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thesffcorner · 4 years

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Terminator: Dark Fate

Terminator: Dark Fate is the 6th film in the franchise, directed by Tim Miller. It follows Grace (MacKenzie Davis) who travels back to the present day from the year 2024, to protect Dani (Natalia Reyes) from a terminator (Gabriel Luna), who’s come to kill her. As they rampage through the streets of Mexico City, they run into an old veteran of the terminator threat, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and together they must find a way to defeat an unkillable machine, or humanity is doomed.

I have complicated feelings on the Terminator franchise; I saw Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was a kid, and then every subsequent film as it came out. Outside of 2, I haven’t really liked any of them: I hated Rise of the Machines with a passion, thought Salvation had some interesting ideas, but a bland execution, and found Genisys fun, but infinately stupid, not helped by a truly awful trailer. I was excited for Dark Fate because it was the first time Linda Hamilton was reprising her role as Sarah Connor, and I always want to see MacKenzie Davis in more things. But I’m sad to say that this movie was not good, and I have a lot to say so strap in: there’s going to be SPOILERS.

Let’s start with the positives. Tim Miller is a good director, but here his talents are stretched thin. He’s helming of the action is excellent; there are some truly impressive action set pieces in this film, especially the opening chase scene through the GM factory and then the highways of Mexico City. It’s fast, relentless and suspenseful, and opens the film on a high note, managing to be exciting while also introducing all the characters. The film has an R rating, so Miller is allowed to let loose and break some bones; as such Davis gets to shine in some rather gruesome and physically tasking action scenes. The stand out for me was a brawl at a Detention Center at the Mexican-American border, but her opening fight with Luna’s terminator was also really well choreographed and executed.

The second positive are the actors: everyone is good in this film, and they are all trying with the limited material they are given. The standout by far was Davis as Grace, though Schwarzeneger steals every scene he’s in.

That’s where the positives end. Like most things these days, this film fails where it’s most important: the story and the characters.

Now, Miller is a good director, but he seems to be way out of his depth here. The film doesn’t really have a distinct style; there were bits that looked like Terminator 2, bits that looked like Deadpool, Logan and even the entire middle section could have been stolen from Siccario. While his action is good, the quiet, character parts are a letdown as none of the characters have any real motivation or personality outside of survival, and as such the action too feels underwhelming because after the 5th massive explosion it all starts looking the same.

Miller is not helped by a truly god awful script, that takes itself too seriously. There is barely any humor or levity in this film: it’s two hours of gloom, and even when we get little bits of levity, you still don’t understand what the characters are fighting for.

In terms of plot, this is a mix of Terminator 1 and 2 with some Salvation mixed in. The filmmakers make a decision at the start of the film, that will make or break this film for you, and for me it broke it. I hate films who pull this kind of trick, because not only does it hurt the story here, it also retroactively makes the plot of 2 pointless because we know that it amounts to nothing. The decision is meant to cast Sarah and Schwarzeneger, who calls himself Carl in this film in a new light, but the story doesn’t do anything with this development.

We find out that Sarah and John prevented Skynet from rising. How exactly that happened I’m not sure, but a new AI, this one developed for cybernetic warfare called Legion rose up. We know nothing about Legion; we don’t know if it’s sentient, if it’s self-actualizing, if it has a goal, nothing. We don’t know how it took over, how it managed to build the new terminator or even how the humans of the future have both the technology and the resources to augment themselves or send people into the past.

What little we see of the future through Grace’s backstory looks exactly like the future in Salvation, but this isn’t the same timeline; in this universe Skynet never took over the world. There could have been a really interesting story here, with Sarah realizing that it doesn’t matter what she did or how many Terminators she destroys, mankind will always create a different version of an AI that will take over, and another version of John will always need to be saved. Unfortunately, not only does the film never explore this, but it has the gall to have the new character belittle Sarah for being crazy, or self-aggrandizing for saving the world! Excuse me?

This film is too serious to not explain anything about it’s world or premise. If they didn’t want to bother, why not just use Skynet? It’s functionally the same thing!

The script is so jam-packed full of action scenes that it doesn’t have time to develop a story or even it’s own characters, resorting to really bland and uninteresting exposition between set pieces. Why should I care about preventing this future from happening, when it doesn’t look different from the last one? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but at least in Genisys we got to spend time with Kyle and John in the future, get to know them and connect to them, so we know what’s at stake if John fails. Here, all we have to go on is Grace, and her one-sided relationship to Dani, but it doesn't matter because we know nothing about Grace.

There are so many moments in this film where characters act and make decisions that are completely nonsensical or driven entirely by the plot. Why does Grace belittle and hate Sarah? I understand Sarah being suspicious of Grace; she has devoted her whole life to hunting terminators and this woman from the future not only appears to have the powers of one, but also claims there is an entirely new AI that’s after Dani, and refuses to say anything else. Why doesn’t Grace explain to Dani what’s happening and who sent her? And don’t give me that you won’t believe me bullshit; Grace is perfectly willing to be angry at Sarah for her naturally assuming that Dani is the same as her, but not explain why she’s wrong? They keep up this rivalry for the entire film, and there is ABSOLUTELY no reason why they would do this, when clearly all 3 are on the same side!

Grace makes a lot of decisions that can only be explained by ‘the script says so’. She is very quick to point out that she’s human, but she spends the entire film protecting Dani with an unrelenting devotion we have only seen from machines in this franchise, not to mention she can go toe to toe with an indestructible terminator and hold her own. She seems to entirely not understand how someone like Dani might want to protect her family or friends, or other people, even though SHE KNOWS DANI PERSONALLY, and acts no different than Arnold’s Terminator did in Judgement Day.

There are also so many plot threads that go absolutely nowhere. In the 20+ years since the end of 2, Sarah has killed 2 other terminators and has become a wanted celebrity fugitive in 50 States; she also has connections strong enough to get a US Marshall to commit treason for her, and get her a jet, but not a contact that could smuggle her across the border? How did she get these connections? Why was she a criminal? Sounds like a more interesting plot than the one I’m watching. Moreover the whole Marshall plot point is just so we can get 2 EMPs that promptly get destroyed in a completely irrelevant actions scene. They acquire a chopper they never use. They teach Dani how to shoot an assault rifle and she never uses it again.

The most infuriating subplot has to do with how they defeat the terminator. Like I said, Grace is augmented, and she is powered by some kind of energy source that’s apparently the only weapon that could destroy a terminator. If she had this all along, why didn’t she use it earlier, if she always thought the situation was hopeless? She was willing to lock Dani in a mining shaft, knowing full well that wouldn’t stop the terminator, but remembered she had a bomb in her chest, 10 mins before they needed to use it?

The characters are likewise a mess. Arnold Schwartzeneger was the best part, and he was so underutilized. He is completely unnecessary here; he can’t defeat the new terminator, and they aren’t even made by the same people like they were in 2 or Genisys, so he could have knowledge the others didn’t. He has some funny lines (the only funny lines), and there was an interesting premise to his plotline: what happens to a terminator that has accomplished his mission, but stopped receiving orders? What does he do? The movie doesn’t really explore that. Like sure he has a family and he calls himself Carl, but what else?

The new terminator was also underwhelming. Diego Luna is good in the part, but he has nothing to work with. He’s got the unsettling glare down, but he’s not sly or intimidting like the T-1000, nor is he funny like Arnold or conflicted like Marcus. He’s just a robot who occasionally tries to fool people into thinking he’s a person. He does get a mini arc in that he gets better at fooling people as the movie goes on, but nothing ever comes of it.

He’s also extremely overpowered and has no limits to what he can do. He has a liquid metal skin that he can shed from his endoskeleton, and both can act independently. Neither seems to be vulnerable, and we don’t get any indication that they need to be fused for him to recharge or something similar. So why even have the skeleton?

He can form weapons, but he only forms a gun once and then never again; and despite having so many powers and being so indestructible, Grace, who is still just a human manages to deal with him rather effectively, so either he’s terrible at his job, or his infinite powers aren’t as cool as it seemed to, at the start.

Dani was infuriating. She is just John, but a Mexican girl, and if possible, even less agency than John did in Rise of the Machines! Her only motivation is wanting to live, and possibly her attachment to Grace which is never really explained, even though the actresses try. She spends the entire movie being shuffled from place to place, she never takes active part in her story and the only thing she does the whole film is get a way to get her group across the border, only to be immediately captured. There’s no arc to her character; she doesn’t become more capable or brave as the film goes on; she starts as a sweet, spunky girl and ends a sweet, spunky girl, with less family now. Even the end, which should be her moment of defeating the literary decomposing skeleton of the terminator she still can’t do it, and has to have Arnold help her.

There is also no sense of her age; she looks to be about 20, but everyone treats her and acts like she’s a child, when she’s clearly an adult. However, the one scene we see of her in the future, she looks to be the same age so… I’ve got nothing.

Then we have the two characters that are the most frustrating, because they both had so much potential.

First we have Grace, who is this film’s Kyle Reese. Davis is the best part of this film, and manages to give this terribly written, shell of a character some much needed depth and pathos. She really sells how much she cares for Dani; every scene she’s on screen I wanted her to win, and she has lots of small mannerisms that give some humanity to her character.

She was also amazing in the action scenes; not only did she bulk up, but she uses her height to her advantage, towering over the rest of the cast, even matching Arnold. She gets to do some impressive fighting, and I liked how she needed to recharge and cool down, which was probably the only real limit to her abilities.

Unfortunately, her character was a complete waste of her talents. She volunteers to get augmented after she almost dies during battle, but by this point, she has presumably known Dani for years, so this decision is in no way related to protecting her. Likewise, having grown up in a world fighting machines, she seems to have no qualms about essentially being part machine; no one tries to take over her electronic parts, mess with her sensors, and she herself never seems to question her decision to get augmented. I’m not saying she needed to be more like Marcus, but Marcus had actual concerns and had an arc where he had to decide what he was, human or machine. Grace just… is.

Now look, I’m not a person who complains about romance, especially in action films. I don’t need Terminator to have a romance. But God Dammit, if I had to watch Jai Courtney and Emilia Clarke who had 0 chemistry make out, then why couldn’t Grace and Dani be a thing? The way Reyes and Davis play the rolls is clearly romantic, especially Davis; not once did I get a mother-daughter attachment from either and yet we get this limp attempt to make it such at the very end of the film. Let your character be gay, you cowards.

Finally we have Sarah, who was the most frustrating part of this film. First, she’s a supporting character in her own franchise; she has no real reason to be a part of this plot and the film has to invent ways to get her involved.

I don’t hate the decision to make her jaded and bitter in theory; she lost her son and spent 20 years of her life with no purpose other than revenge. But the film never does anything with this, other than have her be angry and antagonizing Grace.

There could have been a real story here, Sarah connecting to Dani because she sees Dani as how she was once too, and mentoring her through Dani losing her entire life. We have attempts at that, but really it’s just 2 scenes that are really short, and didn’t really make me believe in their relationship.

This film needed to chose if it was going to be Terminator with new characters, or a sendoff to the old, and it tried to do both. As a result, we have a Sarah who isn’t interesting, feels superfluous, and doesn’t even really do anything. I wanted her and Arnold to have more time together, to come to terms with what he’d done to her, and ask really if a machine can learn and change; instead we just got a limp attempt to remake Judgement Day, with none of the things that made that film good.

I don’t recommend this film. It was joyless, relentless, and didn’t bring anything new to the franchise. It pains me to say this about a film that has 3 female leads, and 3 genuinely good actresses, but it’s the truth. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t good, and I would rather watch Genisys or Salvation instead.

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#terminator: dark fate #terminator #film review #moni talks

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