Last year the gazillionth Terminator sequel hit theaters. It was greenlit by James Cameron who deemed it the third Terminator movie he always envisioned. Its first reviews were positive overall, painting a picture of a film that basically rehashes the story of Terminator: Judgement Day but adapts it for a modern audience. We decided to watch it yesterday and low and behold, it was one of the worst films we have ever seen.
Terminator: Judgement Day is basically my sister’s favorite movie of all time. She loves science-fiction movies, you see. To prove my point, her previous favorite movie was Interstellar. We were excited, and yeah, Terminator: Dark Fate started with a jaw-dropping bang, but it became very clear very fast that whoever wrote the movie didn’t understand what made the first two Terminator films so special; an amazing story.
Terminator is not a Transformers flick. You can’t just dump a bucket load of a high-octane action, provide no storyline, and expect people to have fun. Terminator movies are well-written, emotional stories that just so happen to be great action films as well.
Newcomers Mackenzie Davis and Gabriel Luna are this film’s from-the-future characters; Davis being an enhanced human named Grace come back to save a girl named Dani and Luna being an uber-annoying Terminator who kills with impunity and has a Texan accent of course assigned to kill teenage Dani.
The film is predictable from beginning to end, the action scenes after the first major are no longer engaging and only drag the movie along. For 80% of the movie we don’t get an answer to why teenage Dani needs to be protected by enhanced warrior Grace and when we do get an answer it’s a bunch of feminist crap that had me rolling my eyes.
Linda Hamilton returns as Sarah Connor but the writers don’t incorporate her into the story in a seamless fashion. There’s a scene where she comes face to face with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800, now known as Carl, (they aren’t allies anymore, they’re enemies for a very personal reason) and instead of having her wallop him like she should she was just standing around looking furious and using the F-word to describe him every now and then. I was flabbergasted and very angry.
I don’t know why I tortured myself and forced myself to watch this movie until the end. It was like a dumpster fire I couldn’t seem to stop staring at. As the movie continued I got madder and madder until by the end I literally refused to watch a certain scene because it was just too maddening to handle.
I think after that debacle, it’s safe to say that there shouldn’t be anymore Terminator movies. The first two were perfect…leave it at that…please!
I’m giving this movie 1 out of 5 stars (and that’s only for the beginning) and 20 out of 100. It’s undoubtedly one of the worst sequels I have ever seen.
Have you seen Terminator: Dark Fate? If so, tell me what you think in the comments below.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a spectacular day.
Annlyel Online 
Yeah… Terminator, at its best, is not just a movie where humans and machines blow each other up. It’s a movie about the state of human condition and what makes us better than machines, yet examines our own failings as societies and how we might turn too much to machines without considering the consequences if they decide their goals aren’t the same as ours. This is a story that can absolutely be done well still… but we have to recognize why and where.
In the 80s and early 90s, this was easy: we had a Cold War environment where the idea of a defense computer going rogue once it was given full control of the nuclear arsenal and realized that humans were afraid of its existence wasn’t that hard to imagine. Today, that threat would look different, most likely coming out of the AI driven things that Big Tech is running, and what could happen if one of those went rampant and decided that merely selling humans’ data to other humans isn’t good enough and decided to start misdirecting and ultimately dominating humans against our own best interests.
However, the dynamics of that story wouldn’t necessarily look the same as the original Terminator movies. It would be a more nuanced and complex dynamic than a Cold War defense computer wiping out humanity in half an hour, and would likely involve more of a Black Mirror like universe of deep fakes and manipulation of information to first take over without us realizing it, and then perhaps revealing that android agents are ready to enforce its will more overtly when we resist. This might look more akin to the virtual world of the Matrix with Terminators replacing Agent Smith and without the real world being hidden in Descartian fashion.
…This feels a lot like a post I should write on my own blog. 😓
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I’ll read it!
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Ok. Well, I’ll have to torture myself with Dark Fate myself first, just so I can see how this one failed too. That said… I feel like the Terminator movies are possible to reboot and update to a place where they feel more relevant to the potential for tech to go horribly wrong today, more so than the Aliens movies are, to borrow another contemporary 80s series that’s also gone rather off the rails. You can take the Cold War out of Terminator and make it fit the ways rampant AI could wreck our world in 2020 without needing to screw it around the world the two good movies existed in 1984 and 1991. It’s possible that you’d have to put a different name on such a Terminator movie, but it could still at least be recognizable as a movie about rampant AI that exploits our greed and fear to turn on us using robotic assassins that pretend to be human. Whereas Aliens… well, there’s only so much you can do with body horror that exploits violent and terrifying sexual metaphors before it becomes cliche.
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