I will say this for Alan Taylor, I appreciate the fact he doesn’t hold back or play the publicity game the same way as most folks in Hollywood. He’s been more than open when it comes to his dealings with Marvel while directing Thor: The Dark World as well as The Daily Beast, Taylor discusses Terminator‘s now-convoluted timeline and whether or not understanding it is even important.
“We start in 2029 during the Future War, then go back to… 1984, jumping into…2017. So that’s three,” Taylor said. “But when we start the movie we’re actually pre-Judgment Day, because we’re watching a happy beautiful world that was lost. And then Judgment Day happens. Then we cut ahead to…Post-Judgment Day. So that’s actually two more time frames, just within the prologue. Which brings us up to five. Then when we time travel with Kyle [and] he’s remembering an alternate timeline, which was his 13th birthday in the happy time-verse, which would be 2012 seen in two different ways. And the seventh is when we flash back to the 1970s when Sarah is saved by the Guardian [Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s T-800]. That’s my favorite, because that’s my 11-year-old daughter playing the young Sarah Connor.”
As I alluded to in my review, all that is pretty straight-forward, it’s when you try and unpack it and make sense of it that it begins to get a little confusing. Such as, when was Arnold’s T-800 sent back to the 70s and by whom? And which Arnold was it? But Taylor doesn’t want you to think on it too hard.
“Arnold has one of the most unpronounceable, impenetrable expositional lines in the movie when he says, ‘It’s possible to remember two time frames when you enter the quantum field during a nexus moment,’ and nobody has any idea what he’s talking about,” Taylor said. “But yes, it makes sense. We don’t expect anybody to get it — then Kyle turns to Sarah and says, ‘Can you make him stop talking like that?’ It’s a way to say, you don’t really have to get this. If you want to nerd out, it’s all there, I think it’s coherent. But hopefully we can move on.”
I also referenced this moment of self-awareness as well as what Taylor says after that with regard to using humor to move things along. “My favorite part is using humor to sort of skate over it,” he adds. “It’s a way of saying, ‘You may not get this, but who cares? Keep going!’ There’s a scene where J.K. Simmons comes in and says, ‘What you’re doing seems really complicated.’ And [Sarah Connor] says, ‘We’re here to save the world!’ And he says, ‘I can work with that.’ Basically, that’s what we’re telling the audience: Go with it, we’re saving the world.”
Okay, I’m on board with all of that, but… If it doesn’t really matter why are you bothering telling me about it? If it doesn’t really matter why tack on that last scene where Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) goes to see his younger self? I can understand doing it so audiences don’t storm the Internet wondering how young Kyle knew about Genisys, but it was such an awful scene it more-or-less confirmed how bad the movie was and it’s less to do with whether or not the audience can trace the timelines from point A to point B and more about the fact the movie focused so much on information it knew wasn’t important and yet continued to touch upon it.
It also doesn’t help that even once the audience gives itself over to the film all we’re left with are action scenes involving the same punching and gunfire as the one before it.
Whether you like Jurassic World or not, and I’ll freely admit its story and characters are rather dumb, the action was incredibly on point and different from one scene to the next. At one moment the Indominus is escaping its paddock, munching on folks along the way, then you have the gyrosphere sequence, the pterodactyls, the raptors and the motorcycles and then the climactic finale. Maybe you hated all of that, but you have to, at the very least, admit each scene was able to separate itself from the next. I was able to do with that movie what Taylor wishes I could have done with Genisys, but the lack of variety from one scene to the next made that virtually impossible.
After the lackluster box office result this weekend it’s not yet clear whether or not the studio will be moving forward with plans for two more films in a proposed new Terminator trilogy, but if they do might I suggest coming up with new kinds of action sequences, preferably ones where if one robot punches another robot we don’t have to see them continue to punch one another or throw each other through walls before someone comes in with a rocket launcher or spear to end the scene? After all, each fight scene was a lot like the mid-credit scene, the end of each rendered everything you just watched pointless. [via The Playlist]
