Terminator: Genisys Will Not Be Rated-R, Here’s Why
This article is more than 2 years old
So Terminator: Genisys just got significantly less interesting to fans of the franchise hoping for a return to aesthetic of the first two chapters. One star of the new movie just revealed that the strangely titled film will follow in the footsteps of the last film, Terminator Salvation, and not in a particularly good way, but in the fact that the new movie will be PG-13. But at least he does talk about the plot a little bit.
Talking to The Arnold Fans, Jai Courtney, who you may remember from such stunning motion pictures as The Worst Die Hard and Another Dystopian YA Adaptation, plays New Kyle Reese, and told us not to expect an R rating. I mean why would we, it’s only a movie about killer robots from the future being sent back in time to hunt and murder a dude.
He said:
I would love to see it be rated R, but I don’t think it will. I think in this day & age, it’s much more likely to be PG-13. There were no f-bombs. But there’ll be a healthy amount of movie violence.
Well that’s…disappointing. The realness and grittiness of the violence is one of the reasons why the first two Terminator movies age so well. Tamed down to get a rating, they’re going to have to avoid certain situations, tone down others, and just generally skirt certain things. That’s the last thing you want; ideally your filmmakers should be concerned with telling a smart, earnest story, not with whether or not they’re going to get some bullshit rating. We don’t want a Terminator movie to be safe and sterile with bloodless squibs, that’s not what they’re supposed to be about. This is the same crap they’ve pulled with the last two Die Hard movies, and we all know how that turned out.
Courtney has also been talking to other people, and while discussing the film with The Huffington Post, he gave an idea of what to expect the story to look like when the film drops, aside from sanitized and clean. He said:
What I can say is that we start in a place we’re familiar with from the early films and then, you know, circumstances change. It somewhat shifts the course of events from that point. It’s not necessarily a sequel or a reboot. I don’t even know how you brand it correctly. We’re not remaking one of the early ‘Terminator’ movies. And it doesn’t necessarily carry on from the point where we left off.
If it sounds like they’re taking the J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek pseudo-reboot path, you are not alone. They’re still technically in the same world, but through the magic of time travel, they’ll be able to get around and ignore things from the previous films, should they deem that necessary. I’m sure this will be used to explain how Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), Kyle Reese (Courtney), and their son John Connor (Jason Clarke) are all the same age, not to mention how the Terminator is now 67-years-old. There’s potential to do something cool here, but we’ll definitely have to wait and see and hope they don’t fuck it up.
We knew that this film is intended as the start of a new trilogy, and Courtney also indicated that they will film two sequels to Terminator: Genisys back-to-back starting in 2016, assuming that the first one performs well when it opens July 1, 2015.
