If you’ve been on the internet at all today, you may have noticed that everyone is up in arms over last night’s Game of Thrones season 5 finale. Shit certainly got crazy, even by Westeros standards, and people want to vent. And just in case you forgot that GoT star Emilia Clarke also stars in the upcoming Terminator Genisys, here’s a fun reminder.
People are probably going to be split on who you’d rather have your back, a trio of adolescent dragons or a killer robotic Arnold Schwarzenegger from the future, but lucky for Emilia Clarke, she doesn’t have to choose, she’s got both. Either one would be pretty badass.
It’s also rather clever to have them both standing in flames in this image, as we’ve seen each of them, on separate occasions of course, emerge unscathed from fire. Or at least we’ve seen Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen come through the fire without a mark. We’ve watched Schwarzenegger’s T-800 has also walk out of a blaze, and though his mechanical skeleton is still entirely functional, his fleshy exterior covering has been burned away.
We know that Genisys rewrites the timeline of the franchise, revisiting key moments, only with a twist. For instance, like before, John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from a futuristic threat. That, as you know, is the basic plot to James Cameron’s 1984 Terminator. Only this time, instead of finding a meek, frightened, confused Sarah Connor, Reese finds a total badass, battle-ready Sarah Connor. In this version of reality, she’s been raised by an older version of Arnold’s T-800, the very same one you see in this image, who is known as Guardian, and who she calls Pops at least once.
But the more we find out about Terminator Genisys, the more questions we have. We’ve seen at least three distinct time periods in the film—the future, 1984, and Sarah’s childhood—but even more are hinted at and indicated. In those scenes on the Golden Gate Bridge the cars look pretty contemporary, and if you peruse the credits on IMDb, there are young versions of a couple characters listed, characters that wouldn’t be young at the same time. A character we saw as a child in an earlier movie shows up in a much older incarnation, which places the action at least in the early to mid 2000s. And don’t even get us started on the whole "John Connor is a robot now" thing. We don’t know what the hell is going on.
Terminator Genisys yet, but of the few who have, including James Cameron, the early reviews have been largely positive. We’ll have to wait and judge for ourselves, but we won’t have to wait too much longer as Genisys opens on July 1.
