Terminator Genisys Reviews: 10 Early Reactions You Need To Know
7. The Story Is A Mess
With all the nods, winks and reworkings of moments and ideas from the first two Terminator movies to cram into its running time it would be something of a miracle if Terminator Genisys managed to craft a fresh story of its own on top of the homages. Unfortunately, early reviews suggest that this miracle didn't happen. Deadline described the story as "a convoluted time travel plot tends to erase whatever we had invested in this story and these characters over the past three decades, throwing everything up in the air and seeing where it lands," while The Wrap concurred, saying, "while the script feels frantic, it never feels epic; its too busy traveling through time and space to actually go anywhere." One of the hardest things to get right with time travel movies is convincing the audience of the internal logic without bogging them down in unnecessary concepts which can become quickly confusing. On this count, Terminator Genisys fails; Deadline sums up the plot as full of "a lot of technical mumbo jumbo that is just plain confusing," while Slash Film's reviewer noted as he left theatres, "I overheard some critics trying to figure out how everything worked." Perhaps the writers should have paid greater heed to the maxim, "less is more".
