting off so lightly for doing the same thing as Sandler  

Essentially, your enjoyment of the film will really be dependent on how much of a fan you are of Seth MacFarlane’s comedy, or how much of his comedy you are willing to tolerate. For me, all I wanted to do after watching the movie was go home and pop in my copy of the original film to remind me of how good it could have been.

Ted 2 gets One and a Half Stars (or One and a Half arbitrarily mean references to Amanda Seyfried’s eyes) 

JURASSIC WORLD: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Over twenty years since Steven Spielberg wowed audiences with the first Jurassic Park, where the world thought, for just a brief second, that Sam Neil was going o be the world’s biggest star, we get treated to a fourth installment. A film that is desperate to rid our memories of the lackluster Lost World (a.k.a. The T-Rex Takes Manhattan) and abysmal third film (which admittedly I’ve only ever half-watched). Does it succeed? Well.... yes and no.

Yes in the sense that it is better than Jurassic Park III and most of The Lost World, but no because the film is so reliant on reminding people of the previous films with constant callbacks and references to the first film.

Set twenty-two years after the first film we see the world’s worst parents send their two young children off to visit their Auntie who runs Jurassic World, a place that’s just one Black Fish documentary away from being shut down. The Aunt is played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to be trapped in some other movie where she’s a busy business chick who’s too busy doing business things to find love or look after family; throw in Chris Pratt for a good measure of contrived and forced romantic tension (and to fulfill his Indiana Jones quota on his way to becoming the next Harrison Ford) and you’ve got your leads. The kids are played by some forgettable teenager and the young one is played by Ty Simpkins, the annoying brainy kid from Iron Man 3 who is now playing the annoying brainy kid in Jurassic Park IV.

When a new dinosaur is let loose on the park, it is up to Pratt and Howard along with a whole bunch of red shirts to save the 20,000 plus dino-treats I mean *cough-cough* paying customers. The film is filled with the standard film-tropes of the modern-era which are handled better than most blockbusters, but only providing you don’t think too hard. The film really starts to fall apart once you start thinking about things like: Why with all this technology can people not detect something has happened until a secondary character asks a question that sets up the next scene? Why would you think that a damaged fence leading to a place filled with dangerous dinosaurs is a perfectly acceptable place to enter? Why would you not put in a safety device into your vehicles preventing people from having free-roam of the park? Why would you put two kids in the back of a van when you clearly have enough room in the front of the vehicle? How the hell can she run in those heels? And so on and so forth.

There are some funny moments, mostly coming from that guy from Let’s Be Cops but the rest is very derivative because the characters are all one dimensional archetypes including the ‘I’m bad because I’m a greedy business guy’, ‘I’m bad because I’m an army general guy’ and the ‘I’m good because I’m the charming, rugged good-looking one.’ Jurassic World has some big action set pieces that are creative in a fun popcorn-moments kind of way, but mostly feel hollow due to the reliance of CGI that just seems to be devoid of any weight or gravity. The final climax just looks like a pixels vs pixels battle meanwhile the movie itself pretty much summarises its whole purpose for existing in one of the opening scenes, with a very meta-speech about convincing people to buy tickets to a park by rehashing the same old ideas but with a bigger, more expensive, non-sensical twist on the original.

The film aims for the brilliance of Spielberg’s original but unfortunately, the best they could achieve was Spielberg’s cheaper Mexican counterpart Señor Spielbergo.

Jurassic World gets Two out of Five Stars (one for each time my Chris Pratt man-crush fluttered during the film)