Take that, Ted! (Paramount)

Nearly all of the principals in the rebooted/remodeled Terminator Genisys travel through time, but the most telling traveler may be a quartet from Queens. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” is an undisputed pop classic today, but in 1984, the year the first Terminator film was released, it was only six years old and still something of a counter-cultural signpost. More than thirty years later, when Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones’’ Emilia Clarke) plays it in a mixtape on an old boom box while the menfolk load ammo, it serves as nostalgic texture in a mega-blockbuster. Something that was once startling is now comforting, and that seems to be the theme of this mild reboot.

As the movie opens, John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance against the machines, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to 1984 to protect Connor’s mother Sarah from a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent back in time to kill her. As Kyle travels through time, he has memories of his own alternate childhood, and once he lands in ‘80s Los Angeles he learns that timelines (aka previous franchise plot lines) have been altered. Sarah is now under the protection of Pops (also Schwarzenegger), a T-800 sent to protect Sarah when she was nine years old from the future Terminator model (again, Schwarzenegger).

Got that? There’s an almost never ending supply of reboots of old franchises, and one would be perfectly justified to find this a symptom of a Hollywood bereft of new ideas. Spunky vanilla star Jai Courtney was in fact an ineffective cog in another recent sequel, playing John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard. As pop culture’s collective memory gets shuffled and painted over again and again, these films come off as 21st century repertory productions of modern classics, replacing Hamlet with Spidey.

But until Julie Taymor decides to make a Broadway musical out of the Terminator, we have a familiar and reasonably engaging action movie, albeit with gaps in logic. When John Connor reemerges, everyone in the audience knows he may not be who he seems to be, but either because of emotional ties or a badly written plot point, he isn’t put through the kind of rigorous litmus test of humanity that would be run on anybody else in this universe. But the script by Patrick Lussier (who was behind the underrated Nicolas Cage vehicle Drive Angry 3D) and Laeta Kalogridis makes up for plot gaps with decent momentum.

Terminator: Genisys’ action scenes are for the most part competent and not too hectic, perhaps aware of the fact that its demographic may be a somewhat older crowd more used to 1984-era film’s rhythms. Arnold is the AARP’s action hero, boasting more than once that he’s “old—not obsolete,” his wizened features excused by the detail that the human tissue that encases him is living and thus decaying tissue. This passage of time is well captured by Detective O’Brien (the reliable J. K. Simmons), who encountered Pops and his gang in 1984 and recognize them in 2017.

Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney (Paramount)

There really isn’t anything in Terminator Genisys you haven’t seen before, even if Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are played by different actors. Arnold’s revived career as an aging action hero continues to take advantage of his accent by excusing his fractured speech as that of a machine programmed with human instincts but who doesn’t understand how to be fully human, which may well be a stronger indictment of technology than the giant operating system that is the film’s enemy.

Like Terminator 2’s incongruous anti-violence message, Genisys (is it a coincidence that the movie shares an abbreviation with Throbbing Gristle?) is a market-saturated powerhouse that warns us against market-saturated media. When the gang goes back to the future of 2017, the world is counting down the arrival of Genisys (creation as operating system), which promises to integrate all our devices into our life, but of course this proves to be a delivery system for something insidious.

Is it ironic for a blockbuster fueled by an unstoppable studio marketing machine to warn us against an unstoppable marketing machine? Sure, but as the movie rewrites its franchise’s own history, it almost comes off as an indictment of rebooted franchises. Whatever its meta-significance or lack thereof, things blow up and the good guys save the world and the stage is set for the next memory/installment. And if we’re lucky, maybe there will be music.

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Terminator Genisys
Directed by Alan Taylor
Written by Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier
With Arnold Scwarzenegger, Jai Courtney, Emilia Clarke, Jason Clarke, J.K. Simmons
Rated PG – 13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and gunplay throughout, partial nudity and brief strong language
125 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you.