We’re getting our best and most in depth look at TERMINATOR: GENISYS yet this week thanks to Entertainment Weekly, which is featuring the franchise reboot on two different covers: The first shows off Emilia Clarke (Sarah Connor) and Jai Courtney (Kyle Reese), while the second sports a Terminator, Jason Clarke (John Connor) and Matt Smith (as a “close ally of John’s”).
Perhaps more interesting are the story details that come with the feature. Sounds like they’re tooling around with the Terminator timeline in a whole new way.
First, the plot EW offers up:
TERMINATOR GENYSIS is set in 2029, when the Future War is raging and a group of human rebels has the evil artificial-intelligence system Skynet on the ropes. John Connor (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ Jason Clarke) is the leader of the resistance, and Kyle Reese (Divergent‘s Jai Courtney) is his loyal soldier, raised in the ruins of post apocalyptic California. As in the original film, Connor sends Reese back to 1984 to save Connor’s mother, Sarah (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke), from a Terminator programmed to kill her so that she won’t ever give birth to John. But what Reese finds on the other side is nothing like he expected.
So far, that all checks out with what we already know about the Terminator mythology. But then, a few new wrinkles are revealed. Such as Sarah Connor being “raised” by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator since childhood?!
Sarah Connor isn’t the innocent she was when Linda Hamilton first sported feathered hair and acid-washed jeans in the role. Nor is she Hamilton’s steely zero body-fat warrior in 1991’s T2. Rather, the mother of humanity’s messiah was orphaned by a Terminator at age 9. Since then, she’s been raised by (brace yourself) Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—an older T-800 she calls “Pops”—who is programmed to guard rather than to kill. As a result, Sarah is a highly trained antisocial recluse who’s great with a sniper rifle but not so skilled at the nuances of human emotion.
“Since she was 9 years old, she has been told everything that was supposed to happen,” says producer David Ellison. “But Sarah fundamentally rejects that destiny. She says, ‘That’s not what I want to do.’ It’s her decision that drives the story in a very different direction.”
Just going to let you digest that… To read more of the EW article, head over HERE. The film hits July 2015.