Trailer Time: Terminator Genisys

Once again, they are trying to reboot the Terminator franchise.

After the soulless Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, there was The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which actually started incredibly strong only to become an incomprehensible mess because of the Writer's Guild Strike.

Terminator Salvation was actually an interesting idea: show the war that John Connor fought against the machines.  And I think it would have worked if they had not stupidly spent half of the movie focusing on Sam Worthington's character.

And now we have Arnold returning to the Terminator franchise.

Here's what I've been able to piece together from the trailer.  These aren't really spoilers since I don't know anything more than what the trailer revealed.

In the future, we see the moment when John sends Kyle Reese back to save Sarah as he did in the first Terminator.  But for some reason, a T-101 (the Arnold version) was sent back in time much further back to Sarah's childhood and has trained her to be the kick-butt warrior that she was in T2, but earlier than that into the T1 timeline.  And then like T2, there is a good Arnold Terminator fighting a T-1000 and they are trying to stop Judgment Day (the day the machines destroy civilization).

The plot seems a little convoluted, but I'm willing to by into the JJ Abrams' Star Trek-esque alternate timeline reboot.

My problem is this:  the casting!

Maybe it isn't fair to judge just from the trailer, but I am not impressed.

Jason Clarke as John Connor is fine.

But Emilia Clarke as Sarah just looks awful.  I totally bought Linda Hamilton as naive Sarah and as warrior Sarah.  I even believed Leana Heady in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  But Emilia Clarke seems out of her depth.  She feels like a little girl pretending to be strong.

And Jai Courtney (who was also just cast as Captain Boomerang in the Suicide Squad movie) is all wrong as Kyle Reese.  One of the reasons Michael Biehn worked so well as Kyle was that he was beaten and battered but tough.  Courtney looks like a beefy lunk-head.  He is bulky whereas Biehn was sinewy.  His delivery also lacks any of the haunted desperation that Biehn brought to the part.

And I'm not sure how much I really need to see old Arnold doing his Terminator thing.

Maybe I'm being unfair.  Maybe they will surprise me like Guardians of the Galaxy.

We'll see.

Thoughts?