Nostalgia As A Special Effect

There's a new Terminator movie coming out, Terminator: Genisys, and if the trailer is anything to go by, I'm actually eager to see it, because it actually succeeds at something that I didn't see in the last Terminator film, nor did I see in Aliens vs. Predator, nor did I have any glint of in the trailer for the next Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World. Andrew Swann successfully identified the critical element to any reboot or continuation of a long-lived and fraying franchise: nostalgia is a critically important special effect.

The last Terminator film, the latest Jurassic Park film, and the Star Wars "prequel trilogy" (the Anakin Skywalker series) all lacked that critical ingredient, and lacked a meaningful storyline the audience could latch onto. I have no idea if the latest Terminator film has the latter; it's hard to say from a trailer. But it will surely push its aging audience's buttons hard about important scenes in the original, hopefully morphed into something that has depth and impact in our CGI-enhanced world, and given new life by having the context in which those lines are delivered changed to serve a new and interesting plot.

This editor of this trailer surely understood the maxim: "Give the audience exactly what they know they want, only different." Jurassic World looks like its struggling with that. Let's hope the rest of Terminator: Genisys has it nailed.