Here’s the last sentence I wrote in my Jurrasic World review in July:

P.S.- Holywood. You might want to give up on Terminator while we’re having this discussion.

Now having seen Terminator Genisys, I have to say that I liked it a lot more than Jurassic World! I thought JW stuck too close to the formula and didn’t do enough new to give it its own identity. Genisys does run around in a familiar and favorite playground but takes bold steps to change the formula and bring us something new.

In a controversial move, Genisys changes the established timeline of Terminator (thus keeping any of the other movies from happening). John Connor gets jumped just as he sends Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect his mother. When Kyle gets there, he quickly sees that things haven’t gone as John told them they happened.

I like a lot of what the writers did, they made bold choices while keeping the tone and hallmarks of the series together. They took the relationship that John and the Terminator had in 2 and established it for Sarah and the Terminator (“You named it?!”) wisely. We get to see a big Future War battle and a bunch of different Terminators on the hunt. A few scenes from T1 are revisited at the start but are completely changed so they seem new. Arnold is back and terrific. Nods to the history of the series (like the Dyson family still being evolved despite the timeline alteration). Lots of action and the SFX are top notch, there’s some crazy visuals from start to finish. Really smart pacing that keeps delivering the goods.

Many pieces of the Terminator mythos are shown and used a bit differently. Sara and Kyle have to handle a T-800 and T-1000 at the same time. Both look fantastic, are real threats and used well. While the Terminators are the same, they don’t rely on the exact same beats (like Jurrasic World does) and are dispatched in smart ways (really liked Sarah’s trap for the 1000). With those two pillars in the movie, they also introduce two more advanced Terminators (and a combat “spider” that James Cameron came up with but never got to use) to keep up the pressure and add to the tech advancement that Skynet is so keen on.

Really liked the direction and cinematography of the movie as it’s often beautiful. Smart and clear direction during action scenes without using slow motion and shaky cam as a crutch. The action set pieces are a mix of car chases, gun and robot fights and overall destruction together that kept me entertained and engaged. I like the casting choices, I think everyone delivered aside from a goofy hype speech from John Connor at the beginning (this is really hard to do right, it usually brings everyone back to Independence Day).

I’m really surprised by how much I enjoyed Terminator Genisys. Sure, time travel is really messy to work with and can get you into dumb logic loops, but nothing here ruined it for me. I think this got more hate than it deserves and it is without a doubt better than Salvation. T1 and T2 are classics so it doesn’t touch those. While it’s been a long time since I’ve seen 3, I’m going to put Genisys  in third place. It didn’t do well domestically but made nearly half a billion dollars worldwide and I’m curious to see where they go with it from here.