‘Terminator: Genisys’ is a jumbled mess

It’s half reboot, half alternate reality, and it pretty much all sucks. I generally despise alternate timelines as plots, because usually it means familiar characters doing the exact same things with the exact same dialogue and motivations just in a different setting with different hairstyles.

The film opens in reboot mode with John Connor (Jason Clarke) sending Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to rescue his mother Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke). Just as Reese is leaving for the past, however, a mysterious machine villain messes with time (this villain is played by Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame, so this is quite appropriate), and Reese lands in an alternate version of 1984 where his mission (and how to achieve it) goes complete bonkers.

Still with me here?

That’s where the alternate reality comes in, and where “Terminator: Genisys” gets lost, taking characters and dialogue and scenes from all 4 previous Terminator flicks and smashing them together in a ridiculously crowded, disorienting, and boring story that really never picks up.

Let me explain the whole ‘reboot/alternate reality’ thing. Arnold Schwarzenegger is back playing multiple versions of his Terminator self (including a new version where he is known affectionately as “Pops.”), and briefly it’s a scene-by-scene remake of the original “Terminator” flick.

Then the molten-metal T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) shows up and it’s on to a 20-minute remake of actions scenes from “Terminator 2.” But the T-1000 is only a sub-villain, I guess (or the writers realized they’d done that already), and the plot moves to another, truly ridiculous villain (I can’t tell you … spoilers) with a remarkable weakness to magnets, followed by what I think is the real villain: Genisys, which is just a new name for Skynet, the villainous machine mainframe from the first four films.

I don’t know about you, but I’m lost.

On top of that, every fight scene was painfully lacking in tension, mostly because the death-threshold of a Terminator continues to elude me. Sometime handguns stop them in their tracks while assault rifles and rocket launchers don’t even give them pause, while at other times any bullet from any gun is like a mosquito. A .50 caliber sniper rifle might kill them, or it might bounce off, depending on the scene. Apparently acid works, though, while fire of any intensity does not.

But the winners of the day in this particular flick are magnet brass knuckles and long metal spears because — well, you know — because.

And among all the time traveling nonsense was Emilia Clarke with some truly horrific acting. I wanted to punch myself into a coma every time she came on screen. She overemphasized every line and action with pointed yet awkward pauses in her dialogue, like she was overcompensating for something or proving a point (like, perhaps, that she can act a role outside of her “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys?)

Remarkably, the best acting in the flic was the pairing of Courtney and Schwarzenegger (I can’t believe I used Jai Courtney and ‘best acting’ in the same sentence), and that is about the most positive thing I can say.