Still strong in China

Terminator Genisys tops China's box office, making 526 million yuan ($82 million) since its premiere on Aug 23. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The Oregon-based box-office tracker Rentrack.com shows that the fifth installment of the 31-year-old franchise has earned a worldwide revenue of $409 million, with $320 million reaped from foreign markets.

Despite the commercial success in the overseas markets, Genisys got a tepid reception on major movie-review websites - a 26 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.9 points out of 10 on IMDb.

In China, the online echoes are similar. Douban, one of the country's most popular forums, shows nearly 40,000 netizens giving an average score of 6.9 out of 10.

Most of the criticism revolves around the film's mediocre visual effects, fight scenes that lack creativity, and a destructive plot twist.

The Terminator franchise centers on the future world's human leader John Connor's battles against evil robots. Though following the previous storyline that Connor sends back in time a human warrior (his real father) to rescue his mother (before John was born) from the robots' hunt, the new tale scripts Connor as the ultimate big baddie after he becomes a man-machine hybrid.

"So many years after seeing the first Terminator movie (1984), I still remember the shock and surprise it brought to a teenager like myself," writes a diehard fan on Mtime.com, a major movie-review site in China.

"But it's really difficult to accept that the hero Connor turns into a villain."