MOVIE REVIEW
mOVIE rEVIEW:
‘Terminator Genisys’
I
n a scene in Terminator Genisys that's on heavy rotation in the movie's ads, the old Arnold Schwarzenegger goes up against the new. The older version has the
smoothly pampered skin of the best beauty treatments
that Hollywood money can buy, with scarcely a visible
line etching his sharply angled and ironed facial planes.
Now, though, the new movie's cyborg has abruptly come
deadpan to deadpan with an unlined, recently minted
identical twin that, like the original Terminator in 1984,
has entered without any clothes. It's strange to see Old
and Young Arnold go at it, their refrigerator-size bodies
slamming against each other in what plays like an intimate existential clash. From the moment Schwarzenegger entered The Terminator, that science fiction fantasy
became a pop-cultural classic, partly because of his title
performance as a killing machine from the future. The
movie made the bodybuilder-turned-actor a Reagan-era
star, one who rose to improbable heights. Fewer movie
entrances now seem more providential than that of the
Terminator, who materializes in an Atlas crouch, unfurls
his nude body in all its tumescent splendor and strides
over to a panorama of Los Angeles. There, he flashes a
city that his cyborg will soon invade on the screen and
that the actor would later oversee off screen as the governor of California. And now Schwarzenegger, 67, is,
yes, back, because while the series thrill is lamentably
long gone, franchises now apparently last forever. The
series has so deeply bored into the popular imagination
that it makes a recap of the latest one feel almost superfluous. Once again, there are special effects, muscles
and explosions, boomity boom boom. And, as before,
the machines that rule the future, having overthrown humanity, are trying to kill Sarah Connor in NN