It’s a common complaint these days that there is so much marketing build up to big Hollywood movies that you by the time you finally see the finished product, you feel like you’ve seen the entire thing. Most of us haven’t even laid eyes on Terminator Genisys yet, but if you’ve been paying attention to the glut of trailers, clips, and TV spots, you know they’ve revealed some huge spoilers. According to director Alan Taylor, there is one big reason for that.
Taylor, who also directed Thor: The Dark World, recently talked to Uproxx and made it clear that he’s not a fan of all these twists being revealed in the marketing. He does, however, understand that they’re trying to differentiate their film from what came before and set it apart. He said:
I think they felt like they had to send a strong message to a very wary audience that there was something new — that this was going to new territory. They were concerned that people were misperceiving this as kind of a reboot, and none of us wanted to reboot two perfect movies by James Cameron. I think they felt they had to do something game-changing in how the film was being perceived.
If you’ve been keeping away from Terminator Genisys spoilers up to this point, good for you, that’s no easy task, but you may want to move on now, as we’re going to hit on them beyond this point.
The biggest reveal has obviously been that this iteration of John Connor, the savior of mankind, played by franchise newcomer Jason Clarke, is himself a machine. Or at least he becomes a machine, or is a machine disguised to look like John Connor. We’re not exactly sure how it plays out (at least there will be some surprises left), but we do know that someone or something we and the characters have been led to believe is John Connor is in fact a new generation of Terminator.
That’s a pretty big deal. For a time, a lot of people thought that since it has been all over the marketing campaign, this is something that happens early on. That is still entirely possible, and it sounds like there are some other reveals that have been kept under wraps, but to hear Taylor talk, that isn’t something he expected, or wanted, to be public knowledge going into his movie. He said:
I certainly directed those scenes with the intention that no one would know.
There are still some big questions that remain to be answered about Terminator Genisys, like the nature of Matt Smith’s (Doctor Who) character, how the new film rewrites and interacts with the existing timeline, and what era, or eras, the bulk of the action takes place in. So we don’t quite know everything, but we’ll surely find out when the film opens this Wednesday, July 1.
