“Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”
– Walter Benjamin
There are some spoilers ahead.
Terminator Genesys is not a good movie. In places it wasn’t bad but for the most part it failed to live up to the previous films, certainly the first two. Instead of living up to them, Genesys decided to terminate them. Especially the first Terminator movie where that time line got completely severed. Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as the T-800, a cyborg infiltration unit: part man, part machine with a hyper-alloy combat chassis and microprocessor-controlled, with living human tissue on the outside. He was sent back to 1973 to protect Sarah Conner from a T-1000 liquid metal unit that was sent to kill her.
A T-800 terminator is sent back to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the leader of the Resistance, John Connor, who leads the war against the machines in the year 2029. In Genesys, John Connor along with Kyle Reese, his first in command, in the year 2029 set out to destroy Skynet’s new primary weapon, which they learn is a time machine. The T-800 is sent back before the Resistance can reach the machine, so Kyle Reese is then sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator. While Reese is in the magnetic field of the time machine, he envisions an alternative timeline where he sees warnings of events that take place in the year 2017. Just before he disappears into the time machine he sees a soldier from the Resistance walk up behind John Connor and attack him.
The T-800 arrived back in 1984 as he did in the original Terminator movie but this time he is met by an older version of the T-800 sent back to protect Sarah, who was ‘old but not obsolete’. They fought and the bad T-800 is terminated by Sarah Connor and thus adding a very telling postmodern meta-narrative to the already convoluted retelling of this story. Here is where Genesys cuts the timeline from the original film. Kyle Reese arrives in the alley and is chased by a police officer into the department store, much like the original, except here the cop is a T-1000 liquid metal terminator like the one in Terminator 2. Reese is saved by a soldier-ready, combat-trained Sarah Connor. “Come with me if you want to live!” she shouts out to him rather than him shouting that out to her in the original.
On many levels this is off-putting. Here Genesys pays zero respect to the original film and its existential material. It rewrites the narrative of the story within the story and also, and more disturbingly, it attempts to rewrite our own narrative of the story as an audience member. Here the movie is pushing at the ceiling of postmodernism, threatening to create yet another complication on how we store knowledge versus how we store data in the external world.
Genesys suggests that knowledge in the external world is the only knowledge there is. It also suggests that knowledge can be manipulated and changed anyway it sees fit. This commodification of knowledge is what philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard warned us about in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report into Knowledge, where he summed up what he thought of the postmodern age and the ‘decision makers’ that are altering the narrative for their own means of profit.
“What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.”
- Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Terminator was a masterful film following a vulnerable young woman that was thrown into this insane world of cyborgs and machine wars. The film showed Sarah grow from a helpless girl to the mother of the leader of the Resistance. She was forced to embrace her strength and fight back not only for herself but her future son. The existential part of the film lies in its ever-impending dread. Like George Romero’s zombies, the Terminator cannot be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it doesn’t feel remorse, pity or fear. It’s a force that will not stop until she is dead. It’s impervious to negotiations but in the case of this film, it’s postmodern because it’s a machine from the future. It’s not only death coming but death by man-made technology. It changes everything Sarah thought about the world, it throws into question her own existence.
The semiotics of Terminator Genesys lost all this meaning and vanished into this shallow-surface, level terminator-coolness that it failed to even capture. It also failed at having any life-force that the first two films had throughout. Genesys didn’t make us care about anyone even though it exploded characters that we do care about nostalgically. The Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor of this movie had no chemistry at all where in the original they had it throughout, you believed their love story where with Genesys it was Facebook-forgettable.
Terminator Genesys had actors playing characters that had less life in them then “Pops”, the T-800 older terminator that was sent back to protect Sarah. These characters have impassive eyes like dolls or oddly enough, like terminators. These new generation actors are social-media-friendly-disconnected-consumers that have not been brought up on human emotion like an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman. Genesys mentions how technology and our obedience to it will result in our eventual demise but simultaneously embraces it by celebrating the ‘Guardian’ terminator that saves Sarah and the future of mankind.
In the end, the ‘Genesys’ program, which is an app in the movie that allows consumers to consolidate their technology and thus allows Cyberdyne to take over the planet, is destroyed. Kyle, who remains alive unlike the original, and Sarah remain in 2017 after time travelling there from 1984, where they await the next chapter of this convoluted story. The movie had some okay action sequences but was ultimately a disappointment to the franchise. It was a symbolic mess and as a result could very well be studied for years to come for its very post-postmodern reassignment of knowledge and its assignment of meaning.
“Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.”
- Jean-Francois Lyotard
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