Like an addict who just can’t quite kick the habit, I keep coming back for more Terminator. Despite steadily diminishing returns, I’m there opening night for every new movie, and I watched every episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles live. I’ve noticed, however, the theaters seem emptier and emptier with each new movie. Not even the promise of Daenyrs Targaryen playing Sarah Connor packed in the crowds, not that I blame anyone. Genisys was just so bad.
The tide might be turning for the latest franchise installment, the Tim Miller-directed/James Cameron-produced Terminator: Dark Fate. The critical and fan reviews swear this is the best in the franchise since T2. Do I agree? I can’t totally answer that before I explain why T2 is my favorite movie – not just Terminator movie, but movie movie.
I Know Now Why You Cry
I used to feel embarrassed whenever anyone would give me a weird look after I told them Terminator 2: Judgement Day was my favorite film of all time. I knew what was coming next, and I didn’t know how to handle it. They were going to ask me why, out of every great film in history, I gravitated toward a James Cameron-Arnold Schwarzenegger-Linda Hamilton action flick as my favorite, and I was going to have to avoid making myself vulnerable. Why do I love Terminator 2? The first-of-its-kind special effects, amazing action, surprising comedy, Hamilton’s tour de force performance, Schwarzenegger’s lighter side, Robert Patrick’s icy stare, Brad Fiedel’s brilliant score, the time travel of it all, the horror imagery (hot take: the T-1000 is one of the best horror villains of all time), Guns N Roses, the VHS boxset which came with a making-of documentary that was my first real peek at how movies are made…all of that together makes for a special experience, I’d say.
But that wasn’t the whole truth. Why did I love Terminator 2? Because when I saw it I was roughly Edward Furlong’s age, I was a sad child of divorce, and the film’s story of a kid finding and ultimately losing a father figure hit me like a ton of bricks. No movie before or since has touched me in quite the same way. James Cameron trojan horsed a touching story into exactly the kind of sci-fi/action genre entertainment I craved, and it just caught me so off guard. At just 9-years-old, I wasn’t ready for what I just saw, and my entire geek fandom from that point forward was shaped by that experience.
There’s nothing to be embarrassed about that, I suppose. Children of divorce run the world now, and whether it’s E.T., Terminator 2, The Iron Giant, or even freakin’ Bumblebee genre pictures love to metaphorically give kid characters the friend/surrogate parent they so desperately need. It feels so basic, though, to say I’m a guy who missed his real dad and found comfort in a movie about a kid who never even met his own dad and got his own Terminator as a father. What’s so special about that in an age where saying you have “daddy issues” feels so cliche? Hasn’t a good chunk of film history boiled down to dudes working through the issues they had with their parents?
But at some point, you just have to learn to own your own baggage, and whatever we bring to movies change as we age. When I watch Terminator 2 now, I identify with Sarah Connor, not John, her overwhelming instinct to protect and her struggle to see anything other than the fight. She begins the film as a woman who believes with absolute certainty that we’re all doomed and she ends it looking out on a black road, tantalized that for the first time in a long time she actually has reason to hope again.
What a journey.
Terminator: Dark Fate Pulls an Alien 3
Turns out, however, her hope was short-lived. Spoiler, in literally the first scene of Terminator: Dark Fate we watch a digitally de-aged – or possibly entirely CGI – Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong act out a scene set in 1998, one year after the once-promised Judgement Day that obviously never came. Relaxing at a beach resort in an off-the-grid corner of the world, their troubles seem far behind them. John Connor is even using his terrible Spanish – remember “Asta la vista, baby”? – to chat up a young senorita. He never gets to finish his pick-up attempt. A Terminator – an unconvincing digital recreation of Terminator 2-era Schwarzenegger – waltz in and blows him away, leaving Sarah cradling his dead body and watching through tears as the Terminator walks into the distance, its mission completed.
Welcome to the new Terminator timeline: Sarah failed. John’s dead. Judgment day was merely delayed, not prevented. Skynet didn’t happen, but something else took its place because humanity never learns. The future still sends assassins to erase the past, and the Resistance still sends protectors back to offer their best “Come me with me if you want to live.” In Dark Fate, it’s something more like “come me with me if you don’t want to die in the next 30 seconds.” (It’s 2019, people. The stakes, they must be elevated.)
Oh, also – Terminator 3, Salvation, and Genisys? Never happened. Forget all about them. It shouldn’t be so hard. We did roughly the same thing when Jurassic World pretended nothing beyond Jurassic Park existed and the 2018 Halloween pretended the only other Halloween film that mattered was the one which came out in 1978. I call it the Selective Amnesia Blockbuster. Or The Mulligan Blockbuster. Don’t know. Still workshopping that.
The money people, however, call it good business. You prey on the nostalgia but jettison enough of the mythology to make a franchise accessible again to newbies. Strip away all of the pretzel-shaped narrative tricks the later creators twisted themselves into, and get back to the core appeal of the franchise.
The New Team
Terminator: Dark Fate wants to do that so very badly. After the shocking prologue with Sarah, we jump to the present day and watch a familiar pattern play out: naked people fall from blue energy spheres in the sky in separate parts of Mexico City. One of them, the genetically augmented human named Grace (Mackenzie Davis, a fave since Halt & Catch Fire), is good; the other, a new kind of Terminator called Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna, so memorable as Ghost Rider on Agents of SHIELD), is bad. They have to race to save a girl named Dani (Natalia Reyes). The good one gets there just before the bad. Fighting ensues and quickly morphs into a balls-to-the-wall action sequence, spilling out of a motor plant and onto a busy highway.
Dun dun dun dundun. Dun dun dun dundun.
Your pulse is racing, right? The movie sure hopes so, and I was certainly entertained. Mackenzie Davis is becoming a badass action star before our very eyes. After Deadpool Tim Miller knows his way around big setpieces. Reyes, in her few scenes, before the mayhem begins, lends her character an inviting mixture of sternness and warmth, acting as mother to her father and brother and standing up to the boss at the plant who is threatening to replace them with machines (Nose, you’ve been onned.) It’s hard to tell CGI Gabriel Luna from the real, but he’s always impressive to look at, single-minded in his goal and convincingly unstoppable.
What you’re never supposed to ask is why you should care about any of this. Who are these people? Where’s Arnold? Where’s Linda Hamilton? Do the characters and actors make the franchise? Or can the same formula be repurposed for an entirely new storyline and set of characters?
Worry not – at just the right climactic moment at the end of this neverending action opening, Sarah Connor waltzes in to save the day, temporarily at least. See, Rev-9 is basically a combo of the T-800 and T-1000, and he can self-replicate into two. Don’t ask for an explanation for how that works or how exactly it evolved from our modern tech; the movie never answers. It’s just cool to look at. You can’t stop him; you can only hope to slow him down.
Sarah, Dani, and Grace escape and Dark Fate turn into a bit of a road movie. The heroes search for shelter and answers and eventually discover their toughest challenge might not be outrunning Rev-9 but getting through border control at the US-Mexico border.
What’s It All About?
To this point, the movie is so overstuffed with incident it’s easy to lose track of what should really be the biggest engine behind the story: what is this about? What is this movie trying to say? What kind of journey are we taking with these characters? Or is this just a fun, thought-free action movie? James Cameron might have traded on some tried-and-true fear of the tech future tropes with his first two films but he did it in a way that made it feel new and completely vital to the Cold War era. Plus, he never lost sight of Sarah’s journey from waitress to soldier and from soldier to mother, finally a woman capable of hope.
Dark Fate – its script credited to David Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray but reportedly cooked up in a writer’s room and doctored by James Cameron himself – waves its hands at political commentary. There’s the border crossing sequence and the fact that the new savior of humanity is Mexican. Arnold eventually appears as (spoiler) “Carl,” an aged, benevolent T-800 – the same one which killed John but has evolved since then. He has a shack full of weapons like some doomsday prepper, saying, “I calculate a 70% probability of humanity turning back towards barbarism.” (I’ll refrain from truly getting into some of his other lines because, as the surprise comedy relief, has a lot of clunkers.) A hellish sci-fi future seems so quaint given the state of things now.
In the end, the film arrives at the most depressing conclusion of all (spoiler): that in our radical future, a woman saves the world. “You’re the new John Connor,” Sarah pretty much says to the hero in question. Twice. It’s not depressing because of the gender but because it takes a future sci-fi scenario for that to happen.
What’s truly frustrating is Dark Fate holds this back as its ace in the hole. When we’ve gone two entire acts without any actual confirmation about why exactly the Rev-9 wants Dani dead and already know one of Grace’s flashbacks to her childhood ended with no resolution, it’s not hard to figure out the big twist.
Yet, that’s the balance Dark Fate wants to walk. It wants to mirror Dani and Sarah so that Natalia Reyes can be the new blood and Linda Hamilton can look on with peak weary. The pattern just repeats itself. Sarah is stuck again having to learn how to trust a machine that killed a loved one. That hope-filled black road is forever out of reach these days. But if the future can be female and an old machine can still learn to be human, maybe there’s hope for us yet. Or something like that. Dark Fate kind of loses the plot the further it goes on, descending into an impossibly over-the-top, language-neutral fight on a crashing airplane that then turns in an underwater dual.
Linda Hamilton’s aged version of Sarah constantly looks as if she’s seen this all before, and the only reason to keep going is the memory of her son, whose face she heartbreakingly admits she can barely even remember anymore. Dani and Grace give her cause for hope.
That’s the same view long-term Terminator fans like myself will probably take on Dark Fate. We’ve seen this all before, and if you seriously want us to keep coming back you’d better give us something worthwhile. It doesn’t even have to be a movie as good as Terminator or T2. Just give us hope that the world can still produce a watchable Terminator movie. Thanks to the combined efforts of Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Gabriel Luna, Tim Miller, James Cameron, and countless CGI wizards, Dark Fate meets that low bar.
We Minored in Film 
Tsk tsk watching T2 at 9 years of age. Very naughty. It’s been over a week since I saw this movie now and other than the shock pre credits scene with John it is really forgettable. Nothing is new. The new terminator is interesting but hardly ground breaking like the t1000. All the story has done is retconned the original plot. Did a find1replace on the script where the word skynet is. This is too soon after genesis too so I just can’t take arnie seriously any more and think he harms the movie. I notice your review barely mentions him so that tells me a lot. He is too old and his back story is unconvincing. The action is good but it feels like the T2 story has been mutilated in favour of gender balancing of today. The new lead girl is very wooden and forgettable and all of this offers nothing new except an excuse to reset the franchise. They should have either continued the de aged linda and arnie and furlong story or left it alone. I like you feel duped for going to see this movie again hoping for a worthy sequel to T2. It is a good action movie but nothing more. Mackenzie Davis is good.
I’m totally cool with a 9 year old watching a violent R rated movie. Let’s not forget that the 90s was filled with kid’s toy ranges for R rated films such as RoboCop, Predator, Alien and of course, Rambo. Rambo also had a kid’s cartoon.
> The critical and fan reviews swear this is the best in the franchise since T2.
I think that as a species, we need to stop with reviews that start with the words “the best _____ film/album since _____”. It’s not helpful when the bar is so low. Some examples are:
“The best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back” whereas “Rogue One” has also been described as “if a high school football player had written it”. “The best U2 album since Actung Baby” or “The best U2 album since The Joshua Tree”.
The start of the film sounds like the start of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” but less dream sequence.
I miss the Sarah Connor chronicles. Instead of money going into those movies they should have spent it marketing a 3rd series. Showed so much premise. Heck even terminator salvation had potential to extend the series further. I think if they had kept the deaged precredits storyline and moulded it into the terminator 3 story that would have been a great end to a Trilogy.
I really enjoyed TSCC. I also will admit that it had some flaws such as the “Terminator of the week” episodes that permeated season 2.
I think it’s been out long enough to not bother with spoilers for anyone reading this. From the sound of things, they came up with interesting ideas that got used elsewhere. I liked that there was a renegade faction of AI that seemed to reluctant to join forces with humans.In at least two episodes, it answered the question of what do Terminators do when they have completed their primary mission. “Self Made Man” was a really good “Terminator of the week” episode.
There’s something nobody has mentioned yet. The ratio of good Terminator films to bad Terminator films is 2:4 now.The only science fiction franchise worse than that is live action Transformer films of 1 (Bumblebee):5. They really should give up on the film franchise. It’s just not a good investment.
They blew $185–196 million on Dark Fate and Wikipedia says they need to gross $480 million to break even. They are better off making a TV series and giving it a solid budget. $185 million / 12 episodes is roughly $15 million per episode. It’s also many hours of content that Netflix can have.
I liked the movie, I went on opening night and saw it in a packed theater with people of all ages. Some you can tell were fans from the very first one and some were young kids who’s parents had obviously showed them the older ones and stoked them up for this. I thought it was a typical action movie and yes, some of the plot fell flat and Arnold’s lines were cringe worthy at times, but it still had the heart that none of them after T2 did, which is what I liked.
I’ve said it before to some of my friends as well, they’re going to keep making Terminator movies until Arnold dies, to hell with the other actors. Arnold can be a 98 year old man in a wheelchair and they will still find a way to make a Terminator movie with him in it.
Also, I wanted to ask was it not Gabriel Luna who played the Rev-9 and Ghost Rider in Agents of SHIELD? Diego Boneta plays Dani’s brother?
I finally watched the film via BitTorrent. It wasn’t as bad as I expected. I kind of liked the terrible deadpan humour of “Carl”.
What I struggled with was how everybody coped with two common terrors like they were a walk in the park in broad daylight. Planes crashing. No worries – we have a Humvee on a parachute. Getting trapped in a vehicle underwater. No worries.
I don’t understand why Grace needed insulin. Insulin reduces blood glucose levels.
Overall, it was okay but meh. It felt uninspired like “The Force Awakens” and safe.
Yeah, Dark Fate gets the prize for “yay, we made something kind of competent,” which is not a prize any franchise should ever aspire to. If you reach a stage where your latest sequel gets praise for actually being semi-competent, you’ve gone too far off the rails. Such course-correcting sequels, however, can sometimes lead to genuinely amazing follow-up installments but only if the course-correcting installment made enough money to keep the trains rolling on time. No such luck for Dark Fate – $261m worldwide vs. $185m budget. Despite their best efforts, this franchise has finally derailed. Even Linda Hamilton has shifted from “I’m back” to “never call me again.”
As for Grace and insulin, you make a fair point, but I have to admit I don’t recall the film’s specifics well enough to know if they ever address the blood glucose thing or what their science babble explanation is for the insulin. I mostly remember Mackenzie Davis looking badass and in constant search of a movie more deserving of her performance.
Lastly, I’ll admit – I got a laugh or two out of Carl’s deadpan jokes.
Mackenzie Davis deserves better roles. She was great in “Halt and Catch Fire” and “Tully” then T:DF was her second major stinker in a row.
What’s happening with cinemas in the USA? I got an email from one of the major franchises in Australia who are offering drive-through pick up of cinema snacks for home consumption. They are good value for money unlike when you eat at a cinema but I’m not driving 20 minutes just to get cinema popcorn, choc tops and stuff I can get from a supermarket.
Like Emilia Clarke before her, I think Mackenzie Davis learned that the Terminator franchise is not a train you wanna jump on anymore. There’s such a legacy attached to Linda Hamilton and Arnold in those films. To walk in their footsteps is an honor and a challenge, but it’s damn hard to get right. Doesn’t seem like anyone else will even try that again for quite some time.
Sadly for Davis, though, Tully and DF aren’t her only recent bombs. She was also in that truly bizarre Turn of the Screw adaptation earlier this year – the one that is 3/4 of an ok movie before it seems to just end as if delivered to the cinemas in an unfinished form. Didn’t do well, but not shocking – it had been sitting on the shelf for a year.
Her next movie was supposed to be Jon Stewart’s second directorial effort, a political satire one-half Primary Colors, another half The Campaign. It’s called Irresistable, and based on the trailer Davis plays Chris Cooper’s daughter and a potential foil to Steve Carrel’s dastardly plans. It was originally due out at the end of May, but currently has no release date thanks to Covid-19.
Lesson might be: she should go back to TV. Cameron Howe is still one of my all-time favorite TV characters. I would love to see Davis maybe headline a show of her own the way that Lee Pace was initially the headliner of Halt & Catch Fire.
As for the theaters in the States, they’re almost entirely closed across the country. Drive-Ins are thriving, but only in those areas where they’ve been allowed to remain open. (The drive-in near me, for example, was deemed non-essential and forced to close.) AMC, the country’s largest exhibitor, is teetering toward bankruptcy and looking toward its parent company in China for a potential bailout. Other chains are taking out meaty debt financing packages to stay afloat, but their stock prices have plummeted either way. Furloughs, in some areas, have already turned into layoffs.
What you’re describing has a vague familiarity to it. Most restaurants over here are trying the same thing, shifting toward resource distribution as a way to make up the shortfall they’re experiencing from only being allowed to serve drive-thru and curbside pickup. So, if you want several pounds of beef you can forego the grocery store and head to any number of restaurants. That practice, however, has not transferred to movie theaters, mostly because for that to work those theaters would need skeleton crews to still be reporting for work. No dice. Its possible some of the non-chain theaters in those few states that have yet to issue stay-at-home orders are pursuing the “we can sell you a shit-ton of popcorn!” option, but not on a scale that I’ve seen any reporting about it yet.
The Turning of the Shrew was the other flop I was thinking of. I liked “Tully” but didn’t know it flopped. I can imagine it flopping due to it being kind of aimed at a tight demographic.
She’s scheduled to star in an adaptation of a novel about a flu pandemic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven_(miniseries)
The Sarah Connor role is hard to fulfill. I still remember how much criticism Lena Headey took just because she wasn’t as buffed up as Hamilton. I’m still completely fond of TSCC and binge-watched it with a close friend.
Off the top of my head, I struggle to think of many successful replacement of an actor for an iconic human live action role. Tom Hardy in “Mad Max: Fury Road” succeeded. Alden Ehrenreich was okay as Han Solo. Some of the actors who’ve played Batman were excellent or grew into fan popularity – remember how everyone thought Michael Keaton would be terrible?
Over here, our restaurants and fast food places are still open but only for take out.They still cook the food.
Yeah, I remember reading about Station Eleven when she was announced as part of the cast. The whole “let’s re-watch The Stand and every other movie about pandemics” thing – I’m not there yet. So, my current interest in Station Eleven is somewhat muted, but I wish her nothing but good things.
As for the successful replacement of actors – the best ratio is over in the James Bond and Doctor Who franchises. People have differing opinions on the Bonds from Connery to Craig, but there are surprisingly few who mount impassioned screeds about how much they hate Dalton or Lazenby or whoever. It’s usually more “I like Dalton” or “I like Brosnan” but “I just wish his Bond films had better scripts.” Doctor Who is similarly treated as a choice between preferring certain eras over another but ultimately still liking the show and character. (The current Doctor and version of the show, however, has been divisive in ways I’ve never seen before from Doctor Who.)
But, yes, just as some Bond fans hated the idea of the blonde guy from Road to Perdition playing Bond so too did comic book fans despise the notion of Michael Keaton as Batman so much that they launched a letter-writing campaign to remove him from the film. Sometimes, the fan backlash is ultimately born out as prescient – or more like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of the time, we’re just shouting over nothing and the filmmakers prove us wrong.
Lena Headey got so much heat on Sarah Connor Chronicles mostly because she was the first – the George Lazenby of Connor actresses. She was the first who had to follow Linda Hamilton’s iconic T2 performance, and she was always going to be judged the harshest. By the time Emilia Clarke came around, those who still cared enough about Terminator to complain were in the vocal minority, and then she turned out to be entirely wrong for the role, far inferior to Headey’s version from a decade earlier.