Ever thought about putting your house up for and AirBnB? If so, did you ever give a thought to the judgment potential renters might give you from your DVD collection? You don’t know how it got there. Maybe it was a gift. Maybe you got it at a 3 for $5 sale at Wal-Mart. Or, perhaps worst of all, maybe you actually like it. Welcome to “BnB Shame”.

Exhibit A:

Terminator Genisys

I waffled back and forth, by the way, on whether I should refer to this as Terminator Genisys or Terminator: Genisys. I went with the former because that’s how it’s listed in IMDB, and because the title looks a lot cleaner in the header without all these colons cluttering up everything.

WARNING: there’s going to be a bunch of spoilers ahead, and I didn’t want to gray out this whole article. Proceed at your discretion.

Why make it:

The Terminator series is still a viable brand, right? The series about goddamn time-traveling robots was started by James Cameron back in ye olden days and featured a rare female action protagonist with Sarah Connor. But Linda Hamilton is getting on in years, and we need a younger cast that can sign on for multi-picture deals.

And yeah… I did say kids. While the first three entries in the franchise were proudly rated R, the last two movies has been more upfront about courting the children of the world with a PG-13 rating. I haven’t seen Terminator Salvation beyond the occasional snippets my unguarded eyes catch from time to time on edited FX re-airings. (Incidentally, this movie had originally been planned to be the first part of a new trilogy when its media development company, Halcyon, went bankrupt. Imagine: there probably an alternate universe out there where Christian Bale did three movies feuding with his hated director.) However, just based on the few scenes I’ve caught, I have to say Genisys looks a lot bright and more appealing to audiences than its predecessor. I’d say it goes farther down the track of being a light PG-13, and would not look out of place in between a marathon of Avengers movies.

The Terminator is now Sarah Connor’s grumpy dad now! And he goes by “Pops”! Awwww, that’s so sweet! And drones are more relevant now than ever… buuuuuuut you don’t want to scare the kids. So let’s ditch all that. And the nuclear holocaust stuff, too. How about we have brightly colored holograms and apps instead! Oh, and ditch the scary skeleton robots for the most part. Let’s make them look like a slightly more sinewy Silver Surfer combined with Megatron from Transformers: Age of Extinction instead. Ooooh… maybe in the next movie we can have dinosaur terminators!

Shoot, Terminator Genisys might be the most toy-friendly of all the Terminator movies, so it pains me to say that the only playable merch I could find with regard to this this movie that are actually made for kids and not adult collectibles are Mega Bloks. What, no glow-in-the-dark Matt Smith SkyNet action figures?

Jim Henson’s Terminator Babies:

Emilia Clarke isn’t the most dynamic actor, and I think internet pundits are way too hard on her. When she’s in a movie directed by the guy who did Thor: The Dark World, I think you deserve some leeway. However, this movie hampers her by an especially unrealistic goal: she has to either match or outshine Linda Hamilton. And as with a lot of roles where the character is so tied with the actor’s own real world personality (see: Steve Whitmire taking over as Kermit, or Clarke’s co-star in the Solo), it’s impossible to see it as any more than a pale imitation of the real thing. Hamilton had two movies — one being the box office champ of 1991 despite having an R-rating — to establish herself as the most badass mother on the planet. Clarke… completely comes off as someone trying to be badass but at any moment is going to crack a sweet smile because it’s clearly all just an act.

And while we’re on it, Jai Courtney is also no Kyle Reese. However, he already had a rep for being a bland actor (which is why Suicide Squad was something of a revelation), and Kyle Reese is certainly no Sarah Connor. They didn’t make a TV show called The Kyle Reese Chronicles.

Fear of a Robotic Planet:

I do often wonder what fear is being represented by SkyNet, as opposed to the clear-cut motivations in the previous movies. There, the fear was that humanity would go extinct and replaced by soulless, unfeeling robots. If John Connor fails, then all humanity disappears from the world and replaced by machines that only think of problems in terms of 1’s and 0’s.

Here, SkyNet is a feeling thing. When John Connor gets taken down, he becomes a hybrid of man and machine. (The “machine” portion is represented by nanomachines, i.e. metal shavings. Which, frankly, is somehow less effective than either the machine Terminator or the liquid Terminator.) It’s unclear whether John is acting of his own volition and SkyNet has convinced him that the robo-future is the only way, or whether SkyNet has brainwashed him into becoming a pawn.

After all, Connor sounds convincingly that he buys into his evil monologue. He has superpowers and is kinda indestructible. Can you imagine what you can do with that body? Perhaps you can explore the far reaches of space… not as an emotionless probe controlled by people down in Houston but as a thinking, feeling individual. Maybe rather than dying and SkyNet using him as a meat-puppet, he came to the realization that his new body is actually much better than what he had before. When John proposes that mommy and daddy join him in the glorious future ahead, it really doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.

No, I’m not some sort of transhumanistic robo-apologist! Why would you say that? Humanity is doomed. Doomed, I tells ya!

In the end, we’re not given a really compelling reason why we should fear the future. Extinction of the human race? Yes, got it. Humanity continuing but with some augmented powers? I’m going to need a pamphlet to tell me how to feel.

Planet of the Apps:

And yeah, I love how Cyberdyne is working on liquid metal robots and time machines… but hey, this app that will sync up your phone and computer is like the coolest thing ever! And it’s tied into the military somehow, because that makes sense.

What in the world did John Connor accomplish by going back in time, by the way? Did he embed himself as some sort of Steve Jobs supergenius (he’s rocking the black turtleneck in the movie) to program the soul of SkyNet into their projects? So does SkyNet gain more intelligence by processing itself through time loops or something?

These goddamn time-traveling robots.

I will admit that I have watched this movie several times (never in a theater). For a lot of people in the world, THIS is their introduction to Terminator. It did really well overseas (with China being the biggest bonanza). Thanks to that surprising bonus, Terminator Genisys‘s unadjusted gross puts it as the second highest gross worldwide in the franchise.

So I like playing a game where I put myself in their shoes. How does this movie play out without any previous baggage? Lots of stunts, lots of explosions, the former governor of California being charming as hell…. Honestly, Schwarzenegger and JK Simmons (a put-upon cop who goes whole hog into the time-traveling robots theory) are the only two actors who have an idea of what kind of movie they’re in. Terminator Genisys eliminated all the gloomy nihilistic angst of the previous entries. It’s surprisingly watchable, but mainly because it’s engaging in how baffling it is.

Sadly, the forces of globalization couldn’t save it, and a planned sixth Terminator movie will once again reboot the franchise and ignore everything that went on in Genisys. Goodbye, app shaming.

Potential BnB renter assessment:

Say you have only Terminator Genisys on 4K Ultra HD. With the latter, your renter may assume that you bought this primarily to show off the capabilities of your brand-spanking new OLED TV. They might even watch it just to see what your TV can do. No judgment.

However, if you’re rocking just a standard DVD player and a disc you bought for $6 at Rite-Aid, and there are no other Terminator DVDs on your shelf… you are inviting Judgment Day.

*dun-dun… dun… dun-dun….”