Spoilers Terminator: Dark Fate Review and Discussion

I'm sure that would be even better in the original Klingon.

 

I've never seen that before, it was hilarious.

 

I want a Shakespeare trilogy of films just like that.

 

You should definitely watch The Last Action Hero. Extremely underrated.

 

Who wouldn't pay to see this movie?

 

I hope this thread isn't too old to revive. I discovered they had this movie on Paramount Plus, so I finally watched it. I was misled by the poor reviews and the box office failure. I really liked this one. It would be faint praise to say it's the best Terminator movie since T2 -- any movie that achieved minimal competence would at least surpass everything since T3 -- so let's say it's the first actually good Terminator movie since T2. (Full disclosure, I haven't actually seen Genisys, but from what I've read about it, I think it's unlikely that I'd change my opinion if I were to see it.)

I did feel the action was way over the top, that it just kept going and going and going, but fortunately there was some nice solid character work and ideas and relationships anchoring it all, and a good script with well-written dialogue. (When Carl the Terminator was speaking with such urgency about the color of the drapes in a little girl's bedroom, I thought to myself, "This is an absurdist masterpiece!") The cast all did solid work. Hamilton nailed Tough Old Lady Sarah, and Dani and Grace were both effective leads. I liked that it did something similar to The Sarah Connor Chronicles' notion that one genocidal AI or another will emerge eventually, but went beyond that and had it not be a version of Skynet but something different. And I liked the meta element of subverting the white male chosen one conceit of the original in favor of something more modern and inclusive.

I see a lot of complaints about how it just rehashes the formula of the earlier movies, but I think that's kind of the point -- that Terminators only have one formula, that they're trapped and limited to do this one thing over and over, and what makes things different is the humans, who they are and how they interact and respond. The sameness of the plot was there to contrast against the novelty of the characters and their roles. We're set up to expect a rehash and then it gets subverted. I liked it that the target of the Terminator revealed her true strength and became the heroic leader even earlier than she did before, so the Terminator caused the very thing it was sent to prevent.

That's not all she did. As she said, she's spent the past 20-odd years hunting down other Terminators when alerted by her anonymous informant (i.e. Carl). So she's presumably been connected to a string of violent incidents all over the place, a decades-long spree of what the authorities probably consider criminal mayhem and terrorism.

The name itself is telling. "Legion" means a multitude, many acting as one -- like the demon from the Bible, "My name is Legion, for we are many." And Sarah was talking about the modern surveillance state, how there are devices monitoring and tracking us everywhere, and we saw drone warfare as well. So it seems to me that Legion is a more decentralized threat, possibly an emergent consciousness in the Internet or at least the military intranet. It's probably not just one computer or program, but a whole global network.

The reason seemed obvious to me. She identified with Dani. She's been living with the consequences of her own Terminator experience for decades. It's shaped her entire life since then. And let's face it, she's kind of old and thus probably likely to be set in her ways. So it's no surprise that she'd be a little inflexible and slow to realize that Dani's situation was not a direct analogy to her own.

 

As often is the case, you're missing the point - the forest for the trees. Simply because a repetitious formula is built into these movies doesn't make them one jot better. It means the franchise is badly flawed conceptually. It makes the movies bad.

This one was bad. The end.

 

For you.

But, again, your opinion isn't fact.

I don't know why it's so troublesome for you that people like Christopher, myself, and clearly a fair number of people in this thread at least enjoyed this film, if not outright loved it.

 

Very unpopular opinion, but Genisys is actually a guilty pleasure of mine. I enjoy time traveling, alternate reality shenanigans (even if they don't particularly make a hell of a lot of sense ). If you turn your brain off for about two hours, Genisys is pretty enjoyable in a PG-13 Terminator-John Connor Character Assassinating- kind of way. It's also available on Paramount+ (hint, hint!)

 

See, there's the problem. I like movies that engage my brain, not require me to muzzle it.

 

Netflix is going to make a Terminator cartoon.

https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/film...series,including 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate.

Therer's an IMDB page with zero information.

 

I do not need to engage my brain all the time. Often I want my entertainment to engage my brain, but at times I really don't. "Entertaining" is a rather impossible to define term that I'm satisfied simply to apply to a performance (or film) that I enjoyed experiencing. A pie in the face doesn't really engage my analytical mind very much, but I can laugh out loud and enjoy myself, and have.

One of my "guilty pleasures" is The Core. If one were to grade it on the level of scientific accuracy, it would flop pretty hard. But fidelity to science isn't the defining trait of science fiction, and nor is it required to be entertaining. Things that make The Core good are the characters and the drama. The scene of Lindo's character throwing the switch to allow decoupling is a masterpiece scene of heroic sacrifice; I don't really care about the science. The scene of Qualls's character searching for the location of the seismic weapon gives a compelling indication of an evident transformation in his character for the better. Etc.

All that said, Dark Fate wasn't on the same level of T1, not even close, and nor did it make it up to the plane of T2. It's more on the level of T3, give or take. That makes it better than the others, but what is that saying? These are, of course, all just my personal opinions.

 

Preferred Genysis more. Dark Fate just felt like more of the same

 

Yeah, I got all that, and it still sucked. It sucked that she was 100% certain, without any direct evidence, that the machines were only out to destroy Dani's womb. It sucked that General Leia failed to prevent her only kid from becoming a mass murderer and failed to discover the existence of Starkiller Base. It sucked that Picard, after closely working with Raffi for several years on the Romulan evacuation, completely ghosted her the moment their project got shut down. And these aren't secondary character traits, either: Sarah is quick to adapt to the situation at hand, Leia is a natural leader with high EQ, and Picard is a thoughtful diplomat who doesn't give up a righteous effort even when his superiors freeze him out. All these examples, therefore, are betrayals of the characters' cores.

TNG didn't need to sabotage Spock's character when they brought him back (nor, for all its absurdities, did XI), and Generations didn't sabotage Kirk's character. Heck, Picard itself did right by Seven, Riker, and Troi. Crystal Skull was an idiotic movie that didn't advance Indy's character in the time since Last Crusade, but it also didn't make Indy an idiot, or portray him as being out of touch because he neglected to read the latest in historical scholarship due to a key paper having been written by a woman of color.

It is possible to bring a beloved old character back at a new stage in their life and gave them dramatically interesting flaws without undercutting their core traits. Dark Fate may be a mild example of this, given that it had Sarah still be a resourceful and independent fighter after all these years, but that moment was still unnecessary and disrespectful to the character.

What's more, that was bad writing in general, because, by having it be the first time Grace told Dani she was humanity's future leader, it seemed like the movie expected the audience to be thrown for a loop, also, when we were far ahead of both Sarah and Dani. In short, it was a crap script.

And The Core is awesome.

 

I just don't think it's that big a deal. Okay, so she made an assumption, but what difference did it make? Either way, what mattered was not letting the Terminator kill Dani. The reason why it was trying to kill her was an abstract, academic question that had no bearing on her immediate, practical responsibility to prevent Dani's death. So it didn't reflect at all on Sarah's ability to adapt to the situation, because the situation that mattered was the immediate life-or-death fight, and she handled that just fine.

These two paragraphs prove that we have profoundly different standards of quality in movies.

 

My very vague memory is that he said the time machine was destroyed after they went back, but that doesn't rule out another one existing without him knowing about it. I think one of the sequels (or maybe TSCC?) showed that its destruction was averted after Reese went back.

 

I remember reading somewhere once where it was proposed that the time travel seen in Terminators 1-3 were similar to a war of attrition with the best models being sent first. The TX and T-850 were sent to stop John Connor as an adult and failed. Followed by the T-1000 and T-800 in T2, which failed. Finally with no advanced Terminators left, Skynet sent a T-800, and with no reprogrammed Terminators left the resistance was forced to send a lone soldier, i.e. Reese.

 

in T2 Sarah discovered she could change the future, so whatever Reese said about what happened in his future is not set in stone, even as early as T1, because as it turns out there's nothing to keep them locked in a causality loop.

 

Okay, I finally gave in and watched Terminator: Genisys in the interests of thoroughness. It's not nearly as horrible as the reviews suggested, and it's better than Salvation, at least, but I don't think it's nearly as good as Dark Fate. The first act in particular is quite boring, just a rehash of the original movie with less charismatic actors, and just infodumping everything about the backstory up front instead of creating a sense of mystery like the first film, the second to an extent, and Dark Fate did.

It picks up somewhat once they jump into the future, but it's still got a sizeable number of plot holes. Like, how can John Connor even exist in a timeline where Sarah and Kyle left 1984 and took a one-way trip to the future before he was conceived? Why go to just a day or two before Genisys goes online? We were just shown that Sarah and "Pops" had spent her entire childhood getting ready for the original T-800's arrival and thus had a well-prepared plan in place, so why did they suddenly forget that and just go "Oh, we'll figure something out in 36 hours or so"? Also, if Pops's skin protected him from the magnetic time field, why didn't it protect him from an MRI, which couldn't have been nearly as powerful? And then there's the happy ending that breaks the rule Sarah insisted on just minutes earlier, to leave no trace of future technology behind. And the obligatory post-credits tease to set up a sequel, because nobody is willing to let a movie just stand on its own anymore.

There was some okay character work with Sarah and her frustration at having no freedom to choose her own life, but the actors just didn't have much chemistry or appeal. And of the two films' takes on an aging Terminator, I found Dark Fate's "Carl" considerably more interesting than "Pops," who was basically just a continuation of the T2 version. Come to think of it, it's kind of contradictory the way Genisys repeatedly stresses that T-800s were designed to be perfectly convincing infiltrators, but shows Pops as incapable of figuring out how to smile convincingly.

J.K. Simmons was a highlight of the film, as he usually is, but his role was too small. I would've rather spent more time with him than with the much blander and less talented leads.