20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

Plagued by convoluted behind-the-scenes bickering, bankruptcies and legal shilly-shallying: over the last twenty-five years since the insanely popular Terminator 2, the Terminator franchise has been through more hands than the multi-tasking participant in a gangbang, and with roughly the same outcome (if you know what I mean, and I think you do).

That outcome is crystalised (urrgh) in Terminator: Genisys, which manages - like the 2009 Star Trek reboot - to be both a sequel and a reboot at one and the same time, although using phrases like ‘one and the same time’ around the Terminator franchise is just asking for trouble.

Essentially, the film creates the plot of the first Terminator movie, sending Kyle Reese from 2029 to 1984 to save Sarah Connor from the T-800 that’s just been sent to kill her. That is, until a member of the Resistance in 2029 attacks the middle-aged John Connor, revealing itself to be a massively advanced T-5000: Skynet incarnate.

This assault on adult John Connor allows for the creation of an alternate timeline, which is the timeline the remainder of this film takes place in, as it gleefully craps all over events that have already taken place in other, better instalments in the Terminator franchise.

The film itself never explains why all this happens. No, we had to wait for post-release interviews with the writers for that, who ‘clarified’ that this version of Skynet was not the version that the Resistance was there to destroy, but a Skynet from an alternate timeline. It was this visitor to this dimension whose attack on an important historical figure - a nexus point in history - created the alternate timeline that Genisys takes place in.

This was all, obviously, complete nonsense. Since 1984, the spine of the Terminator franchise has been one single truth: that history can be rewritten to make a better future (or present, depending on where you’re standing). Alternate timelines, however, belong to the ‘many worlds’ theory of time travel, in which it is impossible to change what’s happened to your world because any attempt to do so simply allows for the existence of a parallel world.

Since there are an infinite number of parallel worlds/timelines where every possibility has been explored, and since your own timeline is only one of those infinite parallel worlds, time travel to effect change becomes an exercise in futility, and every single entry in the canon to date would therefore be a waste of freaking time. This would, of course, explain why all this time travel doesn’t ever seem to change a g*ddamn thing.

Or, to put it another way: there exists an alternate timeline where there are only two Terminator movies, and now that I’ve written this entry I have a migraine and want to go and live in that one, please.