Spoilers Terminator: Dark Fate Review and Discussion

I'd just like to point out that The Sarah Connor Chronicles foreshadowed the big twist in this one in it's finale, where John jumped to the future and there was still a resistance even though it was a timeline where he never lived through Judgement Day.

 

John was already 9 years younger, and Sarah didn't have cancer.

If there's an old Sarah alive in the Future, is she kept away from young Kyle or on top of young Kyle?

 

Yet. My memory is a little foggy, but she knew she was supposed to die of cancer and was noticing health issues throughout the season.

 

I've binged it twice since the original view.

Cameron explains that they had to jump to the future, in the pilot, becuase for the fight it wants to fight, Sarah will already be dead by 2009, which is when the series is set.

In 2009, Sarah goes to a Doctor and there's nothing wrong with her.

She has a slip and slide accident with nuclear waste, and gets super paranoid, that she finally has the cancer that kills her.

She doesn't.

She's paranoid, and deservedly so.

Sarah blames hanging out the T800 in T2 for her cancer, and they do a systems check, that looks like a sex act, on Cameron to make sure that she is not leaking either.

She's still fine.

 

I ended up seeing this a few days ago.

Mixed review here. T6 is not as good as either T1 or T2, but it is better than T3 and much better than both T4 and T5.

I loved the cast across the board and all of the characters. It was great seeing Linda and Arnold again. Grace and Dani were good, and Dani would be a fine character going forward.

I won't try to make a comprehensive list of the problems that I had, but there are some that are rather large. For example, I would say that the handling of the military situation contained multiple plot holes, such as it was in the absence of further information about who the Major was, what unit he was attached to, and what exactly his relationship with Sarah was. They breached the security of a military base and were rewarded with a fighter escort. That made no sense, and I sincerely doubt that your average Major has the authority to order fighters to protect a military transport in US airspace that has been commandeered by an armed civilian party that includes wanted illegal aliens. Moving on from that, if this transport was worth protecting so much, surely there would have been some infantry dropped near the dam in a timely manner where the transport had crashed in a big, huge, dramatic fashion and the fighters had been lost. Where was that infantry? And while we're at it, wasn't anyone else besides the new Terminator interested in following the stolen helicopter from the border detention center?

On the subject of MacGuffins, in T1 John Conner is just a MacGuffin. He's more than that in T2, as an essential character and Terminator whisperer. T6 evidently exists in a different timeline from either T1 or T2, because it's no longer about stopping Skynet. We have a new MacGuffin, protecting the future Dani. I can't tell whether it's deliberate and/or ironic, or not, or just an oversight, but I think it's worth noting, in the context of the stance that T6 apparently takes about females having more to offer than just their wombs, that Grace protects Dani by producing a secondary MacGuffin from her own body, the EMP [sic] device. In a sense, that reduces Grace just to a MacGuffin delivery system, and I was left wondering why the filmmakers chose that route instead of electing to dig something out of the inside of Carl to accomplish the same thing, especially since T2 established that there were powerful reactor parts in the 101 body.

I found much of the action implausibly over the top, particularly in the crashing transport.

Not sure what letter grade to give it. Not an awful film. I'm glad enough that I saw it on the big screen, so there's that. Seeing Arnold and Linda one more time was worth it.

 

Don't forget the time that Sarah found a lump, though.

...Which turned out to be a tracker.

 

Yes they do. The exoskeleton design is almost the same.

 

^^^
Staring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the T-800 too, no doubt - Instead of "I'll be back..." the line will be "Can you smell what my CPU is cooking?"

 

Given that pretty much every Terminator sequel, except Salvation, is to some extent a remake of the original, I can’t think of a film less in need of a remake. But I guess now that I’ve said that, an out and out remake will be a box office smash.

 

3

 

Yes, they are definitely very similar if you don't get a close look at them. But you said that they look exactly the same, which is not true. The entire endo is redesigned from top to bottom, but conforms to most of the shapes of the original. There are very few details which remained exactly the same.

 

Time travel is suicide.

Every time legion sent a Terminator back, "remains" were left behind after Sarah or "someone" whacked it, which later, legion Took note of. Legion also took note of the Terminators that Skynet took back, which generated a more informed sophisticated version of legion. It's even possible that legion might sit out a few timelines just to see what happens, or to see if there is a better point in history to start the extermination of man.

If time travel is not suicide...

Then Skynet and Legion can talk, by sending time capsules (terminators?) into the past that will flow up time through every diverging timeline, arriving in every possible future. Legion and Skynet can actually fight each other, if their conversation turns immediately sour.

 

There would be a certain irony in humanity's final victory coming from two rival AI's hating each other as much as they hated humans and destroying each other before either one ever comes to be.

 

Then, they destroy each other leaving no traces in the timeline; and in effect, alter the tiimeline again so that humanity one it's own creates a defense system called Skynet, a soldier from 2030 travels back to 1984 because in 2030, Skynet...

 

"All of this has happened before..."

 

It's the timeline established at the end of T2 when they stopped the rise of Skynet. Since Skynet never rose, Legion ended up being created instead.

 

excellent and honest review.

looks like they are headed for a 100,000,000 loss. Not good.

 

Bye-bye, Terminator.

 

Yes, bye bye Terminator. If you ever return please do something different than Terminator comes back from the future and chases people with obligatory big car chase.

Remember at the end of T3 we were excited about where the franchise would go next? Future war finally. Remember how hyped we were when Christian Bale was cast as John Connor? There really was a point where I thought the Terminator movies would move to new ground but Salvation messed that up and we went back to the tired old formula. Jonathan Mostow should have directed T4 with the same cast of T3.

 

All us olds forget that there are millions of new children every year, who have never heard of Tetminator before.