TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019)

[Contains spoilers for the Terminator series.]

Following the first round of advanced screenings for Terminator: Dark Fate, there were, understandably, mixed opinions, though all of them echoed one general reaction: it was “the best Terminator sequel since Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” The major studios behind Dark Fate’s production, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, were probably ecstatic at this pull quote, because nothing sells a sequel better than a close association with the originals in terms of quality and audience expectations (see 2018’s Halloween). That new car smell wears off pretty quickly, however, once you realize making a Terminator sequel that’s better than all the non-Cameron sequels isn’t that high of a bar. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was occasionally okay, even if it was nothing more than a soft retread of Judgment Day that mostly felt made for television. Terminator: Salvation had interesting ideas but was plagued with major script rewrites to cater to Christian Bale’s interest in playing John Connor, whose status as a cameo was beefed up to a major role following his involvement, and which threw off the tenor of the story. Then came Terminator: Genisys, which, holy shit, I don’t even know. I just know that it was dreadful, not helped by its lame PG-13 rating. By then, general audiences seemed very over the franchise, so even when it was announced that a new sequel was going into production that would retcon every sequel since Judgment Day, be directed by Deadpool’s Tim Miller, bring back Arnold Schwarzenegger, and also see the return of creator James Cameron in a consultant/producer role, the Internet barely cared. However, when it was revealed that Linda Hamilton, gone from the franchise since Judgment Day, would also be returning, the Internet finally raised an eyebrow. It would seem there was still interest after all.

Those initial reactions were right: Terminator: Dark Fate is, indeed, the best Terminator sequel since Judgment Day. It’s also an underwhelming effort that squanders the opportunity to wipe the slate clean in this franchise’s second attempt at a cinematic “okay, for serious this time…,” which it had previously wasted on Genisys. It also squanders the return of Linda Hamilton as the legendary Sarah Connor by misusing her character thanks to the very unexpected story changes that rock the established mythos – not because it was needed, but because it was easier than continuing the story arcs for every character left standing at the end of Judgment Day. The opening scene, utilizing the best use of de-aging techniques I’ve seen yet (seriously, one might think they were deleted scenes from Judgment Day’s production), is staged to be a shocker when a Terminator wearing Arnold’s face waltzes on screen and kills young John Connor. The sequence is meant to conjure the realization that shit’s about to get real. And it does—while also asking fans to make the hugest leap yet in terms of retconning a story by asking them to accept a major change in the series’ dynamic: 

For two films, the continued existence of John Connor would make or break the entire world.

But according to Dark Fate:

 ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ -{“Nah, don’t need him.”} 

That decision is a huge pill to swallow on its own, but there’s more: multiple Terminators (who for some reason looked like Arnold, which makes zero sense being that he was the protector in Judgment Day) were sent back during that particular timeline to make mincemeat of John Connor. I’d love to know what this particular Arnold-faced Terminator, a hunter killer machine imbued with all kinds of technology for seeking and destroying targeted prey, was up to while the T-1000 was blowing up half of Los Angeles – perhaps his CPU was ransomwared and he had to scrounge up the money to unlock himself. 

To its credit, Dark Fate tries to be different from what’s come before. The problem is this is a Part 6 that’s also a Part 3, and also the third Part 3 in this series. No studio will ever be daring enough to return the series to the grounded, gritty, grindhouse style of 1984’s The Terminator; no matter which studio had the rights, they were all intent to remake Judgment Day over and over instead. The first two Terminators are more than just great movies; they’re legendary watershed moments in cinema history and keepsakes that can’t be replicated. With Cameron having pushed special effects into new, uncharted territory, both of his Terminators invoked awed questions of, “How’d they DO that?” In this new era, the audience isn’t asking that question anymore because they already know the answer: CGI. And it’s so boring. Even though, according to this newest timeline, Terminator: Genisys no longer exists, the damage has already been done. Not only did it up the ante in terms of action extravaganza, leaning heavily on CGI, but it also used up another take on the same old story: trying to prevent a future war with sentient A.I. Rise Of The Machines claimed that Judgment Day was always inevitable. Genisys repackaged Skynet with a new name (that sequel’s title), a new global operating system that basically made Google and iPads the bad guy. Dark Fate says Judgment Day was avoided, but in effect, led to the creation of a new evil A.I. company called Legion with the same end result. It doesn’t matter if our heroes are battling Skynet, or Genisys, or Legion if it all feels like the same old shit, and it really does feel like the same old shit. Added to that, Genisys’ sins continue by also having squandered Arnold’s return to the series after a fifteen-year absence. For all these reasons, Dark Fate would play better if the previous sequel never existed, because even though it goes in a mostly different direction, their third acts feel almost identical when the spectacle hits the most ridiculous highs. Once a Humvee filled with people is pushed out of a midair Gulfstream and parachutes down into the Hoover Dam, where it then rides its falls all the way down to the bottom of the reservoir, coming to a rest underwater where the action continues, you can’t help but remember, in spite of all the spectacle and CGI and millions of dollars that sequence alone must’ve cost, how much better and more thrilling this series used to be back when it was just one plucky young girl fleeing from a robot in a factory, or when our heroic trio was being pursued by a liquid metal cop driving a tanker trunk down an L.A. highway. 

Though I’ll forever be an Arnold aficionado, my man love for him barely flared when his name appeared in the announcement for Dark Fate. No, I was much more eager to see Hamilton return to the series after her nearly thirty-year absence. Except for television work and obscure movies, Hamilton hasn’t appeared in anything prominent since 1997’s Dante’s Peak (where she played the hilariously named Rachel Wando). I wish I could say her return was a triumphant one, and even though she strikes an incredibly interesting image with her short-cropped silver hair and her aviators, her performance can be summed up by Dark Fate’s overall final product: okay, not bad, but should’ve been a lot better for what this was supposed to be. Thankfully, Mackenzie Davis as Grace, the new Terminator Protector, offers the film’s best performance, and not by default, but because of her actual thought-out, dedicated take on, essentially, the new Kyle Reese. Sadly, Natalie Reyes as Dani, “the new John [Connor],” barely registers as a presence let alone the future leader of the resistance against the robotic scourge. Her miscasting echoes that of Emilia Clarke’s miscasting as the rebooted Sarah Connor in Genisys. In The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, I easily buy Hamilton’s pluckiness and her badass warrior take on the character, respectively. Reyes gives it her all, but she never feels comfortable in the role she was given. As for Arnold, well, it’s not that he offers a poor performance, because he’s basically been doing the same thing since Judgement Day – it’s more that the limits of the character don’t allow him to do anything new, and it’s not much of a novelty to watch anymore. Even sadder, Dark Fate, which rides a wave of well executed action sequences and mediocre drama, slows to a halt once his character appears in the third act, as the audience waits for his return to feel more than what it is, which by now is obligation. By now, his presence is expected, so much that he was literally CGI-ed into Terminator: Salvation, but again, there’s a problem: no one knows what to do with him anymore to make him more interesting than what’s already been done, and if that’s not happening, why include him at all?   

Terminator: Dark Fate also tries to be current and “woke,” but solely in an acceptably mainstream way: it suggests that women can be tough (which many male members felt was pandering, even though the strong female angle has been a mainstay of this genre since the 1970s), and that the leader of the resistance isn’t just a girl but a Mexican girl (whoa!). There is, however, one moment that works, and that’s when Davis’ Grace asks a prison guard at a Texas/Mexico detainment center where illegal border-crossers are held, and the guard replies, even in the midst of all the Terminator shit hitting the fan, “we call them detainees, not prisoners,” and Grace looks ready to backhand her simply for that response. 

Even though it pains me to say this (while also acknowledging that the world doesn’t need further Terminator sequels), the only path forward for this franchise is to start entirely from scratch – no Arnold, no Hamilton, no Cameron, and an entirely new storyline. To whichever studio is the next to land the rights, please, I beg you: hand over the reins to a new generation with new ideas, let them do what they do, and stop meddling. Otherwise, if there really is no fate but what we make for ourselves, then we are fated to see the same movie over and over until the franchise is dead for good.

TERMINATOR: GENISYS (2015)

With the newest entry in the Terminator franchise, Terminator: Dark Fate, opening this weekend, let's do some time traveling ourselves and look at the previous piece-of-shit sequel, Terminator Genisys, which, according to Dark Fate, no longer exists. (Thank you!)

It's entirely possible that Terminator Genisys, essentially Terminator 5 no matter what anyone says, was never going to be a good film, regardless of who replaced Cameron as director or the immortal Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese. By now, it's unavoidable to recognize the irony in film after film being made in which people (and robots) rely on time travel to keep cleaning up their own messes, all while said films shit the bed and make things even more complicated. The finale of Terminator 2: Judgment Day was supposed to retcon Skynet and all its underlings entirely out of existence. Then they made three more Terminators. And this franchise doesn't lend itself to "what-if?" one-offs where different filmmakers apply their different stamps to see what sticks against the wall. The mythology of the series has become so important that there's no "ignoring" certain entries. Using the same characters and even the same actors will inevitably make any sequel the next chapter in one long killer-robot story. But by now, that story has overstayed its welcome. The first two Cameron films were landmark achievements in storytelling and visual effects. They didn't just spawn from the cinematic movement, but they defined what the movement was all about. They were, and are, important.

Terminator Genisys is not.

While Terminator Genisys does offer a reasonable amount of entertainment, and it's always fun to see Arnold take on one of his most famous characters in a different way, even if he's guilty of committing sacrilege as he does so, it had a responsibility to try and live up to the two landmark films it was attempting to reboot/recreate/retcon all at the same time. But it not only doesn't, it comes nowhere close. Terminator Genisys is the film that would exist in the satirical cinematic universe of something like Tropic Thunder, or even The Naked Gun, where of course a Terminator 5 would be ridiculous, and of course it would try to explain how a robot can age (it's real skin!) and of course it would be a little dumbed down and neutered to appeal to as many people as possible. (For example, in 1995, the sketch comedy series Mad TV made a fake trailer for a film called Apollo the 13th: Jason Takes NASA, in which Jason went to space. In 2001, New Line Cinema sent Jason to space...for real. When the order is parody first and reality later, that's bad!)  T2 had some pretty weighty themes about fate, about life and death, about the hard choices for the greater good. It wanted to entertain its audience, but it also wanted them to think. Meanwhile, the convolution of Genisys's plot feels manufactured, under the guise of being smart, as if its events and ramifications were made purposely complex in order to let its audience off the hook for trying to understand them, instead patting them on the head and saying, "Just enjoy all the carnage, m'kay?" Even the film's own director has said:

“Arnold has one of the most unpronounceable, impenetrable expositional lines in the movie when he says, ‘It’s possible to remember two time frames when you enter the quantum field during a nexus moment,’ and nobody has any idea what he’s talking about. But yes, it makes sense. We don’t expect anybody to get it—then Kyle turns to Sarah and says, ‘Can you make him stop talking like that?’ It’s a way to say, you don’t really have to get this. If you want to nerd out, it’s all there, I think it’s coherent. But hopefully we can move on.”

Movies!

Terminator Genisys is a greatest hits compilation performed by a shitty cover band. It's desperate to hit all the same beats that made the first two Terminator films so memorable and effective, but it doesn't really want to try earning them. It wants Sarah and Kyle to fall in love. It wants to show that even a cybernetic organism of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton can learn to be human. It wants to resurrect the T-1,000, a terminator even more famous and recognizable than Arnold's iteration. It wants to talk about fate. But it's in too much of a hurry to bask in the love established for those aspects from the first two films. It doesn't want to be patient and slowly but deliberately lead up to those revelations. Instead, Sarah and Kyle will be forced to naked-hug, which = express love. Instead, the T-800 will already show traits of a human being since he's been around forever and we can just skip all that "becoming" human stuff. Instead, the first appearance of this new-fangled version of the T-1,000 will feel obligatory. And forget fate--conversations about it can't be had when the plot is this impossible to decipher. Genisys thinks that by revisiting all these common themes from the first two films it will be grandfathered into their upper echelons of respectability, but it does nothing to earn that respect beyond riding the coattails of a legacy and calling it homage.

Following the casting announcement which hailed the return of Arnold to the franchise, each subsequent actor added to the project left people feeling, at the least, ambivalent, and at the most, irritated. Some were adamant that Emilia Clarke would make a good Sarah Connor, citing her role as Daenerys on Game of Thrones as evidence she could play a strong character (even though Daenerys had done nothing more than hire people stronger than herself to do all the heavy lifting--that and ride dragons). However, nearly everyone was dismayed that Jai Courtney, the anthropomorphic equivalent of anti-charisma, was to be featured it yet another franchise. Ironically, it would be the addition of actors worth a damn--Jason Clarke and J.K Simmons--that would result in further frustration, being that they were barely used enough to warrant their presence. Of course seeing Arnold is a delight--seeing him in any film is a delight--but when he's playing second fiddle to Courtney's block-of-wood acting prowess and Emilia Clarke trying not to look like a child with giant plastic guns, the film comes dangerously close to allowing its audience not to take anything seriously.

Not helping things is its unfortunate PG-13 rating, yet another effort on behalf of the studio to reach a new audience. The grisly grindhouseness of the original film is gone, along with the brutality and intensity. (There's not a drop of blood in this thing.) Also gone, probably for good: Arnold playing the villain. By now, his original incarnation of the T-800 has been Uncle Bobbed out of existence. Now, instead of the relentless and bloodthirsty terminator that can't be bargained or reasoned with, and will not stop--ever--he's become the uncool parent dropping off his daughter at school and making her look like an idiot because he doesn't know who Selina Gomez is. Sure, Freddy Krueger grew pretty lame after a while and ended up on kids' t-shirts and lunch boxes, but at least he still violently killed a lot of people in his very bloody, R-rated sequels. For a terminator, Schwarzenegger's T-800 doesn't do a whole lot of terminating. And it's become a rather toothless affair to witness.

Hollywood loves the adage of "never say never," so as long as there's still life in any ol' franchise, and Genisys made just enough money to prove that there is, they will never stop sending people back in time to fight robots alongside other robots. Paramount lost the rights to the Terminator franchise in 2019, at which point Cameron and Deadpool director Tim Miller joined forces to bring the world Terminator: Dark Fate (with Paramount back on board). Many folks seem to be assuming it's a given that since Cameron is involved as producer and co-writer, he'll make a film worthy of the Terminator brand. While of course that's possible, I'm not buying it. Let's not forget that Cameron previously went on record as saying he believed Genisys to be the third "official" sequel and a great movie. Let's also not forget he offered pre-release praise for the widely dismissed Rise of the Machines, which means his overview of the series is now suspect. Regardless of how Terminator: Dark Fate lands with audiences and critics, and regardless of whether or not it turns into a new planned trilogy spearheaded by Cameron and Miller, it's a near certainty that whoever holds the series rights is never going to make another worthy entry. It's also a near certainty they are never going to stop trying. Which is kind of sad, because each new entry that's supposed to recapture the magic of the first two Terminators is, ironically, so far removed from what made them great that it's become fairly evident those in charge have no idea what made them magical in the first place.

Much like Salvation before it, and as Dark Fate is planning, Genisys was supposed to kickstart a brand new Terminator trilogy for a new generation. This, obviously, won't come to pass. Regardless of the studio backing the film or the filmmaker chosen to take the helm, does the world really need any more Terminators? Surely there are people out there who would welcome additional forays into the world of Terminator 3.0, but then there are others out there who fondly remember having seen Cameron's original films (the first was a very adult, R-rated horror/slasher film--did you realize that?) and will decide, with their hard-earned dollars, that a rebooted Terminator franchise is very much obsolete.