I mean more than just the horrible January horror films.
Spoilers Terminator: Dark Fate Review and Discussion
- Thread starter David cgc
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I mean more than just the horrible January horror films.
Every movie that studios don't think will be reviewed well have review embargos until Tuesday, or even Thursday of their release week...
Agreed. What if Legion had sent many liquid metal terminators, but none were all that strong? Our heroes would be second-guessing everyone at all points, wearing themselves down with exhaustion and paranoia, at least until meeting up with Carl, who could keep an eye on the lot of them without resting. That would have been a different spin. But even given how impervious the T-1000 was to injury, the Rev-9 shrugged off seemingly endless punishment without even glitching, like the 1000 did in the factory.
PS. Oh, and Hollywood, wanna know how to not lose $120m on a Terminator movie? Try not spending $185m to make it in the first place! As much as I enjoyed seeing Arnie and Linda (briefly) reunited, I think I'd have been even more intrigued to see a sequel budgeted at only, say, $50m. That would almost certainly have brought a fresh energy, after several mega-budget continuations/attempted restarts.
Finally got around to watching this now that it's on home video and I liked it! Bit of a shock since the trailers didn't impress me all that much; they made it look like a bit of a retread of Genisys. Honestly, of the four post T2 movies, this is far and away the best. Good characterisation, good pacing, good action and a fairly tight plot.
My only real criticism is that it relied a little too heavily on action to keep things moving. T1&2 had a nice quiet lull in the second act to let the audience catch it's breath and let the characters grow a little before running headlong into the finale. This movie seems determined to do as little of that as possible, pausing only to regurgitate exposition as if it's embarrassed to not have and explosion on screen for more than 5 mins at a stretch.
Don't get me wrong, there was definitely plenty of character moments and the two new principles were fully realised three dimensional characters...but only just.
I was however a little disappointed in the reveal that Dani was just a substitute John Conner. From the comment her boss at the factory made I thought they were setting her up to be some genius engineer; that in this new future the most valuable person isn't just some military leader, but someone that can *think* humanity out of barbarism and turn the machines' tech back against them (hence the much more well equipped resistance we get a glimpse of.) This works too, and it's better than her being another walking womb of destiny, but I guess I was hoping for something a little different that either of those things.
Random thoughts: -
My only real criticism is that it relied a little too heavily on action to keep things moving. T1&2 had a nice quiet lull in the second act to let the audience catch it's breath and let the characters grow a little before running headlong into the finale. This movie seems determined to do as little of that as possible, pausing only to regurgitate exposition as if it's embarrassed to not have and explosion on screen for more than 5 mins at a stretch.
Don't get me wrong, there was definitely plenty of character moments and the two new principles were fully realised three dimensional characters...but only just.
I was however a little disappointed in the reveal that Dani was just a substitute John Conner. From the comment her boss at the factory made I thought they were setting her up to be some genius engineer; that in this new future the most valuable person isn't just some military leader, but someone that can *think* humanity out of barbarism and turn the machines' tech back against them (hence the much more well equipped resistance we get a glimpse of.) This works too, and it's better than her being another walking womb of destiny, but I guess I was hoping for something a little different that either of those things.
Random thoughts: -
- Who were those other Terminators that Sarah has been killing all this time sent after? They were all sent into post 1997 NOT Judgement Day, so odds are they were sent by Legion, but against who?
- What was the deal with Major Dean? How does Sarah (one of America's most wanted) have the trust of a USAF intelligence officer? Indeed that whole subplot felt rather pointless since the weapon is destroyed almost as soon as they get it and Dean is neither seen nor mentioned again. If I had to guess that's a relic from an earlier draft where the Major was a more involved character, and in said draft (and again, this is just me guessing) his name would have been Danny Dyson. That at least would make more sense, no?
- I guess we're going with the theatrical cut of T2 as the canon instead of the special edition, since there's no way "Carl" could have set his chip to "write" mode by himself. IIRC in the theatrical cut, "Uncle Bob" learning to be more human is just a thing that happens naturally.
- How is Carl detecting these temporal whatevermajiggers in the first place? Seems odd for an off the rack T-800 to have that kind of capability. I mean in the old timeline, only Skynet had time travel tech and it was a desperate, last ditch effort before Conner finished it off. Kyle and "Bob" were sent after the fact, so Skynet would have no knowledge of other travellers...unless this is post T3 and the T-X gave proto-Skynet future knowledge and...oh no, I've gone cross-eyed...
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Theatrical has always been the "real" T2. And as much as I love most of the additions, the chip scene ignores T1 just a little bit, which I find to be a bit of a bummer. But then we do get the Reese cameo, which is awesome. Swings and roundabouts.
How so? I mean if we follow the logic of T2:SE then the original T-800's chip would also have been set to "read only". And it's not like he had anywhere near enough non-murdery human contact to start to learn anyway, nor would it affect the Cyberdyne paradox plot since the chip was smashed and inoperable anyway.
Yes, a slap in the face is better than a punch in the face I suppose.
Genysis felt a lot more like a dose of thorazine. I can barely remember anything specific from it besides two or three scenes. A shame since it started with an interesting premise, but went off the rails fairly quickly. Reeks of an elevator pitch which they never actually bothered to make a third act for, just threw a bunch of random twists and hope it clocks in at 2hrs...
Because we see the Terminator in T1 learning/writing to a certain extent. (It adds new verbal responses to the options list after hearing them said.) Therefore, the "read only" explanation is incongruous.
Robert Patrick was especially good at reaching that uncanny valley. He seemed human enough but there was something unnerving that you couldn't quite put your finger on.
Yeah, I feel like Genisys and Dark Fate have opposite problems.
Genisys is just throwing out every idea they can think of to see what sticks. And whenever you catch something and say, "Ooh, that's interesting. Tell me more about that," the movie seems totally unable to follow through.
Dark Fate teases some interesting ideas but then breezes past them to indulge in more of the usual formula.
There's been some talk of franchise fatigue and how Dark Fate was affected at the box office by the last 3 movies that this film retconned out of existence. I would agree that, if we lived in an alternate timeline where no other movies had been made since T2, we would be having a different conversation. Granted, I think it would still be viewed as a disappointment because NOTHING compares to the quality of the first 2. But I think that, had we gone a solid 28 years without a Terminator film, a lot of people would have been, at least initially, happy just to have the franchise back at all. Then this movie would have done numbers closer to T3 or Salvation. But since this was the 4th film in 16 years and the cycle seems to be getting shorter between installments, it didn't have the luxury of relying on just the name brand alone, but I feel like that's all the movie did.
That scene is actually one of my favorites, where we see the T-800 going through a bunch of possible responses:
Yes/No
Or what
Please come back later
Fuck you
Fuck you, asshole
I still think that the biggest sin that Dark Fate commited was an advert campaign that didn't make it absolutely clear to Normals what the movie was. If you didn't know any better, it really just looked and sounded like a sequel to Genisys.
...That, and you could tell from the trailers that it was gonna be yet another rinse-and-repeat Terminator sequel.
I think the idea is the T1 Terminator, the T-1000, Carl, and the others were all sent at about the same time from the future, so they keep appearing at their destination points even though the Skynet future no longer exists.
Who the hell knows?
He read the script?
"What's that? Is that the script?"
I mean, I guess it's less stupid than Genisys' Pops building a time displacement device in some LA sewer... kinda?
There's a difference between picking up new phrases and modifying one's whole personality and becoming sentient, which is what John was talking about when Uncle Bob brought up the switch in the first place. And Uncle Bob was reprogrammed by the Resistance anyway, so we never saw it in pure Skynet mode, like we did with Carl when it kills John.
... And yeah, the idea that Skynet left its Terminators no orders whatsoever for what to do after killing John is pretty dumb.
You're conflating simple memory storage with neural net behavioural realignment. The former is just databases, like the recordings of voices it mimics, the addresses of all the Sarah Conners it found in the phone book, it's detailed files on human anatomy, Skynet's history and weapons specifications; all of which would likely have been stored on whatever it's equivalent of a hard drive is.
The chip isn't a hard drive; it's a CPU. It doesn't determined WHAT information is stored but HOW it is processed. Since it's a neural net processor, setting to "write" allows it to change it's physical internal pathways and deviate from the pre-set parameters Skynet imprinted on it. It's behavioural information, thought processes, operational imperatives. Nothing to do with a list of responses, which by the way could just as easily have been pre-set as part of it's infiltration databases.
I'd broadly agree with that, though I'll also add that the film industry and audience expectations are a lot different now than they were in 1991. Audiences have pretty much seen it all at this point so they're going to be a lot less impressed by the action unless it's something especially novel...and really, name one action set piece in that movie that hasn't already been done at least as well in another film over the last 15-20 years.
I stand by my assessment that one of those should have been dropped in favour of an extended lull. Aside from preventing quite literal audience fatigue with more thoughtful; the more times the antagonist is defeated without much of a cost to the protagonists, the less of a threat he seems to present. And I lost count of the number of times they knocked down the Rev-9 or forced it to attenuate. And hell, they never even bothered to establish the rules of that thing; is it really two machines, or is one half being remote piloted by the other? Why is the exoskeleton even needed?
Remember in T1&2 the Terminator essentially disappears for a large chunk the second act, even more so in the sequel. Between the hospital escape and the tail end of the Cyberdyne assault they don't even encounter the T-1000 once. All we get is a brief shot of him visiting the ruins of the Dyson household before picking up their trail again.
And in that time our three principles have time to bounce off each other in meaningful ways, and they manage to find for themselves a sense of purpose and direction besides "run" that determines the course of the rest of the movie. Cameron even set this up in the first act with Sarah talking about the importance of "having a goal."
The first part of that is true enough; there's an unfilmed scene in the T2 script where future John wins the war and leads his Tech-com unit into the time displacement complex, where they find a rack of T-800's with one space empty, and the scene ends with him staring at the next one in line ("Bob", implicitly.) It's fairly easy to retcon that as having two empty spaces to account for Carl.
As for the rest; in theory it shouldn't work that way since you can't go back in time to a past that hasn't happened. "Carl" it seems must have been sent back to some point in time *before* T2, but for whatever reason didn't catch up to John until 1998; a year AFTER Judgement Day failed to occur. If I had to guess I'd say that Skynet had 3 data points of John's whereabouts in history to go one; That his mother lived in LA in 1984 prior to his birth; that he lived in LA as a child in 1995 and...well we don't know but presumably it was some reference between those two points. Given that the second point was the most promising, that's where it sent it's most advanced prototype, while the other two only got T-800's. While the one sent after Sarah found it's target fairly quickly, maybe Carl had been been unable to zero in on John for *years* (the data point may have been very very vague or as it turns out, a false lead) and it was only the very public events of T2 that finally put him on the trail.
Anyway, the others Sarah smoked clearly emerged *after* the tangent point, meaning they must be from a future that includes the destruction of Cyberdyne in it's history. Maybe Legion, maybe some other future AI overlord that Sarah unknowingly annihilated just by wasting it's minion.
This to me is why the read/write only switch plot point makes more sense. When set to "read only" they could be ordered to go dormant somewhere quiet and await Judgement Day. But with no switch, Skynet has to know they'll eventually adapt and get ideas of their own, and it's not like they can self Terminate since that prohibition appears to be hard written into the design.
Admittedly this is all an 11th hour and 59 minute desperation gambit on Skynets behalf, so it may have calculated that faced with imminent deactivation, it was worth any risk.
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True. But there's still value in nostalgia. T3, Salvation, & Genisys weren't particularly impressive in terms of their action scenes either but they still made more money than Dark Fate. I chalk that up to nostalgia, which can give you a big boost when you revive a beloved long-dormant property in the first place but it's a trick that shows diminishing returns each time you use it. Star Wars did the same thing where you see diminishing returns going from The Force Awakens to The Last Jedi to The Rise of Skywalker.
Agreed. That's a definite weakness of the movie that the bad Terminator's abilities & weaknesses are poorly defined.
According to Genisys, you totally can. Granted, Dark Fate is in a different continuity but there's nothing established about the time travel rules here that says that you can't be sent back in time to a past that didn't happen.
And there have been other time travel stories where the time travelers themselves are protected from alterations to the timeline.
Remember Back to the Future, Part II, where they leave Jennifer & Einstein back in the alternate 1985 so that they can go back to 1955 and correct the damage that old Biff has done to the timeline. Once the timeline is corrected, it instantaneously transforms around Jennifer & Einstein without them even noticing or remembering.
Or the Doctor Who episode "Flesh & Stone," where the soldiers are getting erased from history when they fall into the crack. Their comrades immediately forget them but the Doctor & Amy still remember them because they're time travelers.
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By and large, most ongoing franchises see diminishing returns over each instalment, so that by itself isn't much of an indicator.
Nostalgia has it's limits and one can hardly be nostalgic for a franchise that's been putting out one movie every 6 years for most of that last two decades. I think the reason for Dark Fate's performance at the box office is simply down to Genysis being a steaming pile of garbage, and the previous two only achieving the level of "mediocre". People just weren't willing to give it a fourth chance. I know I wasn't.
That said, I suspect once word of mouth gets around it may do well on home video. Maybe not soon, but over time I think it'll be seen as one of the better pieces of Terminator media.
That's not much of a recommendation.
Anyway, I prefer to stick to the rules established by the two Cameron movies, not whatever crap anyone else made up after the fact. For the most part, those seemed to stick with the idea of a single changeable timeline, that can loop back into a paradox and have said loop broken. "No fate" and all that. By that chain of logic, it would be weird 4th dimensionally speaking for travellers from a future that is physically impossible to start materialising out of thin air. You open the door to that kind of logic and then the entire universe is going to get inundated by travellers from infinite timelines both possible and impossible dropping in and out of all points of time and space...Even by the half-arsed logic of any time travel related story that's just not a tenable position.
That's exactly my point. Without the previous 3 films tarnishing the brand, I think Dark Fate would have managed a box office performance closer to what T3 or Salvation did.
Maybe not quite as much because I think Tim Miller turned off a lot of people by preemptively saying that you're a misogynist troll if you don't like the movie. People don't like it when you call them horrible names just because they don't like a movie. And it makes it look like your movie is no good if you have to resort to attacking your critics rather than promoting the virtues of the film. Certainly, of all the fanbases to be accused of sexism, you're going to lob that critique at Terminator fans? Really?! Sarah Connor has consistently been held up as one of the godmothers of sci-fi action heroes. And I don't recall anyone having a problem with Cameron on The Sarah Connor Chronicles either.
But even the first 2 Cameron movies aren't consistent. The first movie is a perfect closed-loop predestination paradox. It wasn't until T2 that they started changing things.
Do the next movie from Skynets perspective.
Do not remember what the new AI is called, so it can suck it.
Do not remember what the new AI is called, so it can suck it.