TERMINATOR: GENISYS (2015)

With the newest entry in the Terminator franchise, Terminator: Dark Fate, opening this weekend, let's do some time traveling ourselves and look at the previous piece-of-shit sequel, Terminator Genisys, which, according to Dark Fate, no longer exists. (Thank you!)

It's entirely possible that Terminator Genisys, essentially Terminator 5 no matter what anyone says, was never going to be a good film, regardless of who replaced Cameron as director or the immortal Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese. By now, it's unavoidable to recognize the irony in film after film being made in which people (and robots) rely on time travel to keep cleaning up their own messes, all while said films shit the bed and make things even more complicated. The finale of Terminator 2: Judgment Day was supposed to retcon Skynet and all its underlings entirely out of existence. Then they made three more Terminators. And this franchise doesn't lend itself to "what-if?" one-offs where different filmmakers apply their different stamps to see what sticks against the wall. The mythology of the series has become so important that there's no "ignoring" certain entries. Using the same characters and even the same actors will inevitably make any sequel the next chapter in one long killer-robot story. But by now, that story has overstayed its welcome. The first two Cameron films were landmark achievements in storytelling and visual effects. They didn't just spawn from the cinematic movement, but they defined what the movement was all about. They were, and are, important.

Terminator Genisys is not.

While Terminator Genisys does offer a reasonable amount of entertainment, and it's always fun to see Arnold take on one of his most famous characters in a different way, even if he's guilty of committing sacrilege as he does so, it had a responsibility to try and live up to the two landmark films it was attempting to reboot/recreate/retcon all at the same time. But it not only doesn't, it comes nowhere close. Terminator Genisys is the film that would exist in the satirical cinematic universe of something like Tropic Thunder, or even The Naked Gun, where of course a Terminator 5 would be ridiculous, and of course it would try to explain how a robot can age (it's real skin!) and of course it would be a little dumbed down and neutered to appeal to as many people as possible. (For example, in 1995, the sketch comedy series Mad TV made a fake trailer for a film called Apollo the 13th: Jason Takes NASA, in which Jason went to space. In 2001, New Line Cinema sent Jason to space...for real. When the order is parody first and reality later, that's bad!)  T2 had some pretty weighty themes about fate, about life and death, about the hard choices for the greater good. It wanted to entertain its audience, but it also wanted them to think. Meanwhile, the convolution of Genisys's plot feels manufactured, under the guise of being smart, as if its events and ramifications were made purposely complex in order to let its audience off the hook for trying to understand them, instead patting them on the head and saying, "Just enjoy all the carnage, m'kay?" Even the film's own director has said:

“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. 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.”

Movies!

Terminator Genisys is a greatest hits compilation performed by a shitty cover band. It's desperate to hit all the same beats that made the first two Terminator films so memorable and effective, but it doesn't really want to try earning them. It wants Sarah and Kyle to fall in love. It wants to show that even a cybernetic organism of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton can learn to be human. It wants to resurrect the T-1,000, a terminator even more famous and recognizable than Arnold's iteration. It wants to talk about fate. But it's in too much of a hurry to bask in the love established for those aspects from the first two films. It doesn't want to be patient and slowly but deliberately lead up to those revelations. Instead, Sarah and Kyle will be forced to naked-hug, which = express love. Instead, the T-800 will already show traits of a human being since he's been around forever and we can just skip all that "becoming" human stuff. Instead, the first appearance of this new-fangled version of the T-1,000 will feel obligatory. And forget fate--conversations about it can't be had when the plot is this impossible to decipher. Genisys thinks that by revisiting all these common themes from the first two films it will be grandfathered into their upper echelons of respectability, but it does nothing to earn that respect beyond riding the coattails of a legacy and calling it homage.

Following the casting announcement which hailed the return of Arnold to the franchise, each subsequent actor added to the project left people feeling, at the least, ambivalent, and at the most, irritated. Some were adamant that Emilia Clarke would make a good Sarah Connor, citing her role as Daenerys on Game of Thrones as evidence she could play a strong character (even though Daenerys had done nothing more than hire people stronger than herself to do all the heavy lifting--that and ride dragons). However, nearly everyone was dismayed that Jai Courtney, the anthropomorphic equivalent of anti-charisma, was to be featured it yet another franchise. Ironically, it would be the addition of actors worth a damn--Jason Clarke and J.K Simmons--that would result in further frustration, being that they were barely used enough to warrant their presence. Of course seeing Arnold is a delight--seeing him in any film is a delight--but when he's playing second fiddle to Courtney's block-of-wood acting prowess and Emilia Clarke trying not to look like a child with giant plastic guns, the film comes dangerously close to allowing its audience not to take anything seriously.

Not helping things is its unfortunate PG-13 rating, yet another effort on behalf of the studio to reach a new audience. The grisly grindhouseness of the original film is gone, along with the brutality and intensity. (There's not a drop of blood in this thing.) Also gone, probably for good: Arnold playing the villain. By now, his original incarnation of the T-800 has been Uncle Bobbed out of existence. Now, instead of the relentless and bloodthirsty terminator that can't be bargained or reasoned with, and will not stop--ever--he's become the uncool parent dropping off his daughter at school and making her look like an idiot because he doesn't know who Selina Gomez is. Sure, Freddy Krueger grew pretty lame after a while and ended up on kids' t-shirts and lunch boxes, but at least he still violently killed a lot of people in his very bloody, R-rated sequels. For a terminator, Schwarzenegger's T-800 doesn't do a whole lot of terminating. And it's become a rather toothless affair to witness.

Hollywood loves the adage of "never say never," so as long as there's still life in any ol' franchise, and Genisys made just enough money to prove that there is, they will never stop sending people back in time to fight robots alongside other robots. Paramount lost the rights to the Terminator franchise in 2019, at which point Cameron and Deadpool director Tim Miller joined forces to bring the world Terminator: Dark Fate (with Paramount back on board). Many folks seem to be assuming it's a given that since Cameron is involved as producer and co-writer, he'll make a film worthy of the Terminator brand. While of course that's possible, I'm not buying it. Let's not forget that Cameron previously went on record as saying he believed Genisys to be the third "official" sequel and a great movie. Let's also not forget he offered pre-release praise for the widely dismissed Rise of the Machines, which means his overview of the series is now suspect. Regardless of how Terminator: Dark Fate lands with audiences and critics, and regardless of whether or not it turns into a new planned trilogy spearheaded by Cameron and Miller, it's a near certainty that whoever holds the series rights is never going to make another worthy entry. It's also a near certainty they are never going to stop trying. Which is kind of sad, because each new entry that's supposed to recapture the magic of the first two Terminators is, ironically, so far removed from what made them great that it's become fairly evident those in charge have no idea what made them magical in the first place.

Much like Salvation before it, and as Dark Fate is planning, Genisys was supposed to kickstart a brand new Terminator trilogy for a new generation. This, obviously, won't come to pass. Regardless of the studio backing the film or the filmmaker chosen to take the helm, does the world really need any more Terminators? Surely there are people out there who would welcome additional forays into the world of Terminator 3.0, but then there are others out there who fondly remember having seen Cameron's original films (the first was a very adult, R-rated horror/slasher film--did you realize that?) and will decide, with their hard-earned dollars, that a rebooted Terminator franchise is very much obsolete.

PET SEMATARY (2019)

[Contains spoilers for the novel and both adaptations of Pet Sematary.]

A remake of Pet Sematary has been bouncing around Hollywood since 2006, ever since George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh attempted to produce it through their then-new company Section Eight Productions, which had also done Christopher Nolan’s remake of Insomnia. Clooney was even set to star as Louis Creed, patriarch and serial burialist of the Creed family. That, obviously, didn’t happen. But, after a decade of development hell, Pet Sematary has arrived, and…this is what we got.

Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch, the directorial pair behind the creepy and successful indie Starry Eyes, had their work cut out for them. Doing a remake is thankless. From the very beginning, you have two choices: stay faithful to the source material (King handled the screenplay for Mary Lambert’s 1989 take, so it’s nearly identical to the book), which will have people asking you, “Why bother?” (see: The Omen remake), or find ways to stay true to the spirit of the story while taking new chances. The danger with this latter approach is making changes that devout fans will see as arbitrary, but something about which the filmmakers can say, “See? It’s different.” Pet Sematary does this a lot—makes small, seemingly unnecessary changes. Yet, if you sat down with the redux for any five-minute segment without actually knowing what you were watching, by the end of those five minutes, you would know. It’s a familiar story with familiar characters, and certainly a familiar concept; Pet Sematary never strays so far as to become unrecognizable, but if you’re already intimate with the story, you can’t help but think, again, “Why bother?”

To its credit, Pet Sematary wants to include as much as it can from the novel that the filmmakers consider “essential,” but with everything vying for space, significant portions of these elements are spread too thin. Victor Pascow (Obssa Ahmed) is barely utilized, reduced to such a footnote that you have to wonder why the filmmakers felt compelled to include him; and despite a far more graphic head wound, complete with pulsating brain, the specter doesn’t come close to matching the former’s onscreen presence. Additionally, we’re robbed of Louis and Jud meeting for the first time, given the dynamic the two men will share and the things they will experience together; instead, we find that the men are already politely acquainted halfway through a throwaway dinner sequence. Weirdly, there’s a complete lack of acknowledgment regarding the connection between the existence of the pet cemetery and the very dangerous road that cuts through the Creed and Crandall estates, being that canon explicitly states the former exists because of the latter. Meanwhile, the Timmy Baterman story, one of the creepiest sequences from the original, is downgraded to a newspaper headline. The character of Zelda, the most terrifying part from the original and the novel, is reduced to a pile of rubber bones and limbs dropped repeatedly down an elevator shaft. (Seriously.) The mishandling of this character in particular is Pet Sematary’s worst offense.

From the first frame, even before a single “scary” thing has happened, Mary Lambert’s 1989 original adaptation oozes dread. You can feel that things will go very badly for the Creeds, and already your chest begins to tighten. For example, she knows everyone has read the book, and she knows everyone will be waiting with bated breath to see little Gage lose his life in the road. That’s why she, wisely, cunningly, even sadistically, introduces the Orinco truck several scenes before the final encounter, because she wants to milk that suspense for every ounce, interrupting a happy-go-lucky picnic more than once to cut back to the truck speeding down the road toward them. Now, when the Creeds 2.0 pull up to their new rural home, you already know bad things are going to happen—not because of any induced dread, but because you’ve experienced this story twice already, so no shit. Yet, there’s a complete lack of suspense or ominousness. The admittedly beautiful opening overhead drone shot of a burning house, which we all know to be Jud’s, is another immediate reminder that, yep, bad things are afoot, but it still doesn’t quite help stoke those brooding fires. Nor does the surprisingly lifeless score by Christopher Young, who ordinarily dominates the horror genre.  

Pet Sematary makes the same mistake as another high profile remake, Rob Zombie’s terrible Halloween: whenever the filmmakers deviate from the story audiences know and love, you can feel their spark, their interest, their excitement in exploring this new direction. But when leaning back on the mainstay elements from those same stories, you can feel their obligation to just barrel through and begin tackling all their material—to infuse the property with their identity, to put a stamp on a title that they’ve temporarily borrowed before sliding it back onto the shelf. Pet Sematary doesn’t fully come alive until, ironically, Ellie does—from the dead, that is. Obviously, this is the biggest change in this new iteration, as the filmmakers felt using Ellie as the resurrected child would provide additional pathos. With Ellie being older and in a position to understand what was happening to her, she could better echo those sentiments to her god-playing father, which was meant to boost the film’s philosophical look at death. 

But what, ultimately, did we learn from this? 

What we already knew from the novel and the original adaptation.

Sometimes, dead is better. 

As for the ending, it’s dreadful; very strangely borrowing from Pet Sematary Two, it’s made even more frustrating by the fact that the alternate ending included on the home video release is far better—gloomier, more ominous, more satirical, and more tonally appropriate. The one that went to theaters was the stuff of Hollywood hokum, rendering whatever mature goodwill the film had achieved as kaput. Screenwriter Jeff Buhler says this is because they wanted the audience to leave with a smile, which seems like a bonehead decision, being that smiles don’t belong anywhere near Pet Sematary, a manuscript King found so vile that he shoved it into a drawer upon completing it, deciding it would never see the light of the day because he’d finally gone too far. 

In spite of all the whining, Pet Sematary isn’t a bad flick, and there are several things lending to its favor. Ellie’s post-resurrection appearance is subtly but deeply unnerving; a drooping eye hints at major damage going on beneath the surface (that bathtub sequence…Jesus), and young Jeté Laurence is incredibly creepy in the role before the film falls victim to the pitfalls of the “evil kid” genre. After a while, she’s reduced to a pint-sized zombie kid using “scary” glaring eyes and coming a little too close to rattling off ironic Chucky-like threats. Amy Seimetz as Rachel is easily the film’s most interesting character, and Seimetz’s performance is a large reason why: she ably sells Rachel’s extremely mangled view of death, due to her childhood experience with her sickened sister, Zelda. Lithgow, too, does fine with the role of Jud Crandall, made iconic by Fred Gwynne, though he sheds Gwynne’s folksiness in favor of curmudgeonness. He also doesn’t even attempt a New England accent. (Not a single a’yuh! What gives!) Lastly, there’s Jason Clarke—an actor capable of much more than the scripts he signs onto. It feels weird to say, but his take on Louis never reaches the same emotionally tormented heights of the original’s fairly unknown Dale Midkiff (whose “NOOOOOOOO!” is still one of the best anguished screams in cinema). 

The filmmakers poke fun at their audience by presenting sequences they think they know, only to see they’re heading off in different directions. (Jud’s death is a perfect example.) Additionally, and I don’t know this for sure, but I’d swear they lifted audio from the original flick, borrowing one use each of Zelda’s screechy “RAAAAACHEL!” and a growl from an undead Church. There also several loving nods to King’s other works, one of which includes an off-screen Jud telling a guest at Ellie’s birthday party about a rabid Saint Bernard. Widmyer and Kölsch’s design of the deadfall and the Indian burial ground behind it is ripped right from the film cells of old fashioned monster movies like Frankenstein and The Wolf Man, depicted as dreamlike and different, since this part of Ludlow’s woods are meant to be evil and mysterious. As a concept, this is tremendous, though it suffers in execution from some surprisingly shoddy green-screen. 

Paramount’s Blu-ray contains over 80 minutes of special features, including the before mentioned alternate ending, along with “Beyond the Deadfall,” which runs an hour in length across four different “chapters.” This supplement is rich with information and content, and goes beyond your standard EPK to delve heavily into the film’s genesis and production. (Stephen King does not appear.) Sadly, however, this is yet another studio release that lacks a commentary with the directors, and in its place are strange and very brief narrative pieces where several of the flick’s major characters have their own unique nightmares about the burial ground. Finally, we do get the story of Timmy Baterman, but in a weird one-man show where Lithgow, in character, sits down and presents the story as a campfire tale to us, the audience. 

Far worse adaptations have come from Stephen King, and if you asked the man himself, even he would probably rank this new version of Pet Sematary above bonafide classic The Shining, an adaptation he never misses the chance to impugn. Even so, it’s ironic that Pet Sematary’s main conflict comes from “those damned Orinco trucks” speeding dangerously back and forth, being that this new version of the story is standing directly in the middle of the road.

Pet Sematary is now available on Blu-ray from Paramount Pictures.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]