
From the woefully misguided casting (just WHO keeps putting the unappealing and charisma-free Jason Clarke and Jai Courtney in summer tentpole movies?!), to the moment that terrible title was announced, through to the godawful marketing - posters that looked like GCSE Photoshop jobs, and a trailer that gave away the twist - it always seemed doomed, another example of a studio-dictated product, and no clear steer from any one creative individual.
The frustrating thing is, there's a good film in there somewhere. You can see moments where the director and screenwriters are trying, striving hard for something better than awful... and in all honesty, it isn't as catastrophic as some of the reviews would have you believe.
Yet neither is it anywhere near as good as Arnold Schwarznegger ("Dis movie is a perfect 10!") or his close friend James "What do you want me to say about it?" Cameron would have you believe, but just as it's hard to see a clear individual vision, it's difficult to point the boney finger of blame at any one person. It feels like a movie by committee. Specifically, a committee of people who said "Here's a billion dollar budget - so long as you spend it all on Arnold and make sure someone fires a gun every 30 seconds."
But anyway. If you, like us, you were rendered clinically depressed by Terminator Genisys, and spent the weekend self-harming, there's always video games to take solace in. Here are the Top 5 Terminator games, as chosen by Vvord Pringle-Trang (us).
Starting in 2029, it loosely followed the plot of the first movie across four woefully short levels - the difficulty of which was cranked up to 14.9 in an attempt to hide their brevity. The opening level was particularly grinding - with you attempting to take down wave after wave of laser-armed terminator, with pitifully imprecise grenades. Still, what was there looked splendid, and mostly played well.
With you adopting the mantle of Robocop, it was solidly, unashamedly arcade-like, starting in the streets of Detroit, before taking a detour to the future. The Super NES version was similarly solid, but Sega's machine - unusually for the time - had been awarded the extra splish-splash of love.
Ahead of its time, its map was so huge it boasted time travel, and stores in which you could not only buy weapons to aid in your sprawling duel, but items including - weirdly - condoms. For all its ambition, it wasn't very good.
Next to dribble forth from Bethesda's nozzle was The Terminator: 2029. Despite some wonky controls - players could only move in four directions - it had the novelty of being a FPS (ish) set during the War Against The Machines.
Bethesda finally found their stride with 1993's Rampage - which borrowed heavily from Wolfenstein, and saw players infiltrating Skynet, by ascending through floor after floor of bland office building. Unfortuantely, Doom was already making waves, and Rampage arrived perhaps a year or two too late to make an impact.
Roughly following the plot of the superlative Terminator 2, it expanded on the movie with scenes set in the future - before the Terminator is sent back in time, and enemies never glimpsed in the movie. Appearances from the stars of the movie - only Linda Hamilton declined to approve her likeness - added to the authenticity. A home version was released in 1992, with the predictable downgrade in visuals and playability.
It was all blistering pockets of radiation, toppled buildings, and rubble-strewn paths and roads - you also got to drive around ruined LA in a jeep thing. It all added to the sense of post-apocalyptic ennui. It was also ahead of its time - it beat Quake to being the first FPS to use mouse-look controls and fully texture-mapped environments. If that's the sort of thing you care about.