Terminator Dark Fate Was An Absolute Disaster

it seems like an unspoken rule at this point that whenever the film industry decides to dig up and repackage previous success the end result will almost always be a horrible train wreck once great franchises like star wars jurassic park alien predator and many more have all been given what i call the lewis treatment you know because they've all had something cold and calculating assume their identity and stab them in the [ __ ] eye ironically one of the latest casualties of this treatment is none other than the terminator franchise itself with the release of terminator dark fate a film that was in theory attempting to resuscitate the long dead franchise but only managed to further desecrate its grave of course getting in another lackluster terminator film wasn't really all that surprising over the years we've seen every type of continuation this franchise could have paint by numbers retread a cheesy tv show a boring prequel and a crazy alternate timeline [ __ ] [Music] despite all of this from the beginning we were promised that dark fate would break this streak continuing the story directly after terminator 2 having james cameron creatively involved seemingly for real this time and having linda hamilton return created a sense that they were really gonna try to make a good film but unfortunately it was a disaster so as a huge terminator fan i felt compelled to weigh in on this giant turd and air my grievances without further ado let's begin so the film opens up with a little member berry of sarah's mental breakdown from t2 of course this was a great scene in that film because it set the stage for sarah's character arc and established the stakes however here it's used as little more than a nod to the audience that tries to convince them that dark fate will be of similar quality to terminator 2 and given what's about to unfold that couldn't be any more [ __ ] hilarious anyway this desperate nostalgia baiting continues into the next scene where we get a very familiar look at the future war with narration from none other than sarah connor now putting aside that these special effects somehow don't look nearly as good as effects from almost 30 years ago a weird vibe is given off in these opening lines one that seems to loom large over this entire film and that vibe is that sarah connor was the only character that mattered or did anything in the terminator franchise i'll be back says that this was a future without hope and sure it looks like a [ __ ] nightmare but john connor was the hope of this future and he actually led humanity to defeat the machines that victory is why terminators travel back in time in the first place we'd won taking out connor then would make no difference skynet had to wipe out his entire existence i don't know it just seems like an odd statement for her to make when most of her life has been spent preparing her son to specifically play that role to add even further insult to injury though she says other weird resentful [ __ ] later too the future wants you dead for the same reason it wanted me dead god i'm nothing i'm nobody well you're not the threat it's your womb geez why does sarah seem to have so much bitterness towards jon and why does she seem almost jealous of how important he was her weird self-centered vibe even spills over into her explanation of how judgment day was prevented that future never happened because i stopped it okay so dissing jon is one thing but why is sarah also taking all the credit for preventing judgement day sure i guess later she says we once when explaining what happened but overall she carries herself in this movie as if it was all her the last i checked this was a group effort of four characters who all played a role in averting this catastrophe sarah definitely had the greatest drive to prevent the future but she wouldn't have succeeded without the help of the other characters poor miles dyson left his family in the middle of the night to destroy his life's work for the greater good and he ended up sacrificing himself in the process the reprogrammed t-800 saved both sarah and jon from death several times in addition to sacrificing itself to prevent that future and adult jon kind of inspired this whole idea with his message to sarah saying the future is not set now don't get me wrong sarah was also essential to the cause and that she sacrificed years of her life to become as strong as she could be so much so that the final defeat of the t-1000 and by extension skynet itself was a one-two punch from both her and the t-800 [Music] but it just seems kind of selfish of sarah that she would ignore the involvement of the other characters that helped achieve this victory although as we're about to find out it really wasn't much of a victory at all so after the future war scene we then cut to sarah and john on a beach in guatemala in 1998. this year is important as it shows that they did actually stop judgment day through their actions in terminator 2. although unfortunately the sense of accomplishment is cut short when a t-800 shows up out of nowhere and guns down jon right before sarah's eyes no [ __ ] the character that the entire franchise as centered around is killed in the first five minutes in a very nonchalant way now the very fact that this happens leaves the viewer with a ton of questions and the answers to these questions are ridiculous to non-existent let's start with the thing that probably popped into your head when this travesty first occurred what the [ __ ] is going on where did this t800 come from if judgment day was prevented well according to dark fate it wasn't just two terminators that were sent back to eliminate jon it was a whole bunch of them and even though the future they came from never happens i guess they just keep arriving from it every two years or so regardless what the entire premise of terminator rests on the basic concept of cause and effect yeah sure the whole john connor skynet causality loop thing kinda makes things weird in the originals but overall the logic was pretty straightforward one thing causes another to happen although i'm afraid what's going on here seems to drop that logic altogether this terminator showing up is an effect with no cause the only way it would make any sense is if they were doing some multiverse thing like that other movie but they never talk about it so i don't know i mean it's obvious we're not dealing with a postponed version of this future like in terminator 3 in fact once dark fate's plot gets going there's a whole different future this time that's completely unrelated to skynet and john connor so what the [ __ ] even if you ignore all that though strap on the feed bag and eat the [ __ ] this film is trying to feed you it's hot steamy in your face right now i'm afraid that more unanswered questions arise questions like why wasn't the resistance aware of all these other terminators why didn't they send any protection back for jon like they did before why did skynet space these terminators out across several years when they could have just sent like six to one time boy this really doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it anyway as if that technical mind [ __ ] wasn't bad enough now the audience has to contend with the actual reality of john connor's death having jon killed in this way just comes across as maliciously disrespectful to terminator 1 and 2 mainly because it's completely unnecessary as i said earlier it has nothing to do with the actual plot of dark fate in any way the new future would still happen and the new terminator would still be hunting its new target regardless of jon dying in fact this film is two aarp members shy of just being a complete reboot anyway so what does jon's death actually accomplish in dark fate's narrative well it pretends to give both sarah and carl some character motivation but in one case that's redundant and in the other case it makes no [ __ ] sense at all sarah wouldn't need additional motivation to help the new characters because of what we've come to understand about her from previous films the knowledge of judgement day drove her nearly to the point of insanity her nightmares about men women and children being vaporized by nuclear fire drove her to want to prevent that future at almost any cost even if it meant killing an innocent man in front of his family now imagine after preventing this future and saving billions of lives sarah is told years later that a near identical future will unfold i don't know about you but i think she'd be compelled to help just on that alone even if jon was alive and well the sad part is that they pretty much ignore this aspect of her character altogether when she's told about the new future her reaction is those [ __ ] never learn when really it should have been more like this you know how much i sacrifice as for carl a terminator feeling remorse after completing its mission is just ridiculous we're told that after killing jon carl met some lady who was being abused by her husband and began to take care of her and her son why what possible reason would this machine have for helping this woman unless it already had a little voice in its head saying that this was the right thing to do i just can't picture a terminator giving a [ __ ] about some human injustice even if this lady walked up to it and begged it for help it likely would have just said [ __ ] you [ __ ] remember that this sudden sense of morality is what's used as justification for carl feeling sorry for sarah and helping out in this story now the question of what a terminator would do after completing its mission is interesting for a minute i guess but given what we know about them we can infer that it probably wouldn't start aimlessly walking around the human population searching for meaning in fact i find it hard to believe that it didn't think anything was off about its surroundings while apparently doing just that you know like noticing the fact that it was 1998 and judgment day clearly didn't happen yet wouldn't it have a secondary objective to make sure skynet gets created or at least speed that process along and my mission was completed there were no further orders so for 20 years i kept learning how to become a human oh how convenient regardless wouldn't it be far more likely that after completing its mission it would just find a secluded spot to wait for further orders until skynet came online no it's just gonna play family man and start a drapery business then there was this one customer that came to me he wanted to have solid colored drapes in a little girl's room i said don't do it either way having this be the reason carl is a good guy is just nonsensical and in no way justifies jon's death and before you say anything yes i know that the t800 grew to care for john in whatever way it could by the end of terminator 2 but there is a considerable difference the terminator in that film started out as little more than a toaster with a set objective to protect john connor at any cost although through being duty-bound to spend time with jon it learned from him and began to interpret its own mission in a broader context instead of merely protecting jon physically it chose to protect john's future at the cost of itself in other words that terminator only learned and grew as a character because the nature of its mission forced it to spend a lot of time around a person who was constantly teaching it new ways to look at things and that's just using the logic established in the theatrical cut of t2 if you consider the special edition version canon where that learning capability needed to be switched on it only strengthens my point either way carl would have no reason to communicate with anyone other than obtaining basic information on where to find jon so his entire character motivation is [ __ ] what makes jon's death even more infuriating and unnecessary though is that the new savior character danny serves the same function that jon would have in a plot that is essentially a copy-paste job of the first two films now to be fair maybe the idea here was that they thought it would be too big of a coincidence for yet another apocalyptic future to revolve around this same guy but they didn't have to kill him they could have just made him a supporting character i mean [ __ ] i know edward furlong doesn't exactly look too great these days but for [ __ ] sake just cast someone who looks like this guy then and be done with it if they played their cards right they could have had the best of both worlds where jon played a significant role in the story and a new savior character would eventually be introduced at the same time maybe an adult john could have related to and mentored this young woman who's told that the fate of humanity will now be on her shoulders maybe jon could have contributed to the action scenes by being the master strategist that he was once meant to be and just maybe instead of being unceremoniously killed off he could have echoed what he learned from his father figure and sacrificed himself for dany in some satisfying way case in point the first five minutes of this movie absolutely destroys everything from terminator 1 and 2 without a second thought whether it's ignoring solid character progression killing off characters like inconvenient loose ends or breaking the fundamental rules that everything else is built upon i don't think i've ever seen a film do so much damage so quickly seriously this [ __ ] would probably make ryan johnson blush [Laughter] the best part is that after such a disastrous opening dark fate actually expects you to take everything seriously again when the new characters get involved you know like you didn't just watch two great movies get flushed down the bowl on the bright side at least there's not a horrible cringe-worthy line to book in the scene i saved three billion lives but i couldn't save my son a machine took him from me and i am terminated the studios and everything said well wow we can make a lot of money and of course the only way you could really do that is not take chances only do something that's proven so after needlessly destroying the story and characters of the original films the new story begins and as we've come to expect from movies like this nothing's changed really i mean everything's changed but nothing's changed it's 22 years later and very familiar things start to happen there's a new terminator a new protector a new target new future war and so many other familiar details and scenarios that it kind of makes your head spin but this movie isn't bad just because it copies what came before it's bad because it doesn't seem to understand the delicate balance that made those things work to begin with to start dark fate's tone is just all wrong for a terminator film not only are there misplaced attempts at humor but dark fate is sorely lacking the gravitas and atmosphere of the first two films one of the most effective things about the originals is that they evoke certain feelings from the audience through a combination of compelling performances taking the subject matter dead seriously and having a mechanical sometimes haunting musical score terminator 1 and 2 felt intense sad and visceral everything was played completely straight and from a narrative perspective that made it easier to get invested in what was going on however when it comes to dark fate it doesn't seem to evoke any feelings at all other than general aggravation and disgust the performances border between awkward and terrible are we supposed to lie down and die because some machine decided it is that our fate well [ __ ] fate that thing killed john the subject matter is not taken seriously at all those [ __ ] never learn and the score either doesn't leave a lasting impression or is barely audible if you don't believe me on that one this is what a chase scene sounded like in terminator 2. and this is what a very similar chase scene sounds like in dark fate no contest no contest even if you disregard the general watering down of the tone though and try to simply enjoy this for the action it's still kind of incompetent characters bounce around like rubber everything is constantly exploding and it all just doesn't feel real let's just say it's one thing to make a helicopter crash into the back of a swap van by suddenly hitting the brakes and quite another to have your bad guy do a front flip out of a crashing helicopter and land onto a plane or have your protagonist one of which is an elderly woman roll down a 500 foot dam in a humvee and be perfectly fine we're falling out of a what into a what and then what stuff like this is just completely ridiculous to me and for all the money time and effort it probably took to make i think it's hilarious that it still doesn't hold a candle to the simple car chases and shootouts of the originals although in addition to failing in all of these categories dark faint has something else in common with a lot of these soft reboots the way it is written it is awful unsurprisingly dark fate is a train wreck in the writing department critical information about the plot and characters aren't explained the things that are explained generally don't make any sense and of course there are a ton of coincidences and convenient moments to keep everything moving along honestly there are so many problems both large and small that addressing them all will probably take some time so let's put on the rubber gloves and get digging so the new protector grace is introduced as yet another character in this franchise who arrives right in the middle of a busy highway geez what the [ __ ] are they trying to get these people killed [Applause] we'll come next time as if that tired idea wasn't bad enough she also falls from like 30 feet in the air and has a pretty rough landing on the way down don't worry though because as luck would have it grace is a human machine hybrid who has enhanced speed strength and reflexes these abilities allow her to go toe-to-toe with a terminator but using all of that energy makes her go comatose after 5 or 10 minutes and the only way she can recover is to take copious amounts of prescription drugs are you serious first of all how is grace expected to keep anyone safe with such a blatant disadvantage previous protectors like kyle reese were outmatched sure but at least he could run effectively grace is passing out at the wheel after just a few minutes of fighting in fact if sarah hadn't showed up and injected grace with just the right cocktail of drugs she likely would have croaked pretty early on how did you know how much of each to use it down [ __ ] if this is the best the humans in the future can do this mission is [ __ ] speaking of the future in a nuclear hellscape how do humans even have the capability to perform such advanced surgeries and have access to enough drugs to keep these hybrid soldiers on the field it seems like simply reprogramming a terminator would be a far more sustainable option the only logic the film gives for this limitation is that you either kill a terminator in the first five minutes or you don't kill it at all but this really doesn't make any sense either terminators have been shown to be pretty damn indestructible in all their incarnations so taking one out quickly doesn't seem all that likely it makes even less sense when you consider that in the future there are more often than not multiple terminators attacking at once so even if you destroyed one in under five minutes there would be several more coming to attack your drowsy ass now with how silly all this is it's actually quite comical to see the writers have to bend over backwards to keep grace supplied with drugs throughout the film my favorite is when carl flies around in zero g gets into a massive plane crash fights the rev9 underwater and slides down a 500 foot dam but then pulls a syringe out of his back pocket and says left is in the plane you this whole concept is just so stupid and for the life of me i don't know why anyone thought it was a good idea but if it wasn't in the film then we wouldn't have great lines like this [Music] continuing the trend of stupidity is the new terminator rev9 this character is what happens when you don't know how to make an intimidating bad guy so you just make them over the top to compensate rev9 is essentially the mashing together of the t-1000 and the t-800 kind of similar to what we got in terminator 3. however the big gimmick here is that it's able to separate itself into two independent machines it also has the ability to hack into the internet control drones and generally act more human now with all these tools at its disposal you would think that this would be the most terrifying terminator yet but i'm afraid you'd be wrong you see the real problem with the rev9 is that even though it has all these fantastic abilities when it really counts it doesn't utilize them well and still does really dumb [ __ ] for example towards the beginning the rev9 takes the shape of danny's father and instead of walking up to dany and killing her up close you know the thing that would guarantee success it points a gun at her from like 10 feet away and is conveniently intercepted by grace before it can shoot why did it need to assume the identity of the father if it didn't use that advantage whatsoever it's not like it needed to look like him to gain entry to the factory danny works at i mean [ __ ] grace just steals some random guard's uniform and gets in just fine anyway the whole point of looking like your target's loved one is that you can get closer to them than you would be able to normally otherwise you might as well just shoot at them from a distance like a total [ __ ] although taking what this thing can actually do into account why didn't it just have the skeleton hide up in the ceiling somewhere with a long-range weapon and use the father's form as a distraction that way even if grace intercepted the liquid part the skeleton could still get the job done the level of stupidity on display here is just baffling and it's even more hilarious that they repeated a well-known error from another bad sequel and actually made it worse somehow anyway throughout the film i guess the rev9 uses its abilities during the chase scenes to some decent effect but whenever the action gets more close quarters and serious or something of consequence can actually happen the same type of idiocy returns one of the most laughable moments is during the ending when carl and grace are trying to push the rev9 into the damn generator the liquid part could easily get out of this and go after dany but doesn't because it's the finale at that point and we have to get rid of the bad guy if you're gonna make a villain with these abilities then you need to be extra clever when you create scenes with them in order to maximize the tension otherwise you're just bending your own rules when they're inconvenient and forcing events to play out the way you want them to speaking of forcing things though one of the biggest problems i found in this film is that it struggles to find logical reasons for our new and old characters to even be in the same story from the moment sarah connor shows up on the highway to help grace and danny my first thought was why are you here when grace asked sarah how she knew they'd be on the highway sarah just says interview's over we gotta move really this is actually a pretty important question sarah because it justifies you being in this film when dany asks sarah this question later she starts to explain that she gets texts telling her where and when terminators will appear in their time bubbles and how she's been destroying them for years then she says and last week i get two texts both in mexico city danny then stupidly jumps right into asking sarah who's sending the text but what she should have said is wait a minute you knew about all this [ __ ] a week in advance you weren't even there when grace or the rev9 showed up so how did you know where to find us again but of course our characters are stupid and don't ask for these basic questions this is one of those things that could have been easily resolved if sarah was introduced the moment grace arrived you know instead of some random couple and the police maybe sarah could have been the one to have the initial confrontation with grace it would have at least been a little bit of a twist having someone already be wise to a time traveler although even if they had done that the way the writers have forced both sarah and carl into this story would rely on a series of stupid ideas anyway ideas that compound into one great leaning tower of [ __ ] that is one big pile of [ __ ] the first layer of this [ __ ] tower is the ridiculous concept i mentioned earlier about carl feeling remorse for killing jon and thus informing sarah about new terminators as some kind of redemption the second layer is the fact that carl even has that information at all it seems kind of ridiculous to me that a robot designed to shoot things has the ability to sense time travelers up to a week in advance down to the exact time and place and the third layer is that it seems utterly absurd for sarah to have been destroying terminators with such ease for all these years i mean [ __ ] did more t-1000s ever come through if so i hope she brought her multan steel what's really weird here though is that it seems like one of the writers knew that these were weak reasons for the old characters to be involved so they tried to create a mysterious connection to the new future in order to make it seem like it would all make sense later but of course it doesn't after sarah's story about the texts grace takes her phone and does some future [ __ ] to find out where the texts are coming from after finding the source grace seems surprised and reveals that one of her superiors in the future tattooed the same coordinates on her whoever sent you these texts is the same person i was told to go to for help okay so first off why wasn't grace already going to these coordinates without push to the limit she seemed after one encounter with the rev9 you would think that going for this help would be a top priority for her mission but grace only brings this up after looking at sarah's phone it's almost like if sarah didn't say anything about the text they just would have kept driving wherever it is they were already going they would have never had to cross the border or been arrested and the whole movie would be completely different although the more important question here is who gave grace these coordinates and how do they know about a terminator from a completely different timeline let's see if the film answers this question who gave you that yep that's it that's the end of the scene and no they still don't have a good reason for either sarah or carl to be here ah [ __ ] anyway while the things i've mentioned thus far are more substantial writing issues there are a lot of what i'll call shortcuts from a to b generally speaking these are moments when characters need to be somewhere or do something and it happens whether it makes sense or not let me rattle off some examples sarah grace and danny go to see danny's uncle so that he can help them sneak across the border now this guy is apparently a professional who's done this many times before and he seems apprehensive about sneaking two americans back in so he asked them if they've done anything illegal danny then stupidly tells him the truth about a robot trying to kill her and understandably he doesn't believe this but then grace pulls out a knife and cuts a fly in half in midair after which dany says crazy smart machine too and then i [ __ ] you not this guy gives a look that genuinely says oh well [ __ ] i guess i have to help now does anyone remember when the t800 convinced the dysons that it was a machine now that was convincing but this this is enough for this guy to risk his own ass this this is ridiculous soon after that our characters get caught by the border patrol and are separated in a very large detention center grace gets taken to the medical wing dany is put in a cell and sarah is taken upstairs by some government officers however grace escapes and finds out where dany is being held she creates a distraction and then leads danny outside to escape in a helicopter and somehow during all of this confusion sarah finds her way to the same area that grace and dany end up convenient did you plan that after meeting up with carl our protagonists decide they need to get a military-grade emp to fight the rev9 so they head out to meet one of sarah's old contacts that can apparently get them one although if you're anything like me you probably thought who the [ __ ] is this guy and why would he be putting his career on the line for sarah does she have some kind of dirt on them are they just that good of friends this guy is so on their side that his involvement is the reason that they're able to get into the military base and take that gigantic plane as if that wasn't bad enough even the rev9's explanation for catching up with them here is laughable it somehow finds carl's house and sees a picture of his van on the fridge you know this random picture with nobody in it i know that i always put partial shots of my vehicles on my fridge keeps them crisp i just can't believe this is really how the super advanced robot that can see everything on the internet finds out where they are all joking aside though the issues i've addressed in the writing may seem trivial to some but they speak volumes as to just how little care went into creating this entire film even when doing something as simple as getting characters from point a to point b or explaining why a character is present dark fate falls short of any reasonable standard although beyond all the elements i've addressed lies one final question are you sure that this is completely necessary if you've noticed up until this point we haven't even talked about the story or themes of this film and that's because i don't think dark fate has anything meaningful to say from a technical standpoint sure i guess it's playing with the same ideas as the first two films artificial intelligence nuclear war fate etc but it fails to really make the audience think about them in any meaningful way for example one of the only moments in the movie that touches on the subject of ai is when dany's brother is being let go because a machine now does his job now you would think dark fate would use rising automation as a major story thread you know one that would be discussed by our characters pay off in some meaningful way and make andrew yang proud however being that it only takes up about 15 seconds of screen time with lines like this 3 000 people out there what happens if i tell them they're just keeping a spot worm for some machine it carries about as much weight as someone saying robots crazy right of course this same shallowness applies to the other themes as well the cautionary theme of nuclear wars essentially just dropped in here for nostalgia purposes with barely any narrative focus at all now fortunately nuclear war isn't as pressing a subject today as it was in the 80s and 90s but it's still a very real danger that should be conveyed with at least some weight if you're going to include it although i think the central theme of no fape of what we make is dealt the most damage of all this once hopeful message has been reduced to little more than an empty platitude at best and a pathetic piece of nostalgia at worst no fate but what we make actually meant something in the originals because our characters change the future through their positive choices however this film actively disproves that sentiment by merely existing if we as an audience grew attached to sarah and john through their journey and triumph only to have them end up like this with a terrible future unfolding anyway how could we ever possibly be invested in these new characters in conclusion terminator dark fate is simply a prime example of everything wrong with movies today it's your standard soft reboot that steals all of its ideas from previous films in the franchise ruins what came before and to top it all off is completely incompetent at telling a coherent story on its own everything this film is trying to accomplish both narratively and technically was done better and with more style nearly 30 years ago so quite frankly there is no reason for this abomination to exist other than to cash in on a brand and provide work for the elderly loose skin and old balls gross [Music] hey don't talk about me when i'm done

Channel: Cinema Sleuth

Views: 17,371

Keywords: Dark Fate, Terminator, critique, movie review, arnold schwarzenegger, sarah connor, judgment day, skynet, Cinema Sleuth, T-800, T-1000, James Cameron, Future War, Terminator 2, Why soft reboots suck, What happened to the Terminator franchise?, Terminator Dark Fate, Film Analysis, Review, Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation, Terminator Genisys, Terminator time travel, John Connor, Kyle Reese

Id: mx1yxb2eeRo

Length: 31min 36sec (1896 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020