TheReach - Terminator Dark Fate

Terminator - Dark Fate

WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD

Is it without value?

The short answer is: No.

It sure is a flawed movie, and it really was NOT what I wanted to see as an avid Terminator fan. However even with the flaws and my general dislike toward the deviation from the concept in my mind about what a direct sequel to T2 should've been, I still couldn't help myself and had to admit that there were really good ideas and throught provoking parts in this movie.

Before I would dive into the topic further, I have to make the disclaimer that I have seen the movie only once at this point and won't be able to see it a second time until it gets released in some home cinema format, so the article is subject to corrections maybe updates.

The dislikes

The following points are the things I disliked about Dark Fate:

It wasn't what it could've been.
It wasted potential and possibly the last chance to have the iconic cast together.
It relied a lot on the same plot devices as T1 and T2.
Using time travel again.
The deviation from the epic struggle between Skynet and John Connor.

When it was announced that James Cameron is involved with making a "true sequel to T2" even with my cautious mindset - after the disappointments of Salvation and Genisys - I got interested again and hoped against hope that this time around they'll get it right.

Genisys had some future-war scenes that were promising in terms of tone, colors and general atmosphere so I hoped Dark Fate would take the good parts of Genisys and run with those elements.

Then I heard that the story going to take place in present day, which still could've been fun. We could have followed John's struggles of growing into becoming a leader figure and preparing for the war with Sarah's support, then see Judgment Day come to be and the forming of the resistance.

But then I saw the first interview where Tim Miller and James Cameron actually were talking about that the movie is indeed in the works, and with that the use of time travel was confirmed.

This was the point where I knew they're setting themselves up for at the very least for a bumpy ride when it comes to plotting.

Messing with time travel is inherently troublesome, because of the multiple ways the theory of time travel is living in the mind of the audience and the other ways it could be working. (but more on that subject later)

The Likes

The following points are the things I liked about Dark Fate:

The exploration of "Carl".
The balls to follow through with the unexpected outcome of messing with time alterations.
Trying for something new.
The exploration of inevitable major developments of human kind.
Bringing back Sarah and the T-800 for one last ride.

Time Travel - Inherently troublesome

One of the reasons why Dark Fate getting so much flak is because it really is difficult to be objective about it. It all comes down to the difference between fan perspective vs objective perspective and this movie sure got more than enough aspects where these perspectives clash.

Most of the criticism I see about the new movie is that it isn't the same as T2 one way or another and while I agree with the sentiment and the fact that it doesn't feel "right" coming off the heels of T2, I still made an active effort to take a step back and look at the big picture, so I can give a fair shake to the movie.

Dark Fate doesn't feel like a sequel to T2 in any way because everything is different, but objectively that was the goal in T2. To change the future. To have the events deviate from the future of old John Connor along with Kyle Reese lived in and Sarah was warned about.

Change was achieved, but nobody would know what way the change would go. Sarah and young John excahged the known "fate" of the future to blind faith, hoping that taking an unknown path will lead somewhere better.

The way Dark Fate kicks off initially for a brief couple minutes it seems like the new direction indeed leads to a better future, but it simply doesn't go the way they/we have hoped. And this is where things connect back to the use of time travel.

Even if you alter the present and that yields an alternate future timeline, if they invent time travel on that new timeline, they too can just as easily drop back into the same past. We shouldn't forget that every concept we have about time travel is only a theory based on our limited understanding of the world around us. Even worse, the public understanding of "how it works" is based on popular culture, mainly well known movies like Back to the Future, the first Terminator, Bill and Ted, and most recently Avengers Endgame.

The movies and books that shaped public perception of time travel tend to focus only on the possibilities of time travel that are suitable for the plot of the story and rarely if ever dwell on how the workings of time travel could be different from what we imagine.

Back to the Future for example handles changes in the past as if they would alter the flow of a single thread of time, where changes in the past would be forcing it to a new route that will become a new future, eliminating the original timeline. However based on our "understanding" of branching alternate realities, creating a new timeline with a change in the past doesn't mean the destruction and disappearance of the original future. The two futures could exist parallel to each other.

So even though from the perspective of young John and Sarah, T2 altered the events of the future, Skynet could be "alive and well" in the future until the resistance wins the war, but that doesn't eliminate the possibility of Legion becoming an alternate version of Skynet, and having the Rev 9 instead of the T-800 and T-1000 units.

With that in mind Skynet expecting changes in its own present and so can send back its terminators to its heart's content until runs out of energy or gets shut down by the resistance WHILE Legion is coming to be on a parallel timeline and sending back Rev 9 to find and kill its equivalent of John Connor.

This means that having a Skynet-sent T-800 gun down young John in Dark Fate and still have the T-800 around along with the Rev 9 later, is entirely plausible. From the perspective of Legion and Rev 9, Sarah and John Connor is of zero importance while the T-800 is still well aware of their importance of Skynet.

Following that logic all of us - the audience, Sarah, John, Uncle Bob and even Skynet - were wrong about how we assumed this time travel thing would work. From Skynet's perspective it is still understandable because it was a desperate last ditch effort on its part at the end of the future war to use the time displacement device (also known as tactical time weapon). Sending back the first T-800 to the past was a shot in the dark, but still was a chance that it had to take for self preservation. However from our own perspective, we've got nobody else to blame but ourselves for our expectations about how we thought the story should continue.

The "Liquid plus solid" designs

The Rev 9 design while looks cool, makes the suspension of disbelief difficult because unlike the T-X back in the days, it is using the liquid metal part as a separate unit, therefore it needs to have enough material to create a complete human form.

T-X on the other hand used the liquid metal only for deception, it was the flexible camouflage layer, therefore it required a lot less of it, which allowed the underlying skeletal structure to appear more mechanical and with that aided the suspension of disbelief. In addition this very thin design was still very self contained and had armored/concealed areas which at least suggested that it had parts we didn't knew about.

Despite the Rev 9 looking more robust than the T-X, it is full of gaps and empty spaces - which is understandable when we consider the amount of liquid metal it needs to "carry" somewhere - when separated from the liquid part the average viewer can only see a skeletal structure with most of it open and exposed, not leaving nearly anything for the imagination, which brings up the question: What makes it move?

The thing about a skeleton is that it is only a framework, it requires some kind of actuators to achieve locomotion. In the case of the T-800 what made it seemingly plausible was that it had hydraulics and servos, the T-X had mainly servos, and even the "fake John Connor" in Genisys had something that resembled artificial tissues and muscles. The Rev 9's skeletal structure however doesn't seem to have anything like that besides small actuators visible at the hip and possibly small servos by the major joints, which could very well achieve locomotion but still makes the onlooker feel as if that thing shouldn't be able to move, and shouldn't be able to move like a human. (Let alone the acrobatics it tends to perform at various points of the movie)

Now this is not to say that it'd be impossible to come up with ways to make a skeletal structure like the Rev 9's move with full range of motion, but still it doesn't "look right" enough to make the design feel familiar as a machine we could believe existing.

The liquid part of course working mostly like the T-1000, and the separation ability can come in handy when the machine needs to engage multiple targets at once and wants to split attention, but it would seem that the individual parts don't really have enough strength to put up against the T-800's brute force.

In all fairness, the Rev 9 was designed purely against human targets, and the T-800 doesn't exist in Legion's timeline, so obviously it couldn't design the Rev 9 to be as effective against it as against humans. From the visual perspective as viewer, it does lack that disturbingly grounded feel the T-800 had plus the black liquid metal combined with the dull graphite color of the endoskeleton made the whole thing a grey blob without any contrast on its own. The "cool factor" of the Rev 9 relied entirely on the lighting of the environment, which I could understand from a tactical point of view as it allows both the liquid and the endoskeleton parts to blend in more easily to the landscape in the future war, but it still is visually dull.

Gabriel Luna however - despite what most cirtiques say - felt to me as a perfectly functional infiltrator unit. Legion's version of the infiltrator was at the very least on the same level as the T-1000. People tend to chalk up as a flaw that Luna was not intimidating enough and forget about the purpose of an infiltrator. The whole purpose why they look like a human is to get close to them and if possible infiltrate bases and gather intelligence about the resistance. This later part needs them to behave as human as possible beyond looking like human. In this aspect Luna's portrayal of the infiltrator were on par with Robert Patrick's T-1000 when it was about human interaction. Somehow fans constantly forget how human the T-1000 was when it impersonated a police officer, asking kids and John's foster parents about his whereabouts.

The concept of combining Liquid and Soild is interesting the same way as it was back when T3 came out, and with the added twist of the liquid part having autonomy it seemed to me like a viable concept for infiltration of smaller human settlements in the future but the concept was bogged down with the previously mentioned design decisions and the badly written action sequences.

Said action sequences often portrayed the Rev 9 as something really agile and fast, yet powerful but doesn't utilize this when it isn't "cool looking enough" or doesn't serve the plot. The chain link fence comes to mind, where the liquid part could have easily separated and walked through the fence as the T-1000 did through the security door in T2, leaving the solid part behind to either rip a hole or go around. The reason why it didn't do so was part because if it would've done it the protagonists couldn't have gained enough distance to make the plot progress, and to whoever came up with the crawling around sequence it wouldn't have looked cool enough.

The writing or lack of it - in the light of character development and cast

The writing of the script for Dark Fate was a collaboration of multiple writers and it shows.

One of the clear signs of the issues they didn't bother to smooth over was the sudden change in the attitude of Grace.

Up to a certain point in the movie Grace is unlikeable and cocky, and then there is a sudden shift from which point on she is all business. The problem is not the shift but it is never showed or explained why she've had the attitude toward Sarah to begin with and what made it go away all of a sudden.

In T1 we saw Kyle Reese and his behavior as a fish out of water type of character as he was trying his best to quickly get used to 1984 after living his entire life in the nightmare of the future war after Judgment Day. Besides the inconveniences of time travel however Grace doesn't present any confusion or issues with adjusting to the environment or the things she saw last time when she was nine years old. Of course part of this could be explained away with the smaller time gap between our present and the time where Grace came from, but I would call it doubtful that she would've paid that much attention to - for example - driving at the age of nine to retain it perfectly how cars work, let alone know how to drive one without at least a momentary confusion. Adapting to our present doesn't seem to be an issue to her which makes her harder to relate to.

Mackenzie Davis however was much less unlikeable than I would have expected before seeing the movie, and I feel like her talents were wasted by a sub-par writing. If the writers would've gave some decent lines to Sarah Connor then the two of them could've had some banter going on. And with that we get to Sarah Connor.

Sarah went through a journey from simple civilian to survivor to warrior and then in Dark Fate she just takes the talking down from Grace. Not just once or twice but constantly. It is as if the writers would've forgot that she is a person and no person in the right mind with her experiences, sacrifices and achievements would just take the trashing and threats Grace hands out in the firs half of the movie.

Sadly Sarah's character is wasted on the movie, though in part I could understand being burned out and single minded after the loss of John, and feeling like every sacrifice she ever made was pointless, but not to the point where she doesn't feel anything about having a purpose again when Grace and Dani show up and the new direction of the future is laid out for her.

It seems to me the cast did the best they could with the horrid mess that the writing was, especially in terms of dialogue. Though the way the whole plotting was handled I can't be sure if the character of Dani Ramos was simply miscast or the writers failed to showcase her as someone who got the spark to become the leader of the human resistance, if not with stature and commanding presence, then using wit and tactics.

I feel like Natalia Reyes could've pulled off Dani's character if the writers would've tailored the character to her to make her feel grounded, but they didn't and now everyone is bashing on she being short and "not leader material", but from my perspective the responsibility for that impression lays squarely on the writers.

Hollywood, WTF you doing? - Time for Judgment

I could be called old fashioned, but I think back in the days movie productions started with having a good, solid story, maybe even a script, with some concept arts, that you can use to sell the idea to the studios, and get it made, but in this case it feels like the process of making Dark Fate came from someone saying "let's make another Terminator movie".

It feels as if they didn't had any concepts or story prepared before someone uttered those words and they only started brainstorming after they've had Linda Hamilton and Schwarzenegger on the hook for making it happen.

As much as I liked Deadpool I feel like it was a mistake to bring in Tim Miller to direct the last shot we've had to see the original cast. Not because his directing abilities but because he clearly had a set vision that is a mismatch to the legacy of T1 and T2.

These times seeming to be the time of wasted opportunities in Hollywood.

They also had the original cast for Star Wars and messed up the opportunity to have their characters reunite for one last chance to shine. And now here we are again, having the chance to bring back iconic characters with the original cast and it is wasted in the pursuit of the all new, "bravely different" vision of rethreading the original story, which is by itself is a contradiction.

They can't be all new and bravely different if they use the old cast for not-rebooting the franchise or not-remaking the first movie, but trying to just make a sequel.

Dark Fate - while having the legit idea of altering the future to unexpected directions and having some interesting concepts along with a solid cast - stinks of sweat because it is trying to be SO different just for the sake of being different WHILE trying to appeal to fans by using the old cast and building on the foundation of T1 and T2 AND ignoring the legacy of those movies.

I really wanted this movie to be good, I gave it a fair shake and - despite having the best chances since T2 - it still it came out as a mess. (Undeniably it makes for a good conversation piece about time travel and artificial intelligence)

I figure it is a time for taking a break, Hollywood.

Ice the franchise for 10-20 years and if you insist on getting money out of it again, maybe make a standalone self-contained story with the basic concept intact, where the machine really feels like a threat and creeps out the viewers and got a hopeful ending. Don't start with the idea of building a franchise on something that wasn't intended to be one.

And if you still decide to build on the solid T1 and T2 again, for the love of god, leave time trave be, and focus on the future war as we seen through the eyes of Reese. People were waiting for it for decades now.

But hey, it creates a market for my stories taking place in the future war!

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