Spoilers Terminator: Dark Fate Review and Discussion

People are getting antsy in the prerelease thread about unmarked spoilers, so here's the spoiler review thread.

Just in case you clicked the thread accidentally, though, I’ll kick us off with

Spoiler: Dark Fate’s opening scene

I don't know if I was more terrified by watching the actual “If the bad guy was smart, he’d just shoot the good guy’ thing actually happen, or the fact that de-aging has gotten so good it looked like they’d just had a scene in their back pocket from the mid-’90s just in case.

Overall, I liked the film, though I’ve only seen the first two (AKA, the good ones) and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. God, I miss TSCC. I really would’ve rather had one more season of that than the second season of Dollhouse. Unfortunately, nobody wants to give me a naked-energy-ball time machine to reshape history to my whim.

 

No John Connor pretty much wrecked what the original premise was all about. Thankfully this movie will be the last. It’s tanking worse then genysis and it’s on more screens.

 

Yeah, I felt that way a decade ago and I still do. Honestly, despite my problems with the show, I'd easily trade in the last three or four movies for a couple more seasons of SCC.

 

Too late now. They decided to keep making crap movies.

 

I enjoyed it a lot. Felt like a 90s action movie and I like how they continued the story. Best Terminator movie since T2.

 

I'm conflicted over the fate of John Connor in the film. On the one hand, I like the idea that the leader of the Human Resistance can be anyone and it doesn't have to involve destiny or some fated savior. I also like that it's a young immigrant woman this time around, which is a timely message. On the other hand, given how Cameron was vocally upset with the flippant manner in which Hicks (to a lesser extent) and especially Newt were killed off in Alien³ after all the character development and bonding Ripley had with them and effort she went through to save Newt (plus, the obvious set-up of Newt as a second chance to make up for Ripley missing her real daughter's life while in hypersleep according the Special Edition), it seems kind of strange that he so casually killed off John here.

I can see why they did it from the standpoint of giving Sarah a new mission and motivation; driven by her hatred and regret to hunt down terminators, but I think it could have also been interesting to have John survive and have to deal with the reality that because of changes in the timeline someone else becomes the savior of humanity instead, and see how he adapts to that. Does he become bitter and jaded or is he relieved to have the pressure of leadership off him but decides to help out anyway as an advisor/mentor to Dani much like his mother was to him? I thought that was a missed opportunity and would have removed the sting of killing off the primary motivating factor of the film series so far. They were originally going to kill off Connor in Salvation and have Marcus take over for him while wearing his face, which was a horrifically bad idea that was fortunately abandoned, and while this is nowhere near that level and isn't even a bad choice per se, I am kind of surprised Cameron went for it.

I like how they're still managing to come up with a progression of terminator advancements in each film. In T3 we already got an armored endoskeleton with a liquid metal shapeshifting skin, but this ups the ante by making the shapeshifitng skin nanites (presumably without the vulnerabilities to freezing) and giving them the ability to detach completely from the endoskeleton and operate autonomously as a second terminator while the first does its own thing too and they tag off like Donkey and Diddy Kong. Gabriel Luna also did a nice job finding a bit of a middle ground between his Ghostrider character's personality and the robotic movements and behavior of the T-1000.

By the same token the excellent Mackenzie Davis from Halt and Catch Fire plays an improved version of the actual human given cybernetic enhancements (called "Augments") in the vein of Marcus from Salvation, though aware of the change throughout and with computer targeting and other enhancements to her brain and senses . She is enhanced by the Resistance to be able to compete against Legion's (this timeline's Skynet) terminators, though she does have the disadvantage of overheating.

The CGI in the film is strangely hit and miss. When they were de-aging Arnold, Hamilton, and Furlong and plastering their de-aged CGI faces on younger actor's bodies, they did an amazing job. It's come a long way since even the de-aged Arnold in Salvation or GeniSys, and that wasn't that bad (not like Scary Fisher in Rogue One, which was awful) , even though they made sure to burn its face off as quickly as possible to save money and credibility in Salvation. But then at times during the big action setpieces it seems as if they must ave blown their wad on the de-aging CGI and nanites and couldn't afford a decent rendering of crashing planes of underwater HUMVEE's. which either looked like an early 2000s video game cut scene or were permanently shrouded in a mist like an Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds commercial from the 80s (aging myself). "Not so fast (and blurry, and amorphous), Von Ryan!" The falling out of the cargo plane on a parachuting vehicle sequence looked just as fake and with equally bad body physics as the falling out the cargo plane on a parachuting sequence in the shitty A-Team movie, which is not a good thing.

The final fight in yet another factory seemed kind of anticlimactic after the build-up, but I guess a melee fight with biker chains is something new.

Linda Hamilton did a great job reprising her role as Sarah Connor and bringing a snarky bitterness and sense of not giving a fuck anymore because she lost the only meaning in her life so now she's just fueled by hate for terminators.

Arnold gives an interesting new take on the terminator that surpasses even the level of emotional development it had in T2. Here, after killing John Connor, he fully settles down with a wife (they have a "non-physical relationship") and adopted son, coming to realize through that relationship what he took away from Sarah by killing John and therefore deciding to help her via text messages alerting her to incoming terminators from the future. It really shows that Skynet/Legion is more of an oppressor/enslaver or these cyborgs than Humans were of Skynet (from its point of view). I wish we could have seen more of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and the different factions of robots which they seemed to be going for with Shirley Manson's T-1000 character.

It's not nearly as good as Terminator 2: Judgment Day or The Terminator, which are two of my favorite films, but Terminator: Dark Fate is better than the rest by a fair margin and a worthy entry in the Terminator lore.

 

It's slightly odd for me to keep reading about how amazing the CG was on the '90s versions of the characters, I couldn't get over how much they all looked like body doubles with cartoon heads. For my money, the Genisys "arrival scene" T800 was much better. Hopefully I'll have less of a problem with the TDF versions on home release.

 

"I'm reliable, I'm a very good listener, and I'm extremely funny."

Arnold is my favorite part of this movie.

 

Yeah me too, It would be interesting to see how John would handle it that he isn't ''the chosen one'' anymore.

I loved the three leading woman especially Hamilton, I really felt her pain.

And it didn't feel forced that we have three strong woman, something Hollywood have troubles with writing normally.

 

I don't have any problem with John Connor's fate. This has always been Sarah's story, John was just a MacGuffin.

 

John Connor was a cypher. He was a mythic legend of things to come. More of a vague symbol than a real character.

 

It doesn't particularly bother me that they dropped John for this movie, but it does feel maybe a little too dismissive to throw him out with the bathwater only to introduce a brand new Cypher MacGuffin and pretend she's worthy of any real focus.

If I'm honest, I found future-Dani as hard to believe as the charismatic worldwide savior as I did with Stahl in his old-age make-up in T3. My two cents, if you can't hire someone who really nails that part of the role, then just don't show that period of their life at all. Dani's recruitment of the three hooligans was a little too pat for my taste.

 

I just found the film rather lazy. You kill of John and replace him with someone exactly the same, the same goes with the villain who uses the same methods.
At least Genysis tried to add some new ideas.

 

Carl said that he was worried about rouge AI in general destroying the world. So not just Skynet and Legion.

Future Dani recognized young Grace, so future Dani was predestined. They tried to make out that a movie about the Jesus is a big change when Rise and Salvation were both movies about Jesus.

Terminators are a bad way to kill people. A virus or more nukes would work way better, but future Dani only called Judgement day Judgement Day because she spent years hanging out with Sarah Connor.

 

I think I agree with you. They are repeating the same formula. Just new names for John Connor and Skynet.

As I said in other thread. I think it would have been more interesting if John died in some type of random accident. New timeline means there is no certainty in what will happen. The Butterfly Effect. That drives her. Maybe to be the leader of the resistence herself and appoint her second in command the name “John Connor” to preserve his memory.

While I enjoyed this I do not have much enthusiasm for more. What happens next? A second Terminator to kill an older Dani? That sounds familiar...

Will they try to work Arnold into another role? It maybe an altered timeline but the human scientists behind the Skynet tech could still exist in it. Not just the Terminators. What about the origins of time travel? They have never dealt with it at all.

 

Well it looks like the series may officially be dead.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/get-woke-go-broke-terminator-dark-fate-bombs-at-the-box-office

 

I stopped reading at the very obvious right leaning website.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-daily-wire/

 

Yeah, "Getting woke"/Adding strong female characters (Which obviously can ONLY have the sole motive of showing off your progressiveness) didn't hurt the profitability of Star Wars or the MCU.

More like "Write a poor script go broke".

 

The first 2 terminators had a strong female lead. T3 also had a strong female lead opposite the make lead. Why did those 3 movies do well. I loved those first 3. So what's changed? Give your opinion and then I will give mine in that question.