Spoilers Terminator: Dark Fate Review and Discussion

Probably followed the trail of crazy from the car chase.

 

I agree with this. It's not as if they would have been hard to find.

 

I don't remember what specifically gave me the idea, but I got the impression Sarah had a police scanner in her car, and that's how she found them.

 

That definitely sounds like something Sarah would have with her equipment.

 

The only reason that Skynet would have programmed childcare into a terminator is if Skynet's human allies and collaborators were in danger of being targeted for termination by the Resistance.

 

Well there were to be two sequels if this movie did well. The have now been cancelled. In think at this point even a reboot would be boring. Do we really want to see another retread? I think these guys have really destroyed the franchise with the last 2 especially. They should have just continued the story after T4 and moved on showing the resistance fighting skynet and ultimately defeating it. But instead they chose to move backwards with the last two movies with the older weaker protector battling stronger Terminator or terminators to protect a savior. It's over and ended on a really bad note.

 

Hardly destroyed. If anything, it seems to have reminded people of their love of T2.

 

The first and second movies are the best for different reasons. I had this duscussion with my wife recently, and this was my conclusion.

THE TERMINATOR - rare do you find a chase movie so captivating. Great concept, well termin... executed, and fantastic setup for a franchise. The thrill component of the whole thing was outstanding. The plot and story are the big strengths here.

T2 - same concept, well executed, but with even better character development. Arnold made his character be sympathetic, and loved. Characters were definitely the strength of this one. And honestly, the effects hold up today... in some cases, even better.

Say what you will about James Cameron, when he directs, it's not a piecemeal production.

 

I hereby submit that Dark Fate can be summed up by this formula: "Good idea! But... too much."

- The new hope for humankind is a young Mexican nobody - good idea! But, she already works at a factory where machines threaten her future (do ya get it, do ya get it?!)... too much.
- The new terminator villain can split himself in two for more effective combat - good idea! But, it's also almost completely indestructible, and shrugs off multiple explosive and military-grade weapons hits with no apparent difficulty... too much.
- Grace's enhanced metabolism means she burns herself out and must be cared for - good idea! But, instead of being fed, rested, and nursed back to health, we get a scene of her robbing a pharmacy, and Sarah randomly injecting her with various meds... too much.
- Sarah is a bitter, hardened loner with a prickly personality - good idea! But, she assumes the new woman's the mother of the machines' real target rather than the primary target herself for no good reason, and she and Grace do little but bicker at each other, long after it becomes clear they're on the same side... too much.
- We get slam-bang freeway chase and detainee breakout sequences - good idea! But, we then break into and out of an Air Force base, casually steal a military cargo plane, have an altered gravity fight, parachute into a reservoir and fight underwater, then have a two-part battle royal inside a hydroelectric dam... way, way, way too much.
- A terminator without a mission grows a conscience, and becomes a family man - good idea! But... actually, this is the one area where we don't get nearly enough.

And for a "back to basics" movie that erases T3, it doesn't mind re-assembling the following factors: a liquid metal/endoskeleton hybrid that remotely commands other machines, humans other than the Connors being targeted, Skynet succeeding in killing John, Judgment Day being merely postponed, an action scene in an Air Force base which our heroes fly away from, arriving at a generations-old industrial site without bystanders, and killing the bad terminator with a gadget from our future hero. Even given that T3 is itself a shameless retread of the first two movies, that's a lot of borrowing from the movie you're essentially remaking with a new third installment.

To be sure, there were some great moments sprinkled throughout - okay, sprinkled throughout the first half - of the flick. But the second half was just too damn long, exhausting, and narratively empty. It was fun seeing Linda back, but I'm a big fan of T3's Nick Stahl/Claire Danes, pairing, too. So, in the T3 vs. Dark Fate battle... Dark Fate has higher highs, but, due to its bloated, plot-hole-filled second half, I have to give the win to Rise of the Machines overall.


Stahl/Danes FTW!

It's almost as if dogs are sentient mammals with individual personalities, or something.

 

Well the Terminators are supposed to be infiltrators. I am sure some of them could be assigned some kind of "deep cover" hiding out among humans until the time was right. And maybe sometimes that meant caring for children.

I imagine they could potentially insinuate themselves into a human community for years if need be...waiting...like a slowly ticking time bomb. Maybe they are like some of the Cylons in nuBSG, who live human lives, fighting along side of the resistance...until one day, they snap and kill everyone.

Even the children.

The humans would never know if they could trust *anyone* around them. Even their closest friend.

(Well, until the undercover Terminator tried to walk through a metal detector...)

 

Oh gods...and this is how it starts:

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRan...-camera-gimmick-will-lead-to-our-certain-doom

https://kvoa.com/skynet-cameras

 

Yes, but the t-800s were bah-rand new.

So if there were deep infiltration models laying down roots...They started a few weeks before Skynet was murdered.

 

I think we are supposed to assume that Carl was online far longer than any T-800 was expected to be.

 

Yeah. This is a franchise that desperately needed to do something new but had no idea what that would be.

Heck, we're still waiting for blu-rays of The Abyss & True Lies.

I agree with all of this. At least T3 had a promising ending by finally blowing up the world.

 

Tim Miller opens up about the box office failure, blaming fatigue and the sense of 'betrayal' from previous films


https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a29896612/terminator-dark-fate-tim-miller-box-office-failure/

Full interview with Tim Miller

https://twitter.com/AaronCouch/status/1198001240690397184


Titles is a bit of click bait here

www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/why-terminator-dark-fate-director-wont-work-james-cameron-again-1257322


To sum that article up in a nutshell for anyone, Miller doesn’t plan to work with Cameron again because he didn’t feel in control of his own movie, and he similarly didn’t return for Deadpool 2 because of Ryan Reynolds’ level of control there.



He said Cameron and him wouldn’t work together anymore because Miller likes his total creative control and Cameron was very involved in the editing. But after the fact, Cameron actually sent him a message saying he’d like for the two to grab a drink in December which Miller will do.


Miller also said that if he told you what notes they argued over, we would laugh because it wasn’t anything substantial but a line here or there that Miller absolutely loved but Cameron thought was slowing down the pace.

 

Maybe not, Tim, but you didn't have to show the future war in daylight, and you didn't have to overload the second half of your movie with just as much meaningless, OTT action noise as Genysis. And Carl is pretty much Genysis' Pops 2.0 - as much as I enjoyed the character, you didn't have to do another cuddly Arnold, assuming you were required to include him at all. (He could have played the human T-101 template, for instance, which due to the Sgt. Candy scene being cut from T3, has never appeared on the big screen.) It can definitely be argued that to bring Linda Hamilton back but keep Arnold around is to miss a great opportunity to emphasize her further.

I've been thinking that surely the night future war scenes of T1/2 don't make any logical sense - wouldn't human bodies be much easier to spot with infrared tech (which Reese even mentions in T1) at night? So surely humans would be better off fighting during the day, when they themselves could see - and yet the flash-forward nightmares of night fighting is vastly more atmospheric and cinematic. It's one reason to show the future as little as possible, to avoid getting caught up in that paradox. The scene of future Dani winning over the murderous drifters was meant to be a key dramatic moment, but it was just weak.

(In Cameron's original T2 screenplay, much of the human army that ultimately prevails over Skynet is South American, from regions not as hit by the Cold War nuclear targets, which is why the American flag in T3's flash-forward is so out of place. Dark Fate finally brings a Hispanic flavor to the future war proceedings with Dani, but still falls short in that regard...)

 

According to IGN's article about Miller and Cameron one of the other issues, was that Miller wanted to have Legion beat the humans, but Cameron insisted that the humans had to win.
Miller wanted Legion to be "so powerful, the only way to beat it is going back in time and strangle it in it's crib."

 

All hail Linda Hamilton, giver of zero effs! Just watch how she replies when asked how Dark Fate is, at the five-minute mark:



She passes it off as a joke a (long) moment later, but... I see you, Ms. Hamilton. I see you.

 

Well, she is right

 

LOL. Spot on, Linda. No take backs.