Terminator Genisys

The clearest skip in the franchise. Genisys restages the opening of the 1984 film with new actors, then interrupts it: Sarah Connor is already waiting, already trained, already has a reprogrammed T-800 she calls Pops, and the timeline Kyle Reese arrives into is not the one he was sent to. Everything after that is a different continuity with no bearing on anything else here.

The film is most remembered for a marketing decision rather than a creative one. Its central reveal, that John Connor has been converted into a machine and is the antagonist, was put in the trailer and on the poster, which removed the only surprise the script had. The film then spends an hour building to it.

What is underneath is a time-travel plot with too many moving parts and no emotional centre. Reese and Sarah have no chemistry to speak of, the reprogrammed T-800 is written as a comic grandfather, and the rules change whenever the plot needs them to. Schwarzenegger is the best thing in it, and he is playing a joke about his own age.

A trilogy was planned from here and cancelled when this did not perform, and Dark Fate then restarted from Judgment Day instead, so this branch leads nowhere at all. Watch it only if you want to see what the series looked like at its most confused.