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July 5, 2015

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Arnie shines in Terminator role

THIRTY-ONE years and counting, and the Terminators keep rolling off the assembly line like new iPhones, upgraded with shape-shifting abilities, rebooted Sarah Conner assassination levels and, one presumes, better selfie cameras.

“Terminator Genisys,” directed by Alan Taylor, is the fifth entry in the series begun by James Cameron and a naked money grab aimed at rejuvenating a flagging franchise. The three-plus decades of “Terminator” have spread across the relentless march of technology and the Internet, but the movies are curiously stuck between their pre-digital 1980s origins and a dystopian vision of machines’ rule over the planet.

However many Terminators are unveiled, the mechanical heart and soul of the series will always be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800. He’s the android version of earlier, cast-aside operating systems: a Game Boy with a gun. “I’m old, not obsolete,” he says in “Genisys.”

And that, surprisingly, is the case. Schwarzenegger’s return to his most iconic role provides much of the appeal in this otherwise purposeless redo.

Not only does his leather jacket-clad hulk continually best newer, better Terminators, in “Genisys” the 67-year-old successfully wrestles a synthetic version of his younger, body-building self. Aging is a hard fact of life, even for the machines sent from the future to kill us.

Five films in, “Genisys” works very hard to explain its existence. Screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier start this story in 2029, long after Skynet robots destroyed most of humanity in Judgment Day. An alternate timeline, caused by crisscrossing time travel, is offered up for why many of the events of previous “Terminator” films — often in the same locations — are repeated.




 

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