It doesn't feel remorse and it absolutely will not stop. It really should.

I appear to be in the middle of a “Dumb Sci Fi” season. Either that or I’ve burnt myself out moaning about superhero movies, which is a distinct possibility. Alien: Covenant, Jupiter Ascending, Lucy before that; there’s just such a wealth of science-idiocy that it was kind of inevitable. Sci-F-idiocy, if you will.

This week sort of fills a whole host of quotas for me. It’s dumb Sci Fi of the highest order. It’s also the latest in a franchise that should have had the good grace to stop about four movies ago.  It’s also chock full of those beautiful, cringe-inducing, punch yourself in the face with a rabid badger to help ease the pain retconning moments that directors and producers think are clever but are almost exclusively hopelessly stupid and nonsensical. We’re talking Boba Fett’s accent levels of douchebaggery today. Suffice it to say I wasn’t impressed. I don’t understand it and I don’t think I ever will; retconning only serves to do two things in my mind. It either makes you look like a hack who can’t actually find a way to write a well thought out script or it makes it look like you have no shits to give about the existing canon. These people probably think they’re maverick legends carving their niche into cinematic history. This is not the case. The truth is that if you have to change the original to fit your new story then you suck and you should go back to writing fan fiction where Spock is in an intimate but ultimately unfulfilling relationship with Cobra Commander and they’re only staying together for the kids, Grimlock and Lion-0. So it came to pass that somebody somewhere not only approved the script for Terminator: Genisys, but also somehow managed to convince a decent array of A-List actor and Arnie himself to throw themselves under the 21:38 direct bus to Stupidsville.

Let’s start out by acknowledging all movies involving time travel are inherently bobbins. They may be fantastic fun and all that but not a single one actually, genuinely makes sense. How has neither one of Marty’s parents in Back to the Future noticed that he looks exactly like Calvin Klein? Even Family Guy worked that one out. Don’t get me wrong, I loved those movies, but they don’t make sense. Hermione’s time turning shenanigans in Harry Potter? Pivotal, certainly, but practical? You expect us to believe she spent an entire school year monkeying about with the space/time continuum and not one student or faculty member caught her at it or thought to intervene? Terminator has always taken the biscuit though.

The entire central tenet of every Terminator movie is simply to keep sending a procession of increasingly sophisticated and yet strangely inept robots back in time to kill various members of Sarah Connor’s bloodline. It was a decent idea for the first movie wrapped up nicely and everyone forgot about the hoops the writers had to go through in order to make it work. Why not just send super weapons back with it? Some slightly odd reasoning to do with living organic material apparently, although why you couldn’t just surgically insert a Phased Plasma Rifle in the 30 watt range into a willing participant I don’t know. They seemed to happily abandon that premise in the sequel for the T-1000 though, seeing as he was just the contents of about 400 thermometers injected with sentience. It’s amazing what corners you can cut when you want to get your new-fangled effects into a movie, even if they’re great effects in a great movie.

I refuse to even talk about Terminator 3 because I saw it at the cinema and have both rued and lamented the tenner I forked out just to watch a dumpster fire of magnificent proportions. I could have spent that on all kinds of things that wouldn’t have made me feel dead inside. Terminator Salvation was at least a bit different and there wasn’t so much of the whole time travel BS in it. It did however, exchange it for a piss-poor game of “Guess who the Terminator is” which nobody cared about and nobody won.

Genisys, which has the stupidest title and an even more stupid back story for said title (it’s the name of an app in case you wondered, because misspelling things is cool kids…) is literally back to the original premise and movie by literally using the plot but retconning it to the point where they’ve re-shot a bunch of scenes from Terminator with new actors (pointless) and then surprise surprise!  Everything’s different because the resistance sent a reprogrammed Terminator back to protect Sarah Connor. It’s painful to write about it if I’m honest; for the sake of making money out a franchise that should have died about 20 years ago on a high they’ve screwed with basically everything. Terminators age now apparently, as well as being able to regenerate and learn how to smile badly. Skynet is now an actual person/robot/series of robots (think Ultron but less snarky) and has worked out how to transform people into Terminators using nanobots or something. So in what the writers doubtless thought was a stroke of genius, we now get John Connor as a Terminator. No double bluffs (apart from the now obligatory who’s a robot? Roulette), no coming back from this one. The newest bad guy in the Terminator is its previous protagonist and we’re supposed to cheer for Arnie’s now ancient T-100. Somebody out there is genuinely proud of that narrative decision because it probably sounded like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.

So yet again Sarah Connor has to try and save the future by destroying Skynet in the past, but this time with added awkwardness because her adopted Father is a robot who keeps urging her to mate with Kyle Reece who doesn’t even know that part until John travels back into the past to “help” and weirdly calls him Dad at a random moment. The whole thing is clumsy, right down to the now standard post-credit scene where they reveal they plan to try and milk more money out of us with yet more technically proficient but artistically devoid crap.

Honestly, it’s really transparent. They couldn’t get away from the fact that the only reason people watch these turds any more is because they expect something out of them: a wave of nostalgia polished up right nice and made all shiny by new effects and technology. People literally throw their money at stuff like this (I should know because Transformers) because we’ve become so jaded we can’t even watch animatronic stuff anymore. We’ve been spoiled as movie-goers so now writers, directors and producers are realising there’s a goldmine in getting out the digital Pledge and wafting it liberally over the decaying corpses of classic movies. It won’t be long before we see John Connor becoming his own Father when the resistance sends him back to sire Kyle Reece whilst being chased by a Terminator made from a million dollar signs.