Under normal circumstances, bad movies may be discussed with friends, but it is rarely necessary to re-brush. After all, there are so many classic movies to watch, why waste time on things that are destined to be forgotten by time.
However, just a few days ago, I brushed "Terminator: Genesis" (hereinafter referred to as T5) three times. Thinking about it carefully, the reason why I am so obsessed with this movie can only be because I am so obsessed with the two films directed by Cameron (hereinafter referred to as T1 & T2) that I do not fully understand what the problem is with this one. It's always stuck in the throat.
I used to be extremely concerned that T5 left too many mysteries in the main story, and that every time the T-800 was damaged due to grading and other reasons, the details were deliberately avoided, and that there were so many nonsense characters that T-800 had to complain” John Connor talks too much", and "Genesis" ended up being an unnecessary shell for "Skynet". My friends also complained to me that after the opening battle of T5, the whole team was as clean as after taking a shower. But I now feel that these can only be regarded as T5 flaws at best - the real flaws are far from here.
Of course, due to such flaws, the upper limit of the level T5 can achieve is only 80 points.
But T5 is only worth 40/100. Deducting the middle 40 points is the three deadly sins mentioned in the title.
The first sin is that the temperament of most new actors and old characters is seriously out of touch.
"Dragon Mom" Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor, Jay Courtney Experiments with Kyle Reese, Jason Clarke as John Connor, and Lee Byung Hun as T-1000. The success of T1&T2, in addition to the Terminator T-800, which has made great contributions, is based on the successful shaping of these four roles. And one of the magic of T5 is that it deviates from the temperament of these four characters by three.
Sarah Connor in T1 in 1984 is weak and helpless, and is a typical "slasher film" actress; Sarah Connor in T2 in 1991 is transformed into a woman who is both maternal and Strong warrior. Combining the timeline and the new story structure, T5's Sarah Connor should be the same age as the former and have a certain temperament of the latter.
And Emilia Clarke presented the audience too much like an ordinary adolescent girl. Femininity, motherhood, and strength all seemed to be a little bit in her, but they were all specious. At the same time, she was very deliberate and superficial in her struggle against fate, as if she was a pure adolescent rebellious mentality, which was extremely annoying.
If Sarah Connor is still only specious, then the casting of Kyle Rees and John Connor is defining the word "failure".
Kyle Reese, established by T1, is in stark contrast to T-800, a character with a slightly feminine temperament, but is gritty enough to easily empathize with the audience. And Kyle Rees, recreated by Jay Courtney, is actually dull, simple and honest, in short, stupid, or more simply - stupid. And many scenes of T5 revolve around the stupidity of "son-in-law" Kyle Reese and the clumsiness of "father" T-800. Comparing the two, Anton Eugene in "Terminator 2018" is obviously much better than him.
As for John Connor, the problem is that Jason Clarke lacks righteousness and lacks leadership qualities as a decent man; he has more than evil spirits, but is not cold enough as a villain. This has two dire consequences: Even if the trailer doesn't reveal the plot of John Connor's blackening, the audience will feel that he is not a good person from the beginning; and he is too long-winded after blackening. The pressure of the T-800 and T-1000 at the beginning. Although one of the reasons for the failure of "2018" is that John Connor's leadership is not convincing enough, Christian Bale in T4 is also much better than him.
Compared with these three roles, T-1000 played by Lee Byung Hun can even be called a perfect restoration. However, the T-1000 was reduced to the status of ordinary thugs in T5, and it was completely powerless. This makes one have to smile.
For T5, a movie that recreates classic characters as a major selling point, another 10 points will be deducted for the failure of casting.
The second sin is the inversion of the internal logical relationship when paying tribute to the classic bridge.
The biggest selling point of T5 is undoubtedly Schwarzenegger's veteran presence, and the script is tailored for him. On the one hand, T-800 has the image of three "age groups" of old, middle and young; on the other hand, the film also designed a lot of bridges for T-800 to pay tribute to the previous work, with ghost and animal laugh as a typical representative, the core is to laugh Points are built on the "clumsy" of the T-800.
Obviously, these clumsy movements are paying tribute or guiding the audience to recall the T-800's attempt to learn human behavior in T2, and the ghostly laughs that appear many times are even directly copied. But the screenwriter made a big mistake and completely reversed the connotation of the "clumsy" performance of the T-800 in the T2.
The T-800 in T2, just beginning to learn about human beings, will inevitably make all kinds of jokes. The logic behind all his blunt demeanor in the film is: I'm clumsy, but I'm trying to learn.
The T-800 in T5, who has lived with Sarah for 11 years, is still making all kinds of jokes. So behind all his blunt lines and demeanor in the film, this logic is replaced by this: I'm studying hard, but I'm clumsy.
In other words, when the audience sees the T-800 in T2, they will laugh at his clumsiness and move because he is learning; but when the audience sees the T-800 in T5, they will only laugh at his clumsiness .
It can be said: Compared with the T-800 in T2, the T-800 in T5 is completely contrary to the creative concept behind its behavior, and even reverses the above-mentioned logical relationship and makes its connotation superficial. Therefore, it is ridiculous to borrow the feelings of the previous work while not respecting the concept of the previous work.
For T5, a movie that pays homage to the previous plot as another major selling point, another 10 points will be deducted for the inversion of the internal logical relationship.
The third deadly sin is the total confusion and dislocation of the three-act structure.
T5 divides the plot according to the time line. 2029, 1984 and 2017 belong to three acts. The structure design can't be clearer, but there is a serious problem in the allocation of plot time.
Taking a typical 120-minute three-act movie as an example, the first act of the main plot usually takes about 30 minutes and is the paragraph that leads to the core conflict; the third act should be shorter, even no more than 20 minutes, to resolve the core conflict. more than half of the rest of the time belongs to the second act, the passage that develops the core conflict. At the same time, to address the probable length of the second act, the script adds subplots, adds new acts, or devises an inter-act climax with sufficient weight.
The scenes are divided by major reversals of the storyline and the character's action goals. In T5, there are two time travels. As a result, the time distribution of the various acts of T5 is surprising.
2029's first act: Aiming to capture Skynet's secret weapons base, from opening to 19th; 1984's second act: 1984's target of tackling the future Terminator killer, from 19th to 51st ; 2017's third act: with the goal of preventing "Genesis" from being born, taking up the remaining hour.
While the first act was still perfectly acceptable, the second and third act were a complete joke.
The second act is supposed to be the main part of developing the story, but in T5 it is more like the normal first act, just a foreshadowing before the main plot unfolds. John Connor, as the main villain of the film, is even completely absent in this scene, replaced by the battle between the old and new T-800 and the spoiler of the T-1000.
The third act should have reached the climax and solved the crisis in one go, but in T5 it carried some of the functions of the second act. Only at this point does the main plot really unfold, the shaping of John Connor begins further, and his identity has been lacking in major new twists since its early exposure. All of these factors finally led to an incredibly long story in 2017, dragging what was supposed to be a climactic passage into an endless tug of war.
Such a script structure is undoubtedly a product concocted to sell feelings, but the negative impact of the double-edged sword of feelings is exposed here.
For T5, a typical mainstream commercial film under the Hollywood system, the chaos of the three-act structure is an extremely low-level fundamental error, so another 20 points will be deducted.
In the end, after the small flaws in the details and the heavy deduction of points for these three major sins, it is the score that T5 deserves: 40/100, ★★.
In the final analysis, the classic of "Terminator" is that it successfully applied the horror film branch of "killer movie" in the background of science fiction, and at the same time successfully created the classic characters represented by T-800. Its sci-fi worldview is inherently simple, not bad but definitely not colorful.
In other words, compared to many classic sci-fi series, the Terminator series is not suitable for repeated development. The story focuses on the past, and it is easy to repeat the story structure and characters that the previous works depended on for success. Focusing on the future and facing the man-machine apocalypse war is essentially nothing new. As for making a fuss about the timeline? The spatiotemporal logic based strictly on the "grandmother paradox" and the relationships of the characters in a single episode, there is essentially not much to do.
T5 also once again exposed a weakness in the follow-up development of the "Terminator" series: the movie relied too much on the T-800, and the T-800 relied too much on Arnold Schwarzenegger. However, after this role was successfully interpreted from two diametrically opposite angles by T1&T2, it has lost new digging space, and Schwarzenegger's advanced age has set many traps for the weaving of new stories.
No, T5 fell into the pit?
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