For its general plot, no, i think it falls to terminator 1 and 2 easily.
I just got back from seeing it. Its watchable, but pointless. Unless youre really aching to find out who sent the terminators back to earlier times than previous, how john connor somehow knew to go back to 2014, there is no reason to watch further terminators, and yeah, you would have to be aching for it, because the first 1 doesnt leave you giving a shit.
Spoiled for length
[details=Spoiler]The storyline, and investment into it as the consumer is tossed out the window from a ton of illogical shit being done, even when characters have hindsight of whats going to happen already.
The best scene was with the og terminator skeleton vs kyle reese after he went back in time.
I think too much time and money was wasted in using cgi to somehow fit arnold back into the movie, and hes not a cameo like i thought. Hes legit in the movie from start to finish. The movie shouldve been a legit reboot, and not trying to fit itself into an already complicated universe filled with plot holes.
Like, in T2, everything makes a fairly decent amount of sense. The first terminator failed, so skynet sends a new upgraded one to kill john this time, and john sends a reprogrammed one to now protect him. Sarah is no longer an important target, john is the target now. Terminators collide, john gets away, and the next step is getting his mom because john tells t1 to. From there they get rifled up, and head to the source of it all, skynet. Sara was locked up while skynet was being developed, and the first terminators chip recovered, so she couldnt do anything if she wanted. They do all that, fight, and end of story.
T2 is clean, and to the point. It has its problems, but overall it fits, and it especially fits for the time. What i mean by that latter point, fits for the times, is this.
You know what, forget clarifying the latter point, this is basically terminator genisys in a nut shell.
Skynet sends back the original t1 to 1984, before getting shutdown in the future. The humans send back kyle reese to 1984, and while kyle is leaving, a terminator undercover as a human, but is not a t1000, attacks john. Kyles back in 84, but the first terminator is now killed by a terminator sent back from the future by the humans to protect sarah when she was 9, because skynet sent a t1 back to kill her as a kid. So essentially, kyle reese was already in an alternative timeline to begin with, at least from the one we traditionally know it as. Now in 1984, there is also a t1000 sent back. The t1000 gets into it with the terminator from when sarah was 9, gets destroyed, and now the mission is simply to destroy skynet. Apparently sarah and 9 year old sarahs terminator have been waiting for kyle all this time, and preparing for the t1000 also.
But wait
So kyle has had flashbacks of an alt timeline, and instead of going to the 90s to stop skynet again, he says they should go to 2017, because what has changed has already changed. They go to 2017, find that genisys is the new skynet, john connor has time traveled (arrived in 2014 actually to develop genisys, apparently with no redundancies either), and is no longer john connor, and they need to destroy genisys. They kill future john connor, dont have a baby, and ride off into the sunset, but not before kyle reese tells kyle reese something to remember as a kid about genisys.
Thats it, and its a convoluted mess compared to t1 and t2. A fresh reboot would have allowed them to play with new timeline fun, new characters, new terminators, blah blah. Instead they pigeon held themselves into plot holes galore, and are making a mediocre pile of, not so stanky, but kinda stanky, trilogy. [/details]
The funny thing is, the machines created john connor, because the humans wouldnt have sent back kyle reese, who impregnated sarah, if the machines didnt send back a terminator, or at least hid that they did better. lol