Terminator Dark Fate - Its Terrible

[Music] the unknown future rolls towards us I face it for the first time with a sense of hope well I don't you'd feel this way if you knew what was coming 28 years later Sarah but now I do and that's pretty much why I drink so many a dark fate was pretty much exactly what I expected from the hilariously desperate trailers a dull disrespectful lackluster creatively bankrupt and visually unimpressive attempt to simultaneously milk the classic movies for a cheap nostalgia box while also shittin all over them and using them as a springboard to launch a new reinvigorated franchise with a cast of younger actors what does this remind me of so needless to say I'm gonna spoil the [ __ ] of this movie so if you don't want to know what happens in it you're probably better off watching a different review there's a lot to cover here so grab yourself a bottle of whiskey and [ __ ] the glasses because we're going hardcore with this one ready good let's drink so dark fate kicks off in 1998 where a young Sarah Connor is chilling on a beach with her son John Liv stop Judgment Day destroyed Skynet and everything is looking pretty good and hats off to the CGI Department on this one because the da-jin process and these actors is absolutely flawless also a can of reminded me that Linda Hamilton was actually pretty hot back in the day might have to do some more research on this one gentlemen but then the t800 shows up and murders John and [ __ ] off just let that sink in for a moment John Connor the most important man in the history of humanity the savior of the human race the one character whose survival has been at the center of everything that's happened up to this point gets wiped out without a single line of dialogue in the equivalent of a pre credits scene who in their right mind thought this was a good idea what's the way to shits all over the events and sacrifices and triumphs of termini or to basically undoing everything that happened in it if this doesn't tell you the degree of respect this movie has for the rest of the franchise then I don't know what will like how is it even possible for Morty eight hundreds to show up from a future where Skynet no longer exists why even use an obsolete t800 when a liquid Terminator with a far more likely chance to succeed now who even cares anyway it's time for the real plot to get going so we flash-forward to present-day Mexico no this being another formulaic Terminator movie we obviously need to be introduced to our two competing warriors from the future the first one to show up is androgynous thing who falls from a bridge and almost gets arrested by local cops but then she beats the [ __ ] out of them because she's some kind of super enhanced machine hybrid and then steals a man's clothes and off she goes because she's really tall like a man I guess then the Apple Genius drops in and he's a liquid Terminator who can mimic anything or anyone he touches because you know what else do we really have at this point terminators have basically reached an evolutionary dead end in the second movie then last of all we get to meet the character at the heart of this entire story the generic teenaged girl generic teenage girl lives with her dad and brother and they both work at a local car factory where humans are gradually being phased out in favor of automated labor nice little touch even if her is about 20 years out of date so the Apple Genius an androgynous thing track her down there and they arrive just in time for androgynous thing to save her then there's a car chase with a bit of back and forth between the two sides including androgynous thing during her ridiculous leap onto the rear deck of their truck but hey at least you can recut this into a bangin techno track and make it look like she's [ __ ] lava Nets anyway their vehicle gets disabled on a bridge and generic teenage girls brother gets killed and the Apple Genius separates his liquid outer coating from the metal skeleton beneath to make two of them things are looking bad because both Apple geniuses are closing in on the two girls but then a really old version of Sarah Connor magically shows up and semper airily disables the Apple geniuses with a bazooka then she delivers the most bored sounding line I think I've ever heard I'll be back really this is what you went with guys you couldn't have got a better takeover than that so old Sarah Connor goes down to investigate the disabled Apple Genius allow an androgynous thing and generic teenage girl to steal a car and she's so pissed about this as if you tall we didn't see it coming like what did you expect these two desperate fugitives to do Sarah just hang around and assume you were on their side the androgynous thing is in a bad way because it turns out being a human machine hybrid isn't all that fun she can fight fast and hard but only for a limited time before she crashes so she needs drugs and supplies to stabilize herself did you really think this was the best person to send back in time for a mission like this future people isn't a person with a constant drug dependency inherently vulnerable oh well as it turns out she passes out anyway then Sarah Connor tracks them down and ticks them away so she can interrogate androgenous thing but it doesn't go too well an androgynous thing gets the upper hand and after a bit of female dick waving to establish who's the stronger strong female character we finally get some kind of explanation so it turns out androgynous thing is from a new future created as a result of the events of Terminator 2 because Cyberdyne was destroyed Skynet never came into being in her reality an entirely different AI called Legion was created instead and this entirely different AI caused an entirely different Judgment Day and an entirely different war between humans and machines which gave birth to an entirely different human resistance movement Oh sumit lee this means an entirely different sermon e'er has been sent back in time to kill an entirely different savior of humanity [ __ ] right off film you're literally recycling the exact same story we've had in every Germany or movie since the first [ __ ] one no you've got the audacity it's a claim this is different just because it doesn't revolve around Skynet and John Connor the equation here is exactly the same as before all you've done is change some of the values yeah dicks anyway old Sarah Connor explains that after her son got killed she started getting anonymous text messages giving her a time in a location and each time she got there a terminator would pop up and she'd destroy it how exactly does a single human being to take out terminators they have always required the combined efforts of multiple people to destroy or even damage in the past don't know how did Sarah Connor not to be on that bridge at that time to save generic teenage girl when the Apple Genius arrived in a totally different Simon location don't know were these similar sent by Skynet or Legion if they were sent by Skynet how is that even possible when that future no longer exists and if they were sent by Legion how was she never encountered an apple genius before don't know why do they only send one sermon at a time when the kids just as easily swarmed the place with hundreds of them don't know anyway androgynous thing magically tracks the source of the text which turns out to be from Texas so they sneak over the border but then they get caught by customs agents and this whole segment just feels like wheelspin and to be honest but eventually they escaped and reached Sara's mysterious contact and that's when old Arnold makes his appearance see it says oh he's the sink Terminator who killed John 20 years ago but he went rogue after completing his mission and since then he's become self-aware and it created a whole life for himself he's got a house a wife an adopted son even a dog and he goes by the name Carl have you ever wondered what a Terminator would do with itself if actually completed its mission and had no one left to kill ever wondered how or if it could somehow integrate into human Society how would it deal with the mundane reality of day-to-day human existence what would it do as a day job could it form friendships a personality hobbies could it love no neither of I because that's [ __ ] stupid it's goofy sitcom material at best not the kind of thing you'd put in a supposedly serious action movie but you'd never guess this movie was made by the director of Deadpool would you terminators aren't supposed to live and work amongst humanity yeah they can look possibly human and handle basic interaction to get information they need but that's about as far as it can ever go the t800 recognized this at the end of Terminator 2 when it said this I know know why you cry but it's something I can never do it was the movies way of telling us that however much the Terminator might learn and understand the BRIT human behavior it could never actually be human itself instead it chose to end its life knowing its mission was complete and its purpose fulfilled but now here we are cracking jokes and trying to carry on a story that should have ended 28 years ago god I hate movies today so anyway old Arnold reveals that he was the one given Sarah the locations of the terminators to kill because he figured it would give her a life purpose again instead of you know ending it in violent fashion I guess we're not meant to think too much about how he knew where they or the Apple geniuses would be especially since he came from an entirely different [ __ ] time line so old Arnold agrees to help them and generic teenage girl decides to put on her big-girl pants and so she's done running she's gonna stand and fight I'm done running I'm gonna stand and fight me and it made me physically squirmin merci because it's like watching a preschool or delivering the Gettysburg Address they figure out that they can use an EMP weapon to fry the Apple Genius and disable it permanently so they go to a military base where some random dude meets with Sirit and hands it over to them who exactly is this guy how does he know sirrah why is he willing to hand over extremely dangerous military-grade weapons like this to a group of people who are clearly extremely shady don't know anyway the Apple Genius shows up and chases the monster a nearby plane and they temporarily escape but the EMP device gets destroyed in the process and eventually he catches up to them and causes their plane to crash near a dam so the final battle takes place in the turbine hall of the dam Arnold and the androgynous thing go at it and eventually they force it into one of the turbine units and it blows up and severely damages all three of them I don't know why this particular thing damages the Apple Genius so badly because he's been shown to be basically indestructible up to this point but our whatever anyway the Apple Genius just keeps coming so androgynous thing tells generic teenage girl to remove the power unit from her body because they'll fry the Apple Genius just like the EMP device well that was lucky this is where generic teenage girl gets her big hero moments as the ruined and smoldering remains of the Apple Genius staggers towards her she blasts it with a shotgun at point-blank range to stagger it then she hits it with a club to knock it down and she's about to shove the power source into its mouth but then it gets the upper hand and it's about to kill her in return when Arnold comes back to life and finishes it off killing both of them in the process and the movie ends with generic teenage girl going to start a new life with old Sarah Connor preparing for the war to come and teasing a sequel that will probably never get made and that's it that's the plot for terminator Dark Fae God's sake there are so many things wrong with this movie that I could probably create a long monster video picking them apart scene by scene but I'm too drunk and I'm too lazy for that so let's just keep this concise allow me to begin with the characters this movie is the first time Linda Hamilton's played Sarah Connor in almost three decades and if you're a big fan of the classic Terminator movies then I imagine this would be pretty exciting for you the problem is that she doesn't really do anything of significance in the whole movie yes she has a few heroic moments where she shoots guns in the chaotic action scenes but none of it really amounts to anything plot wise compared to that so many errors and machine hybrids duking it out she looks weak and ineffective she feels like a fifth wheel most of the time just kind of there in the background making snarky remarks and looking either pissed off or confused the only real character arc she has is with Arnold over the death of John but even that doesn't really go anywhere speaking of Arnold I suspected from the trailers that he wouldn't play a big part in this film and well I was right to be honest he's barely even recognizable as his most iconic role anymore so maybe it's for the best he's 72 years old he's had multiple open-heart surgeries and as a result he looks slow and tired and overweight it's made even worse by the script making him into some kind of quasi human and taken full advantage of his ability to make deadpan jokes and it just feels cheap and disrespectful when he sacrificed himself at the end I felt almost nothing because Arnold's died in these movies more times than Sean Bean the Terminator used to be cool and menacing as a character but now he just seems like kind of a bad joke that was included in this movie because well it's a terminator film and it would just feel weird without him and it's assumed these two veteran actors are so underused because both of them have still got decent charisma and screen presence but do you know who doesn't and by danny ramos is effectively the core of the story the character around which the fate of humanity revolves but we barely learned anything about her we get no real insight into her personality how she feels about any of this where our motivations or ambitions are she reacts to things and she allows herself to be led from place to place and that's pretty much it and I'll just say it the actress playing her was horribly miscast in this role Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1 was able to effectively grow and develop over the course of the movie turning from a frightened and confused civilian into a tough defiant an independent woman the mother of the future in deeds and you could believe it because she really sold it to you and that's even before she transformed into a true badass in so many or two but generic teenage girl is well just a generic teenage girl she could be played by pretty much anyone she can't act she can't fight she can't hold weapons properly she doesn't command the screen in any way and she doesn't inspire anything except mild amusement a flash forward to her as an ass-kicking leader of the human resistance is utterly laughable because she simply isn't believable in the slightest I didn't care about her because neither the script nor the actress made me care the funny thing is androgynous thing actually proved to be less of a disaster than I expected there's certainly no Captain Marvel style smugness about her and I liked the fact that she's fast and powerful but only in short bursts the enhancements that allow her to fight so well are also slowly killing her but just like with generic teenage girl we're never given much insight into who she is or how she thinks living with a death sentence like this would probably weigh heavily on most people but she doesn't seem to care likewise coming from a nightmarish future of endless warfare to the relative peace and prosperity of our time would probably inspire shock sadness and longing but again there's nothing from her she just arrives here and gets on with her mission like nothing happens again I suspect the casting was miles off on this one a genuine like soft intense and physically imposing actress could probably have done some than with this character but Mackenzie Davis spends most of this movie with the kind of blank Katy Perry look about her that makes supposedly dramatic scenes come across as completely laughable I suspect she was chosen because she's really tall and she looks kind of androgynous but those things do not an action hero make remember fast quest from aliens she wasn't all that big and she was certainly still recognizably female but she was believable as a tough-as-nails marine because the actress sold the performance davis just looks gangly an awkward most of the time she tears over Hamilton and teenage girl and visually it looks kind of stupid the feeling I get here is that whether through necessity or design there's just too many characters and the strip doesn't really know what to do with them all the result being that the central story feels vague and unfocused a script that just centered around androgynous thing and generic teenage girl or Sarah and Arnold would have been much tighter and more effective in my opinion but this is kind of what happens when you try to do too much with too little trying to milk the past and set up the future at the same time I looked up the credits on this film and there's no less than five different people responsible for the story and it shows I said in my trailer review that the Apple genius was an unworthy adversary for our heroes understand by that haven't seen the movie he's yet another shape-shifting terminator that can impersonate different people although weirdly he almost never uses this ability to copy one of the main characters when it would clearly benefit him at one point he's even shown being able to manifest a gun in his hand but he never does it apart from that one same and it made me question why I also have to question why they made him so much more human with his behavior Robert Patrick's t1000 was memorable because there was a creepy uncanny manner about him from his weird run to the way he never blinked to the way he'd tilt his head slightly when he'd speared someone with his hand it's like he was kind of intrigued by the concept of pain and suffering and he wanted to explore it more the end result was a menacing powerful and frightening antagonist a machine that was cold and ruthless but with the vague sense that there was something even worse lurking behind it but the Apple Genius just bland and generic I didn't feel intimidated by him in the slightest and I certainly didn't care what happened to him I also didn't care much for the message of this film which struck me as kind of cold and self-absorbed previous Terminator movies have emphasized the strength of firmly and romantic bonds between the main characters the things that make us so recognizably human compared to the cold calculating logic of the machines they were up against like the growing love between Sarah and Kyle Reese in Germany are one Sara's maternal protectiveness of her son and t2 the romance between John and Kay in t3 and salvation and even the revised love of Caillou and Sarah and Genesis love loyalty sacrifice and the hope and protection of the next generation these are all things that speak to universal human experiences it's inspiring and it helps to remind us that there are still noble qualities in mankind display our faults and weaknesses no what do we get generic teenage girl and the revelation that she isn't the mother of the human resistance leader she is the human resistance leader keep that message in mind protecting and raising the next generation doesn't matter you're all that matters right here right now never has a movie more clearly highlighted the problem with our current culture you know it's funny because the overriding debate on dark fate isn't whether it's actually a good movie it's just whether it's better or worse than Genesis to this I would say yes and no it doesn't shamelessly pilfer and destroy the series timeline to the same extent that Genesis did and the action scenes feel more competently staged but neither does it break new ground or do anything remotely creative or different and as we learn from ceremony or three humor and ceremony or movies are two things that really shouldn't mix talk to the hand ultimately dark fate is exactly what I predicted a retread of the same story we've always had replicating the same ideas and dealing with the same themes that the Terminator franchise has already covered for a more competently and effectively and doing it all with the very obvious intent of kicking off a new trilogy that will almost certainly never happen and to be honest I'm totally fine with that this is a story that's already been told and told well and now it needs to end speaking of endings normally I'd wrap up this review by telling you to Gore we know but in this case I'm gonna harken back to a movie that's actually Goods unless Sarah Connor do the honors for me

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 2,539,665

Keywords: Sarah Connor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Grace, Linda Hamilton, movie review, Terminator

Id: cmkF5a1ysYM

Length: 21min 20sec (1280 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019

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[u/Space-Jawa]

No Fate But What We Make.

-- Judgement Day

Nope. Earth is doomed no matter what.

-- Every Terminator movie since

[u/Wiffernubbin]

Im posting because Terminator, like other franchises like Alien, Star Wars and Jurassic Park just got another seboot that didnt need to exist and this review seems to nail why.

[u/Thrug]

Drinker is the best!

That comment though:

Captain Marvel: I'm the dullest female action hero of 2019.

LGBT-1000: Hold my tampons.

[u/forthewatch39]

I have to take back my ST needs to pull a Dark Fate comments. I still believe in the concept of wiping the slate clean of the sequels and starting over from a certain point, but I didn’t expect Terminator to do it so haphazardly, especially since Cameron was back on board.

[u/TheArchdude]

This movie looked like warm dog vomit from the first trailer.

[u/AlteredMiles]

Love me some Critical Drinker