The Terminator franchise has wasted some valuable opportunities over the years, but spoiling Jason Clarke’s reinvention of John Connor in Terminator: Genisys was one of the worst missteps in the series. Terminator: Genisys was arguably always destined for failure. A reboot of the franchise, 2015’s Terminator: Genisys was saddled with a PG-13 rating that inevitably sanitized its action.
Not only that but 2009’s Terminator: Salvation turned the franchise into a post-apocalyptic war movie, meaning Terminator: Genisys was forced to start over by retconning significant chunks of backstory. While the original director lined up for Terminator: Genisys, Justin Lin, might have been able to pull off this sort of absurd plotting while keeping the movie’s tone tongue in cheek, TV veteran Alan Taylor took the story too seriously and ended up bogged down by the blockbuster’s byzantine plotting. What made this worse was the fact that Terminator: Genisys star Jason Clarke effectively reinvented the franchise’s hero John Connor, only for the reboot to waste his performance in the role.
Drawing inspiration from the skittish teenage energy of Edward Furlong’s take on the character, Jason Clarke nonetheless managed to make the role of John Connor his own. The Terminator: Genisys star consulted sources like Shakespeare and Steve Jobs to pull off Connor’s rousing speeches early in the runtime of the reboot, making his eventual fall from grace all the more tragic. At least, this would have made Terminator: Genisys’s evil John Connor all the more tragic, if it weren’t for the fact that from its earliest trailers the reboot completely spoiled his eventual transformation into a Terminator. This wasted all the work that Clarke put into humanizing the tragic version of the iconic character, all for the sake of a few trailer shots.
Since the Terminator series began, John Connor had been something of a thorn in the side of the franchise. While his existence was a useful MacGuffin that facilitated the story of the original Terminator, his transformation from bratty teenager to brave leader of the human resistance was never convincingly realized onscreen by the franchise. This was part of why The Sarah Connor Chronicle couldn’t replicate Terminator’s success on the small screen, as John’s character was caught between being a charismatic resistance leader and an awkward young adult without ever convincing in either role.
Clarke’s Terminator: Genisys version of John Connor managed to overcome this by introducing an older, more self-certain version of the character. Less taciturn than Christian Bale’s take on the role, but far from the nervy young man seen in early Terminator outings, Clarke’s John Connor was a heroic figure who could believably have been the leader of a political movement and his attempts to inspire his followers rang true. As a result, Terminator: Genisys spoiling his early death was more than a mere mistake. For all of Terminator: Genisys’s flaws, the sequel could have made viewers care about the character if most viewers didn’t already know Connor would soon be dead, thanks to the promotional materials spoiling this. As a result, Clarke’s Terminator: Genisys version of John Connor was wasted, since audiences knew better than to get attached to the doomed character regardless of how compelling the actor’s performance was.
