Bots Against the Current: TERMINATOR GENISYS

Yet again the timeline turns loop-de-loops through the meddling of future warfare between robots and humans in Terminator Genisys, the fifth in the thirty-year-old franchise. We return to a distant future where the machines of the world have risen up and nearly exterminated us. John Connor, the leader of human resistance, sends soldier Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor, from an unstoppable robot Terminator tasked with killing her before she can give birth. The robots want the Connors dead before they can lead the human armies. Meanwhile, the future people would very much like to stop the tech company Cyberdyne from inventing the evil robo-consciousness Skynet program in the first place. What started as a way for writer-director James Cameron to stage an epic sci-fi conflict in a small actioner on the streets of 1984 has now ballooned into a complicated story of crisscrossing time travelers forever circling the same key events, attempting to stave off the future Judgment Day.

Once time travel is involved, the series has so many alternate possible futures and pasts that there’s a lot of freedom in recasting the roles and shifting the plot variables each time. But in this series, we’re invariably doomed to face the future conflict. The best the characters can do is push back the day the robots take over. Each film makes the path there increasingly complicated. No one ever prevents future doom in the way they’d hope. It is infinite repetition, an ouroboros of franchise storytelling. In Genisys, screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier make use of temporal flexibility to repeat, remake, remix, retcon, and recombine elements of every previous Terminator movie. It’s fun, but predigested, like watching the other four all at once.

We start in a dire apocalyptic future much like the one from fourth entry Terminator Salvation, which is otherwise mostly ignored here. John Connor (Jason Clarke this time) leads an army into the robot’s secret time travel bunker, where he sends Kyle Reese (now Jai Courtney) on the mission we saw in the first Terminator. Upon arrival, Reese quickly learns the 1984 that greets him is not the one he’s been prepped for. This Sarah Connor (a wonderful Emilia Clarke) is already the tough battle-ready woman of Terminator 2, having been rescued from certain death as a child by yet another time-hopping Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), this one programmed to protect her. They’re ready to fight back. In a satisfying stretch of clever franchise reflexivity, Genisys posits changes made by all the timeline tomfoolery in amusing and sometimes exciting sequences, including a clash between this new Terminator and the younger model with digitally modified footage from the original.

But other Terminators are on the hunt, including a T2-style liquid metal shape-shifter (Byung-hun Lee). So our trio is on the run, with Reese the one told to come along if he wants to live. What follows is functional big explosion-heavy summer entertainment with several car chases (a series staple), headache-inducing sci-fi paradox pondering (ditto), and, after another zap through a time portal, a scrambling fight to stop the nefarious Genysis program from going online. It’s a cloud-based program that’ll allow our cell phone addictions to awaken Skynet and hasten mankind’s destruction. It certainly sounds bad. It all ends in a gleaming tech factory showdown similar to Terminator 3’s, bringing our tour through the franchise’s greatest hits to a slam-bang sparks-and-booms conclusion.

Between loud clashes, blandly dour performances from the main men mix with the welcome sight of Schwarzenegger returning to his most iconic role. It’s fun to watch him as an aging battlebot – “Old, but not obsolete,” he says – even if his behavior is only riffing on what we’ve seen The Terminator do before. A more interesting twist is Clarke’s Sarah Connor. She carries youthful vitality and believable authority as the movie allows her an interesting new way to shoulder destiny’s burden. What if she doesn’t want to have a baby? If she can stop Skynet, she might not have to. Meanwhile, the best new character is played by J.K. Simmons, bringing a blast of real comic energy to a harried detective who pieces together the gist of the conflict and is given the best line, muttered with exasperation upon seeing a trail of destruction, “Goddamn time-travelin' robots!” That seems like a reasonable response.

Director Alan Taylor (of Thor: The Dark World) and crew do industrial-strength Hollywood spectacle brightly and briskly, finding moments for some nifty imagery. A robot melts into a gooey mess in a shower of acid. Another gets pulled apart by an electromagnet. That’s cool. Familiar action sequences (a police station siege, a hospital escape, a helicopter attack) reappear in new contexts, allowing fans recognition and surprise. There are some nice twists here and there (most spoiled by the ad campaign, another series tradition), but there’s a sense we’ve been here before. It’s blockbuster déjà vu. Genisys gains interest beyond the diverting surface only through ripples of Terminators past. The series narrative is impossibly knotted, but I bet if you had a lot of time on your hands you could get out some graph paper and figure it out.

The approach here leads to playful rearrangement of the basic puzzle pieces, but they don’t add back up. For a series about actions and their consequences, the connection between past and present is fuzzy here. Who sent our main Terminator? And why’s the new liquid one there? And what happens in the future to cause the Big Twists here? Maybe it had something to do with former Doctor Who star Matt Smith, who is in so little of the movie he’s presumably mostly on the cutting room floor. These questions leave the movie feeling like just another knot in the timeline when it plays like what should be an essential addition. But I enjoyed the setpieces for their slick thrills and empty echoes. It fits into the same pessimistic loop as the others, with the same characters fighting the same battles, hoping to push back inevitable war. Your enjoyment depends on how much you enjoy futility.

Horror In the Mind's Eye: SHUTTER ISLAND

For all of its bombast and all of its skillful employment of shivery tropes of classic horror films, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is one of the most quietly devastating films I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s a horror film that’s genuinely haunting, but not for any paranormal reasons. It’s scary because of its exploration of what humans are capable of doing to one another, about the fragile difference between sane and insane, about the psychology of trauma.

In 1954, U.S. Marshal, and World War II veteran, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives at Shutter Island’s Ashecliff Mental Institute a haunted man. He was one of the soldiers who liberated Dachau, vividly portrayed in flashbacks; one in particular consists of a long tracking shot through a massacre. His wife has recently died in a fire in their apartment building. He’s shaken and wounded, yet his duty presses him onward. He’s been assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient, a woman who drowned her kids in the lake behind her house. She’s considered dangerous, as are most of the patients in the facility, so she was under careful supervision. No one is sure how she could have managed to escape from a locked room in a locked wing in a locked building on an island made up of forbidding architecture, rough terrain and steep cliffs.

Things don’t seem to be entirely truthful at the institute, however. Daniels begins to suspect that a deeper truth is being hidden. The characters in the film could be considered types, as this square-jawed detective with his square-jawed partner (Mark Ruffalo) square off against secretive doctors (Sir Ben Kingsley, calmly chilling, and Max von Sydow, looking more like Death than a knight), shifty-eyed orderlies, evasive nurses, and menacing guards (John Carroll Lynch, goofily threatening, and Ted Levine, very creepy). The characters, through the material, the acting, and the direction, appear totally believable and dimensional within the pulpy movie universe of the film.

Scorsese doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve, at least as apparently as someone like Tarantino, but in this film he creates a precise and loving catalogue of movie creep-outs, starting with the stock cast of typical B-movie roles in an insane asylum that appears darkly threatening and alarmingly gothic. There are the eerie silences, sudden movements, long tracking shots, carefully controlled sound design, the swirling orchestral soundtrack, and slow building dread. Yet Scorsese doesn’t employ these to show off, but instead to create a seamless effect. This is B-movie material (based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis) turned A through superior craftsmanship.

The island and its inhabitants are frightening almost entirely on their own. From the opening shot of a ferry pulling closer to a dark mass of land, the film is already unsettling. Something is not right here. All of the characters seem jumpy, on edge. “It’s like they’re scared or something,” DiCaprio will say. We meet several inmates who are deeply scary psychological live-wires of frightening intensity or brutal honesty in the way they discuss their feelings and experiences. (It recalls the best of Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor). Robin Bartlett is particularly affecting as a woman who killed her abusive husband. Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley make strong impacts as well.

It is Leonardo DiCaprio who gets to steal the show, though. He’s given a complex character with deep secrets and deeper traumas. He starts the movie as a confident detective, brash and sure of himself, yet as the investigation continues he gets pushed closer and closer to edge of sanity. Scorsese ties the feelings and thoughts of the audience to DiCaprio’s. As his paranoia increased so did mine, as the definitions of truth and sanity started to shift and curdle. It’s not easy to play going insane, or at least the possibility, without going too big, and yet Scorsese gives DiCaprio the room to play an unsettling trajectory without allowing him to overshadow the film. Though, to be fair, the glee with which Scorsese deploys the formal elements of the film, drawing sound and lighting and misé-en-scene into enjoyably creepy spectacle with increasing intensity, would be hard to overshadow. He has great support from his great longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and his great longtime production designer Dante Ferretti to create a film of striking images and juxtapositions. It’s not exactly realism, but it never pushes too far into the realm of surrealism. This is psychological torment he’s after.

Scorsese injects into the proceedings extra shots of stylish freak-outs by way of shocking lucid dreams that combine flashback and nightmare into a potent mix. These are consistently entrancing and often disturbing, with strong colors, sharp splashes of blood, contorted corpses, urgent whispers, and disorienting edits and angles. There’s vivid imagery and haunting sights to be found here, especially when what you think you are seeing suddenly, or worse, slowly, becomes something much different. The nightmarish terrors are fantastically unsettling and bizarrely incantatory. I watched with shallow breath and wide eyes, drawn into the experience of these fascinating moments. It truly feels like being carried away into someone else’s nightmare.

One can’t help but see the influence of Hitchcock (as well as Polanski, Lynch, and Tourneur) in the film’s formal excellence and exactness (although there are hints of Kubrick there as well), but even more in the exploration of the darkness that lies within men’s souls, in the way it fearlessly picks away at its protagonist’s vulnerabilities and the source of his psychological trauma. Scorsese creates a masterfully controlled artifice that shocks in the unbelievable howling depths of genuine despair and grief at which it arrives. The ending, without spoiling it, is definitely a twist, but one that is teased and hinted throughout. To me, it feels just right. This is a twist ending that doesn’t diminish the film or turn it into a trick, but instead grows the clammy terror of emotions that the film evokes and allows the film to genuinely chill and quietly devastate.