Terminator Genisys (2015)

Plot summary (story synopsis): Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney - A Good Day to Die Hard) is sent back to 1984 by resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) to save John's mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke - Daenerys in Game of Thrones) from a T-800 Terminator. Kyle arrives in 1984 and finds that it is not the 1984 that John told him to expect. Sarah knows that he is coming, and has an aging T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) that she calls Pops, protecting her. The three of them have to fight off a T-1000 liquid metal Terminator (Byung-hun Lee) but that's just the start of their problems. 

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It's instructive to compare Genisys (T5) with Jurassic World (JP4). Both are blockbuster sequels, with a good number of years since the last movie in the franchise. TLDR version - Genisys is the better sequel.

Jurassic World succeeded by evoking the nostalgia of the first movie. There were references to the first movie (the cartoon DNA character, the motorized binocular helmets, the field of flocking dinosaurs) as well as franchise-specific tropes (such as a dinosaur trying to eat people in a car, the T-Rex saving the day). Adding to the nostalgia was the fact that 14 years had passed since the last Jurassic Park movie (JP3).

Unfortunately there was little continuity with the characters. The main or only repeat was a minor character - chief scientist Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong). Even worse, the plot was a repeat. Perhaps there's only so much that you can do with a franchise about a dinosaur theme park. Jurassic Park's storytelling DNA is an evolutionary dead end. Jurassic World is a fun movie, a heckuva ride, but not much more. I'm guessing that it was the nostalgia factor that pushed Jurassic World's box office gross to over $1 billion. 

In contrast, Genisys ticks off all the items on the sequel checklist, and then some.

On the nostalgia front, the last Terminator movie (T4 - the awful Terminator Salvation) was 6 years ago but Arnold wasn't really in it. For a real Arnold Terminator movie, you have to go back 12 years to T3 (Rise of the Machines), close to the 14 years between JP3 and Jurassic World. If you want to look at the first movie in the franchise, JP1 was 22 years ago, T1 was 31 years ago. So going in, Genisys has a slight edge in nostalgia.

But wait, there's more. Like Back to the Future II, in Genisys we get to see some events of the first movie, but from an alternate viewpoint. (In Back to the Future II, the events are the same. In Genisys, the events are slightly altered.) So that ups Genisys's nostalgia factor.

Add to that Schwarzenegger providing a sense of continuity that Jurassic World lacked (as mentioned earlier, only BD Wong), and it's easily hello $1 billion dollars too. 

Schwarzenegger plays the aging Terminator with slightly more expressiveness and humanity, than in the previous movies. For example when an exasperated Sarah tells him to "bite me," he doesn't take it literally. He understands that it is a figure of speech and chides her for being immature.

It makes sense because in the Genisys timeline, the Terminator has been protecting Sarah since she was 9 years-old, giving her years to humanize him (compared to John having days in T2 and T3). Adding to the emotional punch is our realization that Schwarzenegger now really is that old. It's like watching Stallone grow old in the Rocky series, Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series.  

Thematically, the Terminator movies are richer than the Jurassic Parks. T1, the first movie asked, Can the future be changed? T2, the second movie said, Yes it can. The third movie said, You can change some things but other things - such as Judgment Day - are inevitable. T5, Genisys says, You can change things, and it's even possible for one person to remember two different timelines. 

T4, the fourth movie? It didn't say anything except that John doesn't grow up to be a great military leader. He becomes a selfish, arrogant glory-hound. It's a horrible aberration that Genisys has thankfully ignored. Genisys treats T3 with more reverence. The ICBM launches of Judgment Day, the scene of the future John making a speech to his soldiers, look the same in Genisys as they did in T3. The scars on John's face? That's from T3.

There's even something for fans of the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series. The scene where a naked Kyle and Sarah appear at night in the middle of a busy highway, is an obvious nod to it.

But it is with T2 that Genisys's heart really lies. The details of the liquid metal T-1000 are lovingly recreated (the bullet hole through the eye, the blob dropping off and then being reabsorbed, the transformation of arms into metal spikes, walking out unscathed from a fire, hiding as part of a room).

In Genisys, Sarah's relationship with the Terminator is a mirror image of John's relationship with the Terminator in T2. Genisys has an interesting development of Sarah and Kyle's relationship. They are realistically awkward about their predestined fate as the parents of John (and like in T3 with John and Kate, the Terminator makes funny boneheaded remarks about it), even though they have just met. But Sarah's father-daughter relationship with the Terminator is the emotional core of Genisys.

In terms of character development, T1 was about Sarah coming to terms with the unbelievable idea that her unborn son was going to be the savior of the human race. T2 had the most interesting extrapolation - the pressure turns Sarah into a psycho bitch, and John realizes that his mother wasn't totally crazy after all. T3 was about John refusing his destiny because the path to his heroic destiny was paved with billions of dead bodies. T5 doesn't have as strong a take on Sarah or Kyle's character but does show Sarah as accepting her fate, and convincing Kyle to accept his.

Plot-wise, there's enough going on in Genisys to keep you interested. You can't always guess what is going to happen next. After T1, copycat time travel movies explored all kinds of scenarios and paradoxes, until time travel became a cliche. Genisys still manages to keep it fresh (even if it means stealing from 12 Monkeys). 

So in this box-office battle of the blockbuster sequels, of dinosaurs versus Terminators, I see it as special effects versus storytelling. Sure, there are special effects in Genisys too, but they are there to support the story. In Jurassic World, the special effects - the dinosaurs - are the main attraction.

I hope the robots win.

Good Kill (2015)

Plot summary (story synopsis): It is 2010. Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is an experienced F-16 fighter pilot. He has finished multiple overseas combat tours of duty in America's war on terror. He is now a drone pilot, surrealistically killing Taliban halfway across the globe from the safety of his control station in Nevada, then going home at the end of the day to his suburban home and his wife Molly (January Jones) and kids. 

He misses the joy and danger of flying for real and begins to feel guilty over the civilian casualties his missile strikes create. He drinks and his marriage begins to suffer even more than when he was overseas, away from his family for months, flying an F-16. 

His boss Lieutenant Colonel Jack Jones (Bruce Greenwood, doing the wise and compassionate leader shtick he did in Star Trek) has no such qualms and handles Egan's drone team with a steady hand. The team includes Zimmer (the hunky Jake Abel) and new pilot Suarez (Zoe Kravitz - Lenny's daughter, who has been getting a lot of plum supporting roles recently - Divergent, Mad Max).

Things become worse when the team works with the CIA to kill suspected Taliban, working based on the CIA's new and looser Rules of Engagement. Their only CIA contact is the mysterious Langley (voiced by Peter Coyote, who sounds deliciously like the late John Forsythe as Charlie) who they only hear over the speaker phone. Morale plummets as the team is forced by Langley to carry out what Suarez considers to be illegal, war crime, strikes.

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Writer/director Andrew Niccol does mainly SF (Gattaca, In Time, The Host - underrated movie based on Stephenie Meyer's novel with a beautiful performance by Saoirse Ronan) and military (Lord of War) movies, though not military SF. He also wrote but did not direct The Terminal (Tom Hanks is a stateless man stuck in an airport), S1mOne (Pacino in a comedy is a fail) and The Truman Show. Whatever the subject material, he's good at pushing your buttons.

Good Kill is similar to Lord of War (Nicolas Cage is a freelance arms dealer after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Andrew Niccol did a lot of research for Lord of War and wrote a technically accurate and dramatic script (with some over-the-top visuals that work).

He does the same for Good Kill, this time on the US drone war. In Time showed him to be an economics-illiterate bleeding-heart liberal, probably because he didn't feel the need to research economics and just went with his gut. From what little I know about real drone warfare, he has painted a relatively accurate picture (super accurate by Hollywood standards) in Good Kill.

He has obviously researched drone warfare and like Lord of War, Good Kill is technically believable and has a good storyline. Unlike In Time, his handling of the issues is quite balanced, though still left of center.

I do have some complaints. For one thing, no lawyers are shown. I'm pretty sure lawyers are heavily involved in drone operations, and the movie does address legal issues (which the soldiers amateurishly try to figure out on their own).

But overall Andrew Niccol succeeds in pushing his agenda because he plays it cool and almost neutral, not overtly propagandistic. Which is how effective propaganda works. And is probably why the media hasn't made a big fuss over the movie. It's too neutral for them. Both sides of the argument are shown (though I feel there are strong arguments for drone warfare that were not presented).  

And like with Lord of War, Andrew Niccol definitely has an agenda. Unfortunately for him, Good Kill has been overtaken by events. Specifically ISIS. After ISIS, you can't convincingly argue that drone strikes are a significant cause of militant Islam (cycle-of-violence theory). 

Andrew Niccol uses music well, almost as well as Michael Mann. Gattaca and The Host had effective, evocative and memorable soundtracks. Good Kill is mainly soundtrackless, and that works too. It's an interesting choice.

And like Michael Mann, he also has a strong visual style. Halfway through The Host (I went in not knowing who the director was), I thought, Hey this looks like an Andrew Niccol movie! Like the soundtrack, he has also dialed back the visuals on Good Kill.

He lets the strong New Mexico (standing in for Nevada) desert sunlight dictate most of the look. No fancy Lord of War time-lapses here. Again, it works. A few strong images do stand out. In The Host it was the aliens' mirror-skinned vehicles and elegant white clothes, in Gattaca it was the Art Deco architecture.

In Good Kill, it is the geometric rows of wheeled shipping containers that serve as drone control stations. It's a simple but strangely powerful image that you will not forget. 

It's good to see Ethan Hawke in an Andrew Niccol movie again. Bruce Greenwood does his Star Trek fatherly shtick well. January Jones and Zoe Kravitz also handle their roles well, and look pretty while doing so. Jake Abel (who to my surprise has less of a following than Channing Tatum, but then I'm not a teen girl) has a small role as a callous, racist, gung-ho member of Egan's team and is suitably hateful. 

The acting is good but it is Andrew Niccol's script that makes the characters come alive. 

Langley is the silver-tongued devil with his polished justifications for his morally questionable orders, Suarez is the team's conscience (superego), Zimmer is the ugly American who delights in killing (id), Jones is the adult (ego). Egan is all three - ego, superego, id - rolled into one, the classic Ethan Hawke sensitive new-age hero.

Pay attention to the ending. On the surface it's a feel-good ending. I found it very disturbing. I wonder if Andrew Niccol meant it to be. Other Hollywood directors, I would have assumed that they missed the implications. Not this guy.