Spoiler Alert…?
The new trailer for Terminator Genisys, which already promised to shake up the entire timeline of the Terminator franchise, has just dropped, with a serious twist. In fact, it’s such a surprising reveal that we feel obligated to include a spoiler warning, even though (obviously) the studio obviously doesn’t care if you know about it. Actually, they’re using it as a selling point.
Audiences already knew that Terminator Genisys was rebooting the series by sending Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to save Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), only to discover that she’s already a soldier, and has teamed up with a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to save Reese from a T-1000. That much was revealed in the original trailer, which already seemed to revel in messing with the heads of fans by completely rewriting the history of the Terminator series.
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This second trailer, which dropped this morning, reveals that the T-1000 isn’t the real villain of Terminator Genisys. The real villain is… John Connor. The savior of the human race, played by Jason Clarke, whose survival was drove the plots of Terminator 1-4, is in now in league with the enemy, and has turned himself into some sort of cyborg, or possibly downloaded himself into a new body. (That plot point is a little unclear at the moment, and the Terminator movies have always been a little fast and loose about what constitutes a cyborg anyway.)
At this point, the changes Terminator Genisys is promising to make to the Terminator story are so pervasive that, for the moment, CraveOnline doesn’t even mind that that the film is potentially nullifying he stories we know and love. We reserve the right to change our minds after we see the film, obviously, and find out exactly how this whole story plays, but for now we can only admire the cajones on these filmmakers, who are throwing caution to the wind and taking some serious chances with a story their target demographic knows by heart. Hopefully they know what they’re doing, but even if they don’t, and Terminator Genisys completely screws all these seriously screwy ideas up, it’ll be a fascinating train wreck.
Terminator Genisys opens in theaters on July 1, 2015.
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When John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and safeguard the future, an unexpected turn of events creates a fractured timeline. Now, Sgt. Reese finds himself in a new and unfamiliar version of the past, where he is faced with unlikely allies, including the Guardian (Arnold Schwarzenegger), dangerous new enemies, and an unexpected new mission: To reset the future…
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
