The past months have seen us inundated with enough explanations of twisting, reconfigured timelines, Dylan Thomas-esque odes to the unavoidable human frailty of cyborgs, mangled spellings, and terrible promotional photos to make us wish for some sort of cleansing fire to rain down from some sort of sky-based network, giving mankind a much-needed rest. But this first trailer for Terminator: Genisys doesn’t really bother with any of that: In fact, any attempt to think too deeply about the whens, wheres, hows, and whys of pushing the reset button on this franchise are immediately hit like a Mack truck driven by Emilia Clarke’s Sarah Connor, who flings open the door and—dispensing a familiar catchphrase—demands you just get on board so we can start blowing shit up already.
Besides, there will be plenty of time for parsing out the way Genisys is both a sequel and a spoiler that makes it so the original film and its sequels never happened. It’s a sea change epitomized by a metaphor-laden scene where the rapidly aging Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Ol’ Pops Terminator, destroys his younger self. In the meantime, at least they were nice enough to get you a replacement T-1000 (played by Byung-Hun Lee), Schwarzenegger still says that line, and there’s plenty of explosions, car crashes, and robots. And isn’t that what Terminator is all about? (Besides love?)