Terminator: Dark Fate

I think we can all agree that the Terminator saga concluded with T2.  Of course it was the sequel we didn’t know we wanted so that was surprising enough.  T3, while completely unnecessary, was a nice bonus though.  No one else seems to have come around on that yet but I’ll sing its praises until my dying day.  It’s the only non-Cameron installment to come remotely close to capturing the spirit of the first two.  Salvation went in the right direction story-wise where if we’re gonna continue to explore this universe then let’s finally take a deeper dive into the infamous war that this entire thing is supposed to be about.  Unfortunately they fucked that up real hard by making John Connor a secondary character and giving off some unpleasant Transformers type vibes.  Then Genisys was a total disaster misguided in just about every way.  I mean they turned John Connor into the villain terminator which was spoiled on the goddamn poster!

Finally we’ve come to Dark Fate and I’ll say from the top that it’s pretty much almost as dumb as Genisys.  I’m not sure if it’s actually a speck better but it’s at least a speck more watchable.  High praise, I know.

Sure it’s easy to dismiss Fate as simply the same ol’ shit yet again with a terminator going back in time to kill a human who will be a threat to the machines in the future but is protected by a good guy also sent back in time.  But that’s not an automatic disqualifier in my book.  It’s the other decisions made within that framework that are bad.

I would classify the dull repetitive narrative as a smaller problem.  There are many others in the same category like that they made the evil terminator Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)), the new half machine/half human hero Grace (Mackenzie Davis (Blade Runner 2049)) and even the standard T-800 way too powerful.  They’re all like Superman level indestructible now which really doesn’t make sense particularly with Grace since she’s still partly human.  These machines used to get some damage after a battle and would need repairs.  That’s out the window in favor of extravagant more cartoonish action.

Speaking of the action I don’t think I care for any of the sequences they came up with.  They’re either worse versions of ones we’ve seen before like a car vs helicopter chase or shit that’s so goofy looking I can’t wrap my head around it like a zero gravity fight in the cargo bay of a humungous military plane falling out of the sky and an encounter with the Rev-9 while our leads are trapped inside a Humvee underwater with ferocious currents because it’s stuck at the bottom of a dam.  And all of it is overly CGI-ed.  Having the machines flip and jump all over the fuckin’ place at lightning speed and use excessively complicated fighting moves makes my eyes glaze over.

With all of that said the film has larger issues and the two I’ll discuss here are related.  Spoilers for the rest of this piece.  The first is replacing Skynet with Legion.  According to the timeline of this particular movie Skynet never becomes a thing so instead it’s this other program called Legion that tries to eradicate human life.  This change is pointless considering Legion does the same exact shit and in the same exact way as Skynet.  The filmmakers are trying to weave an alternate universe because they didn’t want to keep going back to John Connor.  They wanted a fresh face who was as important to the human race but just not John Connor.  And I guess they felt the only way they could do that was to erase almost all events from T1 and T2 (this is somewhat ironic seeing as Fate is a direct sequel to those skipping everything else).

Legion wouldn’t be such a dilemma if we had an all new cast of characters in this other world split off from the original.  It’s still technically part of the Terminators but we’re essentially hitting the reset button.  Again, that would be fine but that’s not what we got.  This leads me to my next big issue.

The conventional wisdom is that you can’t have a Terminator joint without Arnie and once again the T-800 shows up to help save the day.  Not only that but Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton (Dante’s Peak)) is back in action.  Having the two of them co-headlining this feature thirty five years after the first outing is well, if I’m gonna be really honest here, sad.  They’re just too old.  I can’t get on board with either of them running around at their age getting banged the fuck up and doing more physical work than they ever have before.  It’s not even funny.  It comes off as pathetic.

If these characters were used in smaller supporting roles where they aid our protagonists here and there in a much, much, much less guns blazing, fist pounding kind of way that would’ve been more acceptable.  They should’ve catered to the strengths that come with growing older like wisdom, expertise, poise and perspective.

Besides the age thing it’s more that I don’t want to see these characters anymore.  They had their arcs and I’ve been ready since 2003 to move on to others.  And with the new timeline angle it makes even less sense that Sarah Connor and the T-800 are here at all.  Sarah succeeded in preventing her world’s future from happening and the T-800 was theoretically never created.

In order to get the T-800 in this story though they had to shoehorn in a plot point revealing that several T-800s were sent back in time all at once to different time periods and one of them successfully kills John Connor not too long after the events of T2.  I will say the movie has some balls ripping a hole through John Connor’s chest so I’ll give them credit on that one.  It’s a tragic epilogue because the Connors blew up Cyberdyne and everything averting the Skynet future but John ends up dying right after anyway at the hands of a fucking terminator.  Ok, I’ll admit that’s kind of interesting even if it is some major retcon bullshit.

But I don’t understand why this T-800 who accomplished his mission didn’t self-terminate.  I thought that’s what they did when they were done.  Nope, instead he decides to not be a terminator anymore because…he feels like it and settles down and has a family and starts a drape hanging business.  I’m not kidding.  That shit’s actually in the movie.  His name’s Carl by the way.

So the filmmakers wanted it both ways.  They attempted a soft reboot without Skynet or John Connor but at the same time they couldn’t give up Sarah Connor or the T-800.  The end result is this new generation and old generation mix that doesn’t come together.  In fact they clash horribly.  You gotta go all in on one or the other.

One last item, the fate messaging is confusing.  They’re telling you that we can make our own fate but at the same time the drive of the plot is to ensure this one person (Natalia Reyes (Birds of Passage)) survives so she can eventually become the leader of the human resistance.  So it’s all fate but it can be a good fate?  Not such a dark fate but a lighter fate? 

Or perhaps a battle between humans and machines is inevitable which is an idea that T3 initially floated.  You can postpone judgment day and you can split off into a million different alternate realities but the end result will always be the same.  Maybe that’s our dark fate?  I dunno.

The bottom line is the franchise is fated to poop out pure crap until it decides to say “fuck fate” and go in a totally new direction.  I still think it’s possible to do a cool Terminator war movie but that ship may have sailed.  Whatever, this last one’s a mess.