It’s sort of a reboot, but using the new Star Trek model, they’re doing some time travel frippery to keep the “old” Terminator timeline valid while going to a new one.
It’s looks like a lot of the same material and characters with some time travel spin applied. Yes, this IP is tired and abused, but I doubt I can resist seeing it in the theaters. I’m a sucker.
Shockingly there are elements here that I kinda like. I kinda dig how they flipped everything. “Oh yeah, the Terminator, we took care of him.” Very non-chalant. The T-1000 spear thing is kinda cool.
So it looks like there are three Arnolds in this one - Freshly minted T-800, middle-aged T-800, and elderly skydiving T-800. Is that right?
Also, trailers are weird. At first, it looks like the car hitting the bus on the bridge is what makes it somersault through the air, but then you can see the bus is missing the front wheels while airborne, so whatever did that is what made it flip. Why would they edit it to make it look like the car did it? I mean I guess if you’ll buy a bus getting booted that high into the air, you’ll swallow anything, but why change it for the trailer? I won’t even speculate how anyone inside could possibly survive such a stunt.
I actually rather like what they’re doing there in the trailer. Given that time travel has always been absolutely central to the series, it’s unfair to characterize it as “frippery” to reboot it with a new timeline. If anything, the Terminator series has usually not done enough to mess with multiple timelines - only The Sarah Connor Chronicles got into that, writing over Terminator 3 (it’s mentioned that Sarah was supposed to die of cancer in a previous timeline), Jesse being from a different future than Derek, and the lead-in for season 3 being a future that didn’t have a John Connor. The re-shot scenes from Terminator 1 look well-done, strongly evoking the original scene with police chasing Kyle Reese into a department store after he steals pants from a bum.