He's back: tin man goes clunk

‘There is no fate but what we make' is a poetic and great line from the first Terminator that came out 31 years ago, and it's held up over time. It has been repeated in each of that visionary movie's sequels but hasn't aged a bit. One could take it entirely out of the context of a science fiction tale about killer androids ruled by a sentient artificial intelligence and use the phrase as a personal philosophy. Seize the day, that sort of thing. It is a phrase about hopefulness and fulfilment.

Well, the fate of the Terminator is a sad one indeed. Three decades have taken quite a toll on the unstoppable and unfeeling killing machine. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the titular character, is now nearly 70, has grey hair and wrinkles, and somehow is still chasing after his younger self. That's not a metaphor.

That original tale was at its heart a fable about the battle between the ultimately hopeful versus the ultimate hopelessness. How does one survive and prevent the end of the world against an unbeatable foe?

Terminator Genisys is the fifth in the series and certainly the least comprehensible. Time travel does not lend itself well to synopsizing. I'll give it my best but remember: it's best if you don't think too hard on it.

It starts off in the year 2029 as John Connor (Jason Clarke) leads an army of resistance fighters against the heart and mind of Skynet, the aforementioned artificial intelligence that has decided that the world would be a lot better place for humanity without all of the people on it. It devises humanoid and other war machines to take care of the nasty business.

Skynet loses the fight and so it sends its original T-800 Terminator back to 1984 to track down and dispatch John's mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), before he's even born. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) is sent after it and the movie swiftly finds itself back where the entire series all began in an unprecedented act of attempted retroactive continuity.

The problem is that the past just ain't what it used to be. Reese immediately finds himself confronted by a T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun), a liquid metal Terminator that didn't appear until Terminator 2. Even Sarah herself is different. Instead of being a defenceless waitress, she is already well trained and prepared for the storm that's coming in.

Why? Because of the other T-800 that was sent even further back to when she was a child. It raised her after the death of the rest of her family. Its role is to be her guardian. She calls it Pops.

Still with me? It gets better. Alternate timelines pop up like dandelions in this state of the art convolution.

Together, Pops and Sarah have built themselves their own time machine, one that they intend to use to go to the future to stop Skynet from self-realizing. They end up in 2017 where the Cyberdyne company is set to launch a new “killer” app called Genisys. Well, you can probably guess where Skynet gets born.

If you can keep track of the bouncing ball that this movie calls a plot, and the logic inherent to make sense of it all, then you, my friend, should automatically earn an honorary doctorate from MIT.

Honestly, I should have just called the plot a bunch of hammy gobbledygook and left it at that. Don't think about the story. Just sit back and enjoy watching a bunch of rock'em sock'em robots engage in immortal combat in the middle of a city and ultimately, in the middle of an industrial complex, as always. It will be less disappointing to you that way.

Back in 1984, the younger version of Scott Hayes somehow admired the Terminator. He sure kept his cool and did what he had to do. Nothing ever bothered him and his single-mindedness made him ultra efficient in his devotion to his goals. Granted, he was still a machine but there was a lot to be said for a character like that.

Now in 2015, the older version of Scott Hayes – let's call him SFH-1138 – is disappointed that this unique intellectual creation has solidified itself as a laughingstock, a bland gag reel of its former self, all goofy catchphrases, pseudo-scientific theories, and implausible/impossible storylines.

What's worse? There are already two more of these movies set to drop in the coming years.

So yes … he'll be back. Oh well. At least the future is not yet set. Perhaps the new Terminators won't be duds like this one. In a hundred years, who's going to care?