Terminator Genisys is not, as its cast is at pains to point out in this month’s Empire, a reboot. Rather it’s a plunge into an entirely different timeline that takes a new-look Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time by John Connor (Jason Clarke) to save his imperilled mum, Sarah (Emilia Clarke). Except, thanks to an ageing, complexly-motivated T-800 standing sentry, she’s not as endangered as he might have imagined. “The story has changed,” that T-800, Arnold Schwarzenegger, explains, “so I am like a combination of the characters who you have seen in the past. He is a powerful and potentially evil kind of machine that can be very destructive if I see that a there is danger from me or for the victory against the machines. I can switch over to being the protector of Sarah Connor. It depends where we are in this storyline.”
The centrepiece of Empire’s new issue – on sale this Thursday, peoples – is the return of the epochal franchise. In an exclusive interview, Schwarzenegger trumpets the enduring power of a storyline that's stripped humanity back to its basic will to survive across three decades of jackknifing lorries, massive explosions and narrowly-avoided (or not) nuclear holocausts. But it wasn’t always so. “I didn’t know when I did the first Terminator that this would become such a popular franchise,” he remembers. “But you never know when you do a movie anyway. I mean, some movies, you do a Superman or a Batman, you know the franchise is already there, but with these kind of movies you don’t know..."
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Terminator Genisys arrives in UK cinemas on July 3. Head here for the latest trailer.