It's hard to judge a movie by its trailer. The particular sales approach here — "Look, guys! It's just like the classic Terminator movies, but with modern FX and multiple Arnolds!" — may be pretty much the full summary of what Terminator Genisys<\/i> actually provides, or it may be just what some suits thought the movie-ticket-buying public wanted.<\/p>\n
The movie does provide more background into the War with the Machines and what's going on in the future with John Conner and Kyle Reese. It screws around a bit with Terminator meta-continuity — not just that Kyle goes back only to find that the timeline in the past has already been altered, but the very idea that despite that nothing has changed in the future.<\/i> So it gives us a kind of desperate and not terribly effectual Kyle and an effectual but not-yet-obsessive Sarah … fighting a T1000, while an aging T800 assists them.<\/p>\n
(Surely someone has a past film clip of Arnold Scharzenegger in his salad days saying "I'm getting too old for this shit.")<\/p>\n
It's all pretty and glossy and FXy, but the trailer makes no case, for me, that there's anything really new here, just the same furniture given a slipcover or two and arranged differently. There's little distinctive about the characters presented, human or robot. There's not even anything particularly ground-breaking \/ jaw-dropping about the FX here (there's one pretty cool brief shot of an automotive stunt on the Golden Gate Bridge, but everything else is very been-there, done-that).<\/p>\n
Again, the criticism above may just be because the trailer creators were aiming for the familiar, not the new. And, heck, I've complained about movie trailers giving away too many goodies as they run.<\/p>\n
But to be perfectly honest, this trailer resolves me only to one thing: I need to watch Terminator<\/i> and Terminator 2<\/i> with my daughter this weekend. If nothing else that to show her how Arnold became famous and how to do the vast majority of this stuff solely with practical FX.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n