TERMINATOR GENISYS This is an official promotional image from Terminator Genisys.
  • TERMINATOR GENISYS This is an official promotional image from Terminator Genisys.

There's something weird about Terminator Genisys—even weirder than its name, which, I assure you, is even more physically painful to type than it is to read. We're now in a spot where mainstream film has largely given up trying to tell original stories—instead focusing on franchises and reboots that feature easily marketable, already recognizable brand names. You have to sell a movie to make money, and selling something that people already know about is a million times easier than trying to make them buy something new.

But at the same time, audiences want—or at least say they want, despite all financial evidence to the contrary—to be surprised, to see something they haven't already seen. So filmmakers end up in a difficult position: Create something that's part of a franchise people already like, but also try to include enough original stuff to justify charging $15 a ticket. Which leads us to Terminator Genisys, which looks like a fucking mess.

I don't want to say that: Speaking of slavish brand loyalty, I love certain parts of the Terminator franchise to a worrisome degree. But even the most devout fan of all things T-800 will admit that the Terminator films, comics, TV shows, videogames, and diapers are hardly reliable; at this point, there's been a lot more insulting crap than there has been weird, fun, smart, tech-noir brilliance. (I'll go to my grave defending the first The Terminator, the great TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Dark Horse Comics' The Terminator: 2029 to 1984.) Hell, if we're counting, Genisys is at least the third feature film to try to revive James Cameron's series. But in attempting to cash in on a well-known brand name (and on the poster-ready images of Schwarzenegger and a chrome skeleton), Genisys appears to just be throwing fucking everything into the pot: Sarah Connor! Young Arnold! Old Arnold! The first Terminator movie! The second Terminator movie! Liquid metal guy! The Terminator's theme song! John Connor! Kyle Reese! "Come with me if you want to live!" "I'll be back!" Metal arm! Explosions! Future war! SCHOOL BUSES FLIPPING OVER AND OVER IN THE AIR! YARRRRRRRHHHGGGH PLEASE COME SEE OUR MOVIE

Maybe Terminator Genisys' marketing campaign is just terrible, and maybe the movie—which has a good director, which has a good cast—will actually be good. I would like that to be the case! Or maybe it's all just a big pile of gibberish with a brand name, because maybe these days, that's good enough.