Simon and Jim enter the modern era of Terminator films with TERMINATOR GENISYS directed by Alan Taylor, a film with a promising start that goes on to absolutely fall off a cliff. They discuss the producers’ ambition for a new Terminator Cinematic Universe off the back of this film and the perils of planning for a trilogy without making a successful film first, the interesting way that this film recontextualises and subverts the original film and creates a blank slate for a new direction, the uninteresting way that the film just goes in the same direction as the previous entries in the franchise, digital de-aging and the “mummification” of cinema, the transformation of Skynet into a consumer tech product and how that impacts the politics of the narrative, and why ‘Genisys’ is spelled that way.

Content warnings: nuclear war and apocalyptic destruction; murder and violent death; patriarchy and forced procreation; body horror and removal of skin.

Our theme song is Terminator Theme Song (32Stitches Remix) by 32Stitches available on SoundCloud at ⁠https://soundcloud.com/32stitches/terminator-32stitches-remix⁠

Full references for this episode available in Zotero at ⁠https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/EIRIF9WS/collection