Terminator: Garbage

pretty much no terminator film since terminator 2 judgement day has been well received by audiences and uh for good reason oh no titties so to try and distance itself from those last few not so great installments of the terminator franchise terminator dark fate completely disregards them acting as a direct sequel to terminator 2. distancing themselves from previous worst films like this would have been a great idea if this film was any good but as it stands it's kind of like trying to persuade a significant other you've just cheated on that you've changed as they're watching you just ram your neighbor into the mattress that's what this is stop fucking my neighbor terminator franchise you're just as bad as you were before i digress dark fake takes the formula of the first two terminator films a terminator is sent back in time to kill a target and someone else is sent back in time to protect them from that terminator it's a tale as old as time but while terminator 1 and 2 have well-written characters uh plots that make sense and themes that don't collapse in on themselves dark fate does none of the above while taking a massive dump on those two films it's trying desperately to associate itself with let's fucking elaborate eh the film opens with some narration from sarah connor there once was a future in which humankind was hunted by a machine that could think that future never happened because i stopped it referencing the fact that she helped stop the machine uprising we then get a short scene where sarah and john connor are just sort of chilling out on a beach the scene appears to be set directly after the events of t2 this is what happens almost immediately after that whole movie about saving jon's life john gets shot three times in the chest by a newt john gets shot three times in the chest by a new t-800 we haven't seen before and dies i would just like to make clear this isn't a joke i kind of said it like a joke the first time i said it this isn't a joke this is what happens in the film there are two main things that happen in terminator 2 two main objectives that our main characters have the first is to keep jon alive from a terminator that's hunting him this is the central premise of the film sarah and the reprogrammed t-800 trying to keep jon safe that's not all they achieve along the way they also managed to halt the research that would lead to creating skynet which is the evil ai that otherwise would have destroyed the world in 1997 you know just just in case you're not a terminator fan but are watching this anyway for some reason this all ties into a big theme of terminator 2 choosing your own fate see i'm going to put those words in big letters on the screen right now just they're important look there they are in terminator 2 sarah and john connor know that the world ends in 1997 that's essentially their fate but since it's not 1997 yet they do their best to change that they choose their own fate this is played off as one of the film's central ideas that your fate isn't determined and you can choose it for yourself that future never happened because i stopped it so the opening narration here is good and in keeping with terminator 2. however killing jon is the polar opposite of this they immediately undo one of the core victories of the previous film because it's simply inconvenient to the story they want to tell kinda spitting in the face of that film that loads of people love this is especially insulting considering the story they want to tell is just this story again but worse but hey at least sarah still got to choose her own fate right there definitely aren't still more terminators now even though she stopped it all i will get to that so i was so proud of like you know i'm part of this so yeah this is cool you're also being like oh my god i'm in a terminator film um because i would have been if i'd got the role like just even as someone dying in the background like the happiest person yeah just kill me just stop me man if i was in this film i'd be saying something pretty similar after this opening we get introduced to a couple of our principal characters first we meet the protector of the target terminator protector trio her name is grace and she has intense top energy she does the usual routine of stealing someone's clothes and vehicle before it comes to the introduction of our next character the target dany we learn that she is mexican and nice we also meet her father and brother so they can both be killed by a terminator in a few minutes and last but not least we're introduced to the terminator of the trio a terminator who time travels in and starts his hunt for dany these introductions are done fine enough we learn everything we need to for the time being about these characters like you know being mexican and nice for example or that grace is aggressive and really really good in a fight that's kind of as deep as her character ends up going actually i'm not saying that those are only character traits but they are about as deep as her character traits get so our premise is now mostly set up grace cyborg needs to protect dany a normal person from this semi-liquid metal terminator he's made of liquid metal but he's still got a terminator skeleton body on the inside and they can split into two if they need to because whoa gimmick the film will use this gimmick when it can actually think of something cool to do with it but we'll also ignore the fact that this gimmick exists whenever it's inconvenience the plot there are multiple instances in this film where the terminator splitting into two like it clearly can because that's like the whole gimmick would be a really useful thing for it to do but it just chooses not to because hey the plot needs the main characters to be able to escape it for a while and things of that nature also when you see the skeleton that goes under the liquid metal the teeth of the skeleton are black do you guys not know why these things have teeth it's so they look like teeth danny and her brother arrive at the factory in which they work to find that the brothers work station is taken up by a machine which is automating his job hey that's thematically linked to the events of this film in an entirely superficial way someone else tells the brother that his boss wants to see him it's implied that this is because he's being laid off apparently he's been made redundant by a machine that they've installed and is finding out about this by coming into work and just finding a machine at his workstation yeah okay before too long the semi-liquid metal terminator that's quite a mouthful isn't it you know what i'll just call him the semi before too long the semi finds dany at her workplace but grace has also found dany so an action scene between the two ensues they can't kill the semi and decide to run from it at which point we get a car chase the car chase ends with dany's brother being killed and sarah connor finding the situation whoa i can't wait to see what sera cotta is like now she arrives at the scene with a load of military-grade artillery and just unloads on this new terminator she also says i'll be back i'll be back whoa that's a line from a good film i remember good films so so far all we've really had is an action set piece and everything that needs to be established established we've also had some fan service which is a bit wank also the slow motion action scenes that are like whoa look how cool this is whoa do you make me question things as well but i can't really fault them on anything technical i just don't like them so i'm gonna leave it at that there are much bigger fish to fry in this film than these action scenes and it certainly goes downhill from here since the truck that grace and danny escaped in just blew up they steal sarah's truck to escape and sarah's like that's the noise she actually makes in the film at this point the film takes some time out to explain something that's wrong with grace so we already know that grace is a cyborg and apparently she has tuned her metabolism to be extremely high because she believes that she'll either stop the terminator in the first five minutes or won't be able to stop it at all but since the first five minutes are now up she's burning up she's incredibly sick and she desperately needs water and medication and will continue to need constant medication for the rest of the film there's no payoff to this and it contributes nothing to the story they rob a pharmacy to get the medication that grace needs and then she just has that medication for the rest of the story in fact she even keeps it in situations where it wouldn't make sense for her to because the film needs her to have it now there's a scene later on where they're trying to get into the usa and they all get arrested by border patrol they all get searched and their personal belongings confiscated except grace gets to keep her two syringes of medication just because the plot needed her to in fact when it's revealed that she still has them a character who's present goes wow they didn't search you very well did they wow it sure is convenient that she didn't get the one thing she needs to stay alive taken away there are multiple contrivances like this in the film so that she gets to keep her medication and it just makes you wonder why is this in the film in the first place it doesn't contribute anything to the story in fact it detracts from it the excuse we're given for this plotline is also really flimsy greece said she had to tune her metabolism to be super high because you either stop a terminator in the first five minutes or you don't stop it at all but that's not true this film is in continuity with terminator 1 and terminator 2 and in both of those films it takes them ages to defeat their respective terminator also you know it takes the mages in this film we've never seen a terminator defeated in the first five minutes so here we have some bad writing to justify something that doesn't contribute anything to the story and in fact detracts from it later because they need to add some more bad writing to keep it in the story why is it here anyway after they've robbed the pharmacy and get grace the medication she needs so the rest of the story can be unaffected by it they're found by sarah connor grace has now passed out because she hasn't had the medication yet and sarah drives grace and danny away sarah takes him to a motel where she gives grace all of the different medications that she bought grace is still unconscious and sarah doesn't know how much of each medication to give her so she just guesses random amounts and this works because this plotline needed to make less sense and be more pointless no for real why is the spotlight introduced if every time it causes a complication in the story they're just gonna hand wave away that complication and just brush over it so they can move on to something else this is also where sarah connor starts to get characterized and i really really don't like the fact that i have to say this she's shit she's so shit in this film there are a couple of moments here i'd like to know specifically dany is obviously upset that her dad and brother are now dead and is crying about how she never got to say goodbye and probably won't get to go to their funerals sarah tells her that the funeral won't help them and saying goodbye won't help you this is supposed to seem like it would be comforting to danny and i think sound a bit deep but it doesn't because all it implies is that the funeral would help you and saying goodbye would help them but hey the line sure does sound deep hearing this line is like hearing someone say you don't need a pizza cutter or a spoon because you can't use a pizza cutter to eat soup and you can't use a spoon to cut pizza while they're insisting to you that they're being clever sarah also tells dany that she just needs to learn to live with it obviously thanks to the beginning of this movie sarah has some experience with losing loved ones and her saying that you just need to learn to live with it implies that she's learnt to live with it you know but for the rest of the film all of the characterization we get for sarah makes it seem like the fact she lost jon fuels her every action so she says you've just got to learn to live with it but what she means by that apparently is you've just got to let it consume your entire life now i don't take issue with the idea itself of this consuming sarah's entire life but the devil is in the detail and they execute this with about the subtlety of a hammer to the dick so sarah mentions skynet and is relieved to hear that grace and danny have never heard of skynet we changed the future saved three billion lives apparently she still thinks she saved the entire future when she can see that there are still terminators being sent back in time surely sarah should be worried about this it absolutely implies that the war with the machine still happens in the future but nah it doesn't seem like that's something sarah connor would be concerned about i don't think she's ever really cared about stopping that future so she just brushes straight on past this and goes into how the death of jon has affected her she recounts the events of the beginning of this film and says since then i hunt terminators and i drink until i black out this means that she is traumatized i bring this up because it's basically the perfect example of how she's characterized through this whole movie in terminator 2 sarah's actions her character are shaped by the events of the previous film and the trauma she experienced in it it takes us to a point where she's trying to shoot an innocent man in front of his family and we totally buy that she got to that point because her trauma has been so realistically portrayed now almost every part of her personality as a result of the fact that she knows the world is going to end soon we see how draining that is for her and her terror of the future in terminator dark fate she says she drinks and this means she has problems now one thing that may be on your mind is if it's now canon in terminator 2 sarah connor stopped judgment day she stopped the future where skynet took over that future never happened because i stopped it if that's the case where are these new terminators coming from if the future where humanity went to war with machines didn't happen who's building the machines that look almost exactly like the ones from that future and who's sending them back to kill people well sarah connor did manage to stop skynet a military ai that launched the world's nukes and went to war with humanity so instead of that what happens in the future is a military ai called legion launches the world's nukes and goes to war with humanity this is not different what a middle finger to terminator 2 this film is first it kills jon which we've already been over but then it completely demolishes the idea that you can choose your own fate that fate is what you make of it in terminator 2 sarah connor was trying to make her fate one in which the world didn't get destroyed by robots and her son was alive now this film is standing here squarely in contradiction of the idea that you can choose your own fate essentially suggesting that whatever you do the war with the machines is going to come no matter what which is true because the war with the machines is what makes hollywood executives money anyway our trio of leading ladies is now on the road and since sarah hasn't bothered to ask grace who actually sent this terminator dany has to because you know i guess sarah just doesn't care about the war against the machines anymore it's not like terminator 2 exists it's this point that grace explains what legion is in that it's literally just skynet but it's called legion sarah's reaction to finding out that judgment day still happens just at a later date when she finds out the thing that had caused her trauma for so many years has still happened when she thought she'd stopped it she goes those assholes never learn and that's all she has to say on the matter this is so far out of character for sarah connor that i can't even begin to describe it they fly apart like leaves dreams at the end of the world are very common it's not a dream it's real sure it feels very real to you on august 29 1997 it's gonna feel pretty fucking real you do as soon as she found out that there were still terminators being sent back from the future the first thing she would have done is try to find out why and where they're coming from and who's sending them she should have been grilling grace and danny about this at her first opportunity desperate to find out what had happened remind me what does she say to them again i'll be back oh cool that light is in other films hey yeah what's trauma but no she just doesn't bother to ask and actually has to wait for someone else to ask instead so that she can find out as well and then when she actually does find out she's just like ugh that sucks this would be a major under-reaction from literally anyone learning that the world is going to end soon let alone from sarah connor whose entire personality was shaped by her fear of this for years yeah just kill me just stop me um it's at this point we also learn that sarah gets regular texts telling her whenever anyone time travels these texts always end in the words for john and lead her to a terminator that she can kill however we later find out that the person sending these texts only knows when someone time travels and where they time travel to so sarah should have shown up at either the location grace time traveled to or the location the semi time traveled to but she was able to find them at the end of their car chase on the bridge and then found them again after they drove away from her to rob a pharmacy she had no way of knowing where they were either time so this is just a plot hole but the group decides to go to the coordinates that these texts are being sent from you know maybe they can get some help from there but these coordinates are in the usa and none of the three of them have a legal way to get in so they need to smuggle themselves across the border sarah absolutely should have a way to get into the usa because she could be called upon by these texts to go to the usa at any given time but she just doesn't so they go to a contact of dany's who has a way to smuggle them in on the way dany finally thinks to ask why me why am i being targeted by these terminators and in response to this we get one of the most obvious setups for a subversion ever dany is convinced that there's no reason anyone would want to kill her she's not special sarah connor then says let me guess she gives birth to the man who saves us all dany says but i'm nothing i'm nobody and sarah connor agrees with her and says yeah you're not the threat it's your womb first of all for this scene sarah may as well have been holding up a sign that says i'm gonna be proved wrong by the end of the film we're at a midpoint now when one of the main characters who's done nothing wrong is being berated with oh well yeah you're not special are you you're just gonna give birth to some man and he's gonna be special sarah also has no reason to assume this yeah a terminator did once try to kill her because she's the mother of john connor but even in that situation it wasn't just her womb that was important it was her guidance she shaped jon into the man he would become the film here not sarah the film is deliberately downplaying sarah's role in the previous films to prop itself up but then in terminator 2 a terminator came after jon himself pretty sure his threat wasn't his womb so in sarah's experience she has seen the target targeted directly or the target's parent be targeted the only reason that she has to assume that dany is the parent of a target is so that the film can subvert that and go whoa no actually danny is special not only that there's also an annoying gendered element to this sarah connor assumes that it's going to be a man who's the special person and really the only reason that she assumes this is so that she can be proven wrong later the film makes sarah connor a sexist who assumes that the special person must be a man just so that it can prove her wrong and have an anti-sexism message in it later thanks film i really wanted you to turn sarah connor sexist so that you could remind me that sexism is bad terminator dark fate was the last straw i have decided to no longer continue to respect women i have had 20 good years to respect women but women have now been in too many bad film i will no longer support women [Music] this is exactly the kind of post i was referring to the other day dude if you can't handle films with putting women at the forefront when we've had almost a century of films with leading men you really need either serious help or to get laid or both oh you sure showed me for that joke just gonna go have sex so that i can learn to appreciate films that don't have men in them once they arrive at danny's contact we get a scene i can only assume the seat is someone's magnum opus it is this scene is not supposed to be funny but i have not laughed this hard in a cinema and as long as i can remember it was a struggle controlling my laughter out of consideration for the other three people in the cinema i saw this like the day after it came out if you're wondering dany's contact is concerned that they're only asking him to be smuggled across because they're criminals they've done something illegal and that's why they need to get into the usa under the radar danny's immediate reaction is to just straight up tell this guy the truth oh we're being hunted by a robot from the future which of course this guy doesn't believe until grace uses a knife to cut a fly in half in slow motion and this convinces him oh she must be from the future she got a fly in half of course realistically he would have been like what hang on there was a fly where was the fly but of course realistically if they were trying to convince him that they were from the future why doesn't grace just show her the wounds that she already has that reveal her cyborg innards no that would make sense almost as much sense as dany just coming up with some lie so that she can get through she cuts the fly in half there's like a swoosh ninja sound effect and it's right i question everything the scene is great watch this film just for the actually don't don't reward this film with your money after this film is like free somewhere and you see it in a bargain bin pick it up just for this scene that's my advice so this works to get them smuggled across the border but unfortunately for our heroes they get caught along the way and are detained by border patrol this is the point where grace just gets to keep her medication because the plot needs her too this part of the movie continues to be bad and just the ways that it already has been the semi tracks them down to this facility and tries to kill them but they escape in a chopper that was awful i'm gonna put that in they finally get to the usa and get to the person who was sending sarah the texts it's a t-800 the same one that killed jon at the beginning of the film apparently when he shot and killed a child in a public place with several witnesses he just wasn't caught even though he'd finished his mission and had no reason to evade the police whatsoever we learned that since he finished his mission he was without purpose and so he decided to make his own purpose and for him that was building a family because fuck it why not the death bot after it killed someone decided i'll just live a normal human life because that's how software works when it finishes its task it decides on something else to do of course the only reason he's here is that someone somewhere thinks you can't have a terminator movie without arnold schwarzenegger so they just forced him in even though he doesn't really fit the movie makes a great effort to make this version of the t-800 the most sympathetic character ever as we learn that since he's killed john he's basically only been selfless caring for a woman and child who really needed his care he's now also on the side of our heroes for no reason they may as well and probably should have given the excuse that some scientist found him and reprogrammed him because that would make a lot more sense than he just developed a nice personality because the film needed him too basically no aspect of this guy being here makes any sense whatsoever sarah of course really hates him because he killed jon this is of course an understandable character motivation but it's done with about the same level of subtlety and nuance as before basically every line of dialogue she says to him is just her saying something along the lines of fuck you you killed john you big metal bastard they even make her stupid and irrational in service of this for example there's a moment where the terminator is talking about his family and sarah connor goes he's lying he's an infiltrator she believes that everything he's saying is part of some kind of ruse to achieve some kind of objective however sarakotta knows for a fact that this isn't really true she knows for a fact that this terminator has completed its mission and that skynet literally doesn't exist anymore there's no way that it can have new orders she also knows that for a long time it's been sending her texts to help her kill other terminators yet still thinks it's lying about having a family so that it can achieve um something there is no reason for her to believe it has any kind of goal beyond what it had before and has already achieved it only makes sense that sarah would be emotional when she confronts the machine that killed jon however despite all she's been through before her emotions have never made her irrational until now her emotions have been a driving force of her character but they've always driven her to do rational things her fear of judgement day and of skynet drove her to try and kill an innocent man miles dyson but this could have worked if she had actually killed him that might have been enough to stop the rise of skynet but this film seemingly can't think of a way to show that she's angry at this terminator that killed her son without making her stupid so now she's stupid thanks film you made sarah connor stupid shortly after this we have a training scene for dany where she learns to shoot guns again the movie fails to understand human emotions here it also doesn't understand how skills work we see the t800 setting up a load of professional shooting targets before we cut to dany shooting at a watermelon on a stump she's missing every shot because well shooting guns just isn't a skill she has after dany has missed a few shots with a pistol sarah brings her a much larger weapon she whispers in dany's ear a terminator has just killed your whole family what do you do which may i remind you is true a terminator has just killed her whole family dany then proceeds to one shot both of the melons yes film this is how humans work remind them of a recent traumatic experience and they'll suddenly develop new skills hey maybe if i invited you of a recent trauma you'd develop some basic creative writing skills it's at this point that the movie sort of devolves into its final form just repeatedly finding excuses to have another action set piece and then another one and then another one and then another one in terminator 2 the action that was there needed to happen to facilitate the story it happened as a natural and logical result of the conflicting goals of the different characters terminator dark fate feels like it's trying to find excuses to have cool actiony things happen now don't get me wrong i love cool actiony things but it's the story that gets me invested in them but this story literally is just the same story as terminator 1 and 2 but instead of well-written characters and their motivations pushing the plot forward the story is progressed by people cutting flies in half it's in all of this mess of action at the end of the film that we finally get the reveal that are you ready for this danny is the special person not some man she gives birth to are you surprised the reveal comes in the form of grace just telling dany that she is the special person before we get a flash forward or a flashback from grace's perspective of dany doing some heroics in the future it's at this point she gives a heroic speech which is clearly supposed to encapsulate the theme of this film she's talking to someone who believes it's impossible for them to defeat skynet i mean a legion to which dany says are we just supposed to lie down and die because some machine decided it is that our fate yeah well fuck fate she puts about as much emotion into it as i did then she really doesn't act this scene well apparently this film is still trying to give a message of fate is what you make of it you choose your own fate in fact many of the posters for this film literally have choose your fate written on them as a tagline they clearly want their film to have this theme while squarely contradicting that message with most of the events that happen in it the fact that skynet was defeated and just got replaced by legion something that's literally the exact same just after a rebrand essentially conveys a theme of whatever you do this fate is inescapable which is literally the antithesis of the theme they're going for this should be especially pertinent to dany who's delivering the speech in the events of this film not only did she learn everything that i just told you and presumably came to the assumption that a war with the machines is inevitable she also knew about the war with the machines before it happened but is now standing in the middle of that war so clearly wasn't able to stop it if anyone in the entire world has reason to believe that your fate is just inevitable and whatever you do you can't change it it's dany so in short nice message movie nice theme but you contradicted it with most of the things that happen in you the film is trying to have a nice inspirational message while accidentally delivering the nihilistic message of we're all fucked whatever we do the film finally ends with the semi being killed because of course it does and thus an end is put to my suffering also a couple of characters die or something i don't really care the moments are supposed to have meaning but since all the characterization leading up to it is fucked they just don't but uh what a bad film it fails to have a cohesive plot with holes and basically anywhere you can find them it fails to competently write characters or human emotions completely obliterates sarah connor and has a theme that collapses in on itself now unfortunately to close off this video i'm going to have to make the obvious joke it seems like the terminator franchise is doomed to a dark fate whoa [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jay Exci

Views: 963,233

Rating: 4.7603602 out of 5

Keywords: Terminator dark fate, dark fate, terminator, termiator 6, terminator dark fate review, review, movie review, arnold schwarzenegger, linda hamilton, sarah connor, t-800, grace, dani

Id: 5tLrh4Qvm7c

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019

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[u/TammyTamed]

I actually went back and watched Terminator 1 and 2 and I have to say that John can be killed. Now hold your horses, I'm not done. What I'm saying is that at the end of T2 where John lives, you can have it there and start another uprising of the machines. There's enough material to do so with John losing more and more support in the senate and eventually prepares for another war but the twist would be that it didn't happen in his time nor his daughter's but his grand daughter. No time machine or anything, just straight up struggle between man and machine.

Because really, the quest for convenience will always be there. It can still retain the message of choosing one's fate by having John's grand daughter make some sort of call that decides the outcome of said war. Hell, she can even fail at it paving the way for more movies with less constraints as to what should change.