I’ll Always Be Back: Can You Love A Franchise Too Much To Review It?

It’s so tempting to begin with an extended personal anecdote that reveals what a massive Terminator fan I am. How I first encountered the franchise. What it meant to me then, and continues to mean now. How, when I saw Terminator Genisys on Monday night, I wasn’t just watching a single movie: I was watching all the previous Terminator stories as well, along with my own remembered experiences of them, like hazy, fragmented memories from alternate timelines.

But do you, the reader, care? Not really. Should I rate the film on how well it serviced my fannish desires? Not really. And if I report having laughed in delight, or having sobbed in catharsis, or having felt disappointed or disgusted, what would such play-by-play reports actually tell you about the film?

Not much. Still, I want to share why I liked Terminator Genisys where others (including on Junkee) have disliked it. Genisys is not a great film, but it’s not a complete travesty either. I went in expecting it would leave me feeling hollow and sad, like the recent remakes of RoboCop and Total Recall – or indeed like Terminator Salvation. But pleasingly, it felt right to me. Now, would you like a slice of the terrible T-800 head cake I decorated a few years back?

Yeah, Well, That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man

It has hurt my feelings to see people gleefully hanging shit on Terminator Genisys. And that’s worth examining. In part, it’s the usual self-doubt I experience when I find myself on the wrong side of critical consensus. I don’t take pride in being a free-thinking contrarian. I worry that I ‘got it wrong’. And in this case, I worry my fandom has clouded my judgment.

Most reviews are presented as the definitive word on the film. As theatre critic Jane Howard noted, in a panel on criticism for the National Writers’ Conference at the recent Emerging Writers’ Festival, “An essential part of being a critic is the thought that you are the most right.”

But given that critics are drawing from so many domains of experience and modes of expression, as Howard goes on to acknowledge, there is no ‘most right’. Every response to a film is worthwhile – as long as the critic approaches the text with thoughtful goodwill, and can acknowledge her own subjective preoccupations.

Some critics prefer sparkling dialogue to effects-heavy action. Some critics want their time travel stories to be logical and scientific. Some enjoy gory violence and visceral chase scenes. Some want to see politically progressive role models. Some people just like cool robots. (I love cool robots!)

But what I respond to most strongly in Terminator is its romance. I’m simultaneously engrossed by its sinister metallic bodies and swept up in its fateful human relationships. The horror of Arnie’s original killbot was its inhuman inexorability: “It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” In stark contrast, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) had a vulnerable, human motive for protecting Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton): “I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you; I always have.”

The acting in the Terminator series was always corny, and I don’t care. I love it. And as Reese, Jai Courtney is romantic because of his bewildered, inarticulate physicality. I liked the way Genisys paints him as the hunky sap nobody ever explains things to. Not John Connor (Jason Clarke), the leader he idolises. And not Sarah (Emilia Clarke), who in this timeline is reluctant to bed her predestined babydaddy. But she hugged him pretty tight when they travelled through time in the nude!

Do We Prefer Originality, Or More Of What We Already Like?

Since James Cameron decided to reboot it in 1991, the Terminator story has been about rebooting. The future is not set, yet humans and machines still make the same fate for each other, locked in endless existential combat on a temporal battlefield. The Connors will always be threatened with termination and protected from it. Judgment Day will never be prevented, only shifted around.

In Terminator Genisys, the franchise’s tropes have the ceremonial heft of a pageant. Familiar dialogue is intoned. Known facts are recited. Motifs surface – a moment, a gesture, a name – and chime across timelines. The same settings recur: a confrontation in an underground car park; a road chase in a van with flapping rear door; a climactic battle on metal catwalks amid industrial machinery.

Back in T2, Sarah mused that the Terminator’s tenacity in protecting John (Edward Furlong) makes it a better father figure than any man she’s known. (“In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”) Accordingly, Genisys casts a Terminator as a long-term guardian. This is also a neat solution to the elephant in the room: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s advanced age.

I found Sarah’s (Emilia Clarke) relationship with her “old, not obsolete” ‘Pops’ affecting – especially the film’s brief glimpse of her childhood drawings depicting them together. It echoes John’s relationship with that other Terminator, in that other timeline. Even Arnie’s robotic attempt at a smile is a callback.

The Fan Vs The Critic

We often make artificial distinctions between fan spectatorship and critical spectatorship. The stereotypical fan is naively immersed in the world of the film and obsessed with fidelity to canon. The stereotypical critic grounds the film within cinema history and social realities, and is obsessed with the originality and virtuosity of its form and craft.

But in practice, critics can also cheerlead for their favourites, while fans can also perform shrewd, nuanced analyses of a film’s politics. Fans can imagine radical novelty, while critics praise slavish self-referentiality.

At comedy blog Splitsider, Devin Blake describes the rise of “consumer comedy“. This is a form of comedy that consists solely of making pop-culture references in order to provoke a laugh of recognition from people who’ve also consumed the thing being referenced. It’s lazy and alienating for anyone who doesn’t get the reference. Basically, it’s like that time I did a Terminator-themed Game of Thrones recap and it got the fewest pageviews of any of my recaps, ever.

Perhaps only Terminator tragics would ever enjoy Terminator Genisys. To anyone else, it’s just another plasticky modern blockbuster. It leans hard on visual bombast and has a videogame-style escalation of disposable villains and action setpieces until it reaches the final boss. It certainly suffers by comparison to the earlier Terminator films, whose excellent practical effects included prosthetic makeup, miniatures, puppetry and stop-motion.

Noted Marxist sick-burner Theodor Adorno wrote that cultural critics must resist approaching their work with either naive enthusiasm or supercilious dissing: they “must both participate in culture and not participate … Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.”

But as Rebecca Harkins-Cross argued at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the artworks critics write about “exist in a tangible world, and that the critics themselves reside there too. The critic is a person with a body and a politics, as well as predilections and, importantly, limitations.”

I freely acknowledge that my fandom inclines me to be generous about this film. But in a reviewing landscape polarised by critical raves and pans, perhaps a generous critique can reveal a little more?

–

Terminator Genisys is in cinemas now.

–

Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist, and tweets at@incrediblemelk