What a totally empty movie, a shell of what came before it, and not much better than the entries after 2.
Seeing Linda Hamilton be a grouchy, no-fucks-given action star was good, but nowhere near captivating or versatile enough to carry the over 2 hour runtime.
Mackenzie was decent, but spent most of her screentime either overheating or rolling on the floor in pain. This is the augmented super soldier you send back to protect your only hope? Wish they'd given her more time to be badass and cemented herself as a force to be reckoned with.
Arnie was great and was kinda used as Tim's comic relief stand-in. There is some decent one liners and Arnies delivery fits this perfectly. I enjoyed the spin on his character and what he has become, even if it wasn't fully realised outside of some emotional baggage to give the ending added weight.
Everything else is just popcorn fodder. Loud, sometimes slick, sometimes cumbersome action scenes that feel mashed together with very little coherency or requirement. Nothing stands out as a defining moment or that the movie is finally hitting its stride. It just feels like a bunch of individual scenes inspired by the original movies but without any of the innovation or polish. Like going to see your favourite band and finding out you got a tribute act. Sure, they can play the songs, but it lacks any of the original authenticity.
The story retreads the same ground its prequels walked much, much better; do yourself a favour and just rewatch T1 and T2.
"For John."
'Dark Fate' was meh. I mean it's basically the Force Awakens of the franchise just more cash grab. Like...how many times can they keep alternating T1 & T2, and yet it's astounding that it never ruins the legacy of the series.
Despite all that, it's the third best in the series. At least this movie knows that Terminator is not for kids! I had some engagement in the movie, even through the reason being that it follows a familiar plot line.
Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger are both the stand outs. Hamilton playing a cranky bad-ass and Arnold playing an involved machine that has a life of his own. Mackenzie Davis was surprisingly not as annoying as I thought she will be just from the marketing alone. Her character was straight forward in terms of motivation and can take damage.
Tim Miller really knows how to direct action scenes effectively and in this movie he delivers some grand action set pieces. However, after seeing the movie a few days ago, only a small selection stick to memory.
Gabriel Luna did a decent job playing the new advance Terminator. They took the "Robert Patrick" approach with picking an ordinary looking guy and making him into the biggest threat of humanity. Although it was a bit hard for me to feel threaten by him as throughout the movie he seemed easily out match by pretty much everyone.
I didn't really buy into Dani played by Natalia Reyes as the main "saviour of the future", mainly because of her stiff acting and everytime she holds a gun it's twice her size.
The visual effects at times looked pretty OK, but the rest looked really bad. It really doesn't help when there's close ups on the effects where you can see the fakeness. At times the movie was a little too dark and I don't mean in tone, just whenever it's night time.
Overall rating: Not as great as T1 & T2, but nothing will without James Cameron magic touch.
Tim Miller, your career is over.
Cameron, you have created your own Alien: Covenant. Now, I have an interesting relationship with this film, before it was even announced. I liked Genisys quite a lot. I've liked all of the sequels past Terminator 2, especially the action heavy and emotional Terminator 3 that takes up the responsibility of carrying the development of it's lead, John Connor, and expanding on that. John in that film has brought the trials and understandings from the Terminator's sacrifice at the end and understands that a Terminator can grasp the concept of the value of human life. That part of him is still there, which is why he can accept another T-850 has come back to protect him and he doesn't stay prejudiced to it the entire film. The new challenge has to take up is his responsibility as the leader of the future resistance. He's run away and he's living off the grid, but over the course of the film, leading up to the brilliant ending, has accepted that he must come forth and take the mantel of leading humanity to ultimate victory. That is what his mother taught him, which is why I could accept her being killed off screen, because her development had been completed in the second film, John had a new burden to overcome, it was his journey by that point.
So tell me why this is acceptable. Why has it become accepted in our society that we can just throw a number of films, all with different creative leads, teams, and producers, under the bus and say they were all terrible, and this new version being created is the true sequel to what are supposedly universally accepted films, determined somehow. This botched move is what killed the 2018 Halloween reboot, which for some reason felt the urge to make the original sequel and Season of the Witch no longer canon, which makes no sense and it's a slap in the face to the original lore, just cause some redditors thought it was "a little silly" Michael and Laurie are siblings, even though Michael had a sister in the opening scene. There was no reason to remove the second from existence and it's put the franchise in a creative dead end, resulting in many logic gaps and ridiculous connections. You begin to realize this is all a tactic, this is the new remake craze like what was going on in the 2000's. Instead of just remaking the classics to varying degrees of quality, the new explosion of bait and switch is making a "correct" version of the original, i.e. in sequel form or reboot. This has happened with Star Wars, Digimon Tri, Scooby-Doo, Ghostbusters, Voltron, and so many more. It's become a franchise wasteland out there, with every company ready to kill off whatever it was you loved in your childhood. It's ripe for picking.
Dark Fate decides to forgo any profit from the Chinese market and any fans that may have been forged out of the 440 million profits of Genisys and ops to wipe the slate clean again, for some reason. Think about it, five was all about multiverse hopping and time travel, different timelines interconnecting, it actually explains away some time paradoxes created from previous films, because now anything can happen. Other characters can exist in new timelines and kill blood related family and suffer no consequences. Anything is possible with what Genisys introduced, but no, it's better to kill the potential golden goose. I was even cool with John Connor becoming a villain in his respective timeline, because a) it throws the development back on to Sarah and Kyle struggling with the idea of their child, originally prophesied to be the savior of humanity, now villain, and b) a good John Connor could still exist in another timeline. The floodgates of crossovers and mayhem were opened.
But, 'kay, fine, let's throw all that talk out the window. Cameron is back, Tim Miller is on board (yay?), David S. Goyer is writing, we're just getting rid of everything creative that was done before and going back to "basics." What does that entail. How is the brilliant writer's room going to top all out of the outings that it has to top, and prove that it's worthy enough of saying it is better than all of them, and it's the true version that should be canon? I know! Kill John Connor four minutes in to the movie. You think I'm joking. Let's have a T-800 walk up to child Johnny, who's a digitally recreated young Edward Furlong, and shoot him in the chest with a shotgun. Brilliant, oh, you guys outdid yourselves. The "mythos" of Terminator are important to them, this is the real Terminator 3 everyone. That's why Terminator 1 and 2's importance and story no longer matter since all the effort of saving Sarah, and then following up the born child, just results in the kid being shot in the chest in under a minute. Hey Cameron, what was that you said about Alien 3? That it was dumb and maybe a little disrespectful to kill your characters, Newt and Hicks unceremoniously? Aren't you being a little hypocritical constantly trashing on that film, yet you just wrote and produced the love child to it? Like, do I even need to continue the review? You've shot yourselves in the foot not even a few minutes in to the film. Sarah I can believe killing off, John was the product of those two films, he is who needs to survive, that was the entire message of Terminator 3, the T-850 sacrificed himself and lied to save John and Kate's lives. He is the backbone of the series, outside of Sarah Connor.
But, 'kay, fine, let's throw John in a lava pit. He doesn't matter. Where do we go from here? Answer is you don't. You know the trend. We have to regress every character's development from the previous entry so we can essentially remake the film with the same script and lesson. Worked so well for Incredibles 2, amiright? Sarah is now back to being a paranoid Terminator expert who doesn't trust a T-800 look-alike because they killed a significant other of hers. In T2 it was Kyle Reese, in this one it's John Connor. What a load of shit. Way to show massive disrespect to the films you claim to be honoring. May I remind you this isn't even really Sarah's film. We haven't even gotten to the new bland leads they've had to scrounge up because there's nothing to go off. So now that Skynet doesn't even exist anymore and John is just dead, we can now just remake the original The Terminator with a new super evil robotic massive conglomerate in the form of something called "Legion," with direct rip-offs of scenes from 3, Salvation, and Genisys, films they claim to hate, but will still copy from. Real class act. This future soldier named Grace is sent back to protect a new leader of the resistance, Dani, a total (wo)manlet that does not look like a feasible leader of the resistance. No disrespect to Natalia Reyes, she seems like a nice actress, but she is horribly miscast. If they had switched around the leads, Davis as the leader and Reyes as the protector, I'd believe it more. But okay, Reyes lives in Mexico and works in a car factory (social commentary), lots of Spanish language is used in the film, an overwhelming amount, and her Papi is taken over by the new Rev-9 terminator in an attempt to kill her at the factory. A Terminator 3 and Genisys ripoff chase ensues and we end up meeting a beaten down Sarah. From there, we just go through the motions of exposition, who are you, who am I, what are we doing, taking cues from some The Terminator deleted scenes, and flashforward glimpses of the surprisingly bland looking Salvation copying future war. That's a thing I really have to deduct points from this movie significantly. Tim Miller, I don't know what happened in your three years from Deadpool but the action in this movie is shockingly bland and boring. How can you make a truck chase that exceedingly tiresome, a finale at the Hoover Dam that anti-climactic and kind of laughable. The CG effects have downgraded so much, it would be Stan Winston to shame, the poor man. Compare the effects in this film to Terminator 3, and it's just evident as an audience, we have accepted lower standards as a thing. We are okay with shiny, video game tier special effects. Especially during the D-Day Saving Private Ryan inspired future war scenes, the Terminators are hideously over shiny. The liquid T-1000 effects in Terminator 2 still look better today, I don't believe for a second this film cost 180 million legitimately, a lot of that was probably forfeited to Linda Hamilton and Arnold, both of whom are on record hating this franchise and wishing it would end.
But okay, we find ourselves in nap inducing action, bland rushed characters, retreaded existing characters, and then we delve in to border hopping. Not making that up either. Sarah is banned in all fifty states for what she's done in the previous films, but since this takes place in Mexico, we can have social commentary about the leads sneaking across the border and getting caught by Border Patrol, and subsequently being held up in psuedo-ICE camps. I'm not even making that up, that's a crux of the film, the Rev-9 joins the Border Patrol (like the T-1000 taking the mantle of a police officer) and hunts them down in an ICE camp. There's even a back in forth with Grace and a patrol officer. "Where are the prisoners?" "They're called detainees." This is where we're at with propaganda. It's okay to illegally border hop because the protagonists of the film are supposedly good people. That's how they're trying to shove this nonsense on to you. It's not even subtle or clever. How can you get the blatant with the reality bending. From there, they hijack a helicopter (Genisys reference) and some more hijinks ensure. They do meet up with the T-800 from the opening scene of the film that killed Johnny. There's some faux deep themes like, can a Terminator understand human life, can it evolve in to a normal functioning person after completing it's mission, all of which were explored in 2 and Genisys better, and then we get in to the final climactic Furious 7 and Rampage rip offed plane finale and Dam showdown. From there, Grace sacrifices herself to save Dani, i.e. Kyle Reese, and the T-800 kills the Rev-9 while saying "For John," which is a bullshit final attempt to show they care about Johnny, which the film doesn't. Then the movie just ends. It just ends, there's nothing more to it. They don't defeat Legion, there's a little scene with a speech Dani gives in the future war, which was done better by John in the opening of Genisys and actually plays off with the role reversal later in the film, this is just a B-grade schlock speech about rising up and shit. Nothing interesting. There's no mid-credits scene, nothing. It just ends. This movie is pointless. There is no point to this movie. Why does it exist? Answer me that. Terminator 3 was about Judgement Day finally coming to fruition and John accepting his fate at a future leader, Genisys was about stopping a new Skynet while Kyle comes to terms with the fact his friend and hero John is now an enemy that must be destroyed. Grace and Dani have no charisma. There is nothing to either of them. Sarah regresses as a character, and Arnold is there to just please the fans. All the while the film just rips off the films it hates.
I would say the only positive of the film, not even much so, is some of Junkie XL's score, he can always put together something halfway decent, but anything else, the cinematography and color grading especially are awful. Nothing pops out of the screen, the lighting is horrible, very bad contrasting, silhouettes, no impressive shots to speak of. This is some of the most amateurish direction I've ever seen in a major studio film, only rivaling Joss Whedon's Age Of Ultron
Cameron, you are on my shit list now. I defended you with Avatar and the recently produced Alita: Battle Angel, my favorite film probably of all time, but this, this is gross. This is another in an evergrowing list of franchises that have been shameless ripped apart and put on display in a freak museum. How much longer do we have to endure this before people say to stop. Don't go see this movie, go watch the other sequels. Terminator 3 needs to be vindicated, it needs to get the respect it's been wrongly taken away from.
Maybe this is the right send-off for this movie anthology...
Better than anything else they've made after the original two Camerons, it's a reasonably enjoyable film that should probably not have been made.
Arnie steals the show when he arrives and it's an interesting twist. I enjoyed it though I can understand others not.
Linda Hamilton didn't need to do this. Let's hope she's happy she came out of anonymity to do it as I would guess her character's storyline is likely in keeping with her own.
The rest of the cast do fine with what they get. And a script that is lacking any real bite.
The action is a touch repetitive and there's a couple of occasions where the CG goes a little overboard. And I cannot stand a frame-rate higher than 24 as it looks like a home-recording or a soap opera.
All in all. Enjoyable enough. Better than I thought it was going to be. It did make think how good it could have been with some James Cameron magic sprinkled on it...
A fitting farewell to the series hopefully, in reuniting the original pair. But time is upon the franchise now.
6.5/10 (shame about the silly high frame rate too)
This one makes me tired of the franchise. A copy of the previous movies with an absolute lack of originality. Bad writing... there's no story beyond "let's stop this enemy together" and "look at how macho we all are". It's pretty equal with Genisys as the worst entry in the franchise but maybe a little worse for me.
The characters look cool and act cool but I have no idea who any of them are. There's no chemistry between them until there finally is in the third act in an attempt to connect them through a flashback—late and convenient. They at least do something different with Arnold this time and his presence added to the movie. The villain was alright but I don't think he carried throughout the entire movie, his powers felt redundant in the third act and I wanted something new.
The special effects get worse and worse with every entry in terms of creativity, it's down to entirely CGI here which is sad. It looks alright for the most part but every once in a while it looks like a video game. The set pieces aren't the most memorable but I did enjoy the plane part, looked and felt like a sequence right out of a Fast & Furious movie... Furious 7 actually.
Before the title card appears, they take a dump on the ending of Terminator 2. It really sucks. It's almost like they wanted to reboot the franchise to start new sequels... that sounds familiar.
Seriously, every Terminator movie after T3 was created to be the first movie of a new trilogy. Then, when the movie underperformed, the sequels were cancelled. It's the same story for Salvation, Genisys, and now Dark Fate. Why can't Hollywood accept that this model isn't working?
Anyway, Terminator: Dark Fate is a 2019 sci-fi action thriller that's just as exciting as its subtitle (which is to say, not very). With each iteration of this franchise, the lore becomes astronomically more complex, all because they need to make a way for Arnold to reprise his role as the T-800 (hence the dump on T2). I was interested to see what they would do with Hamilton returning as Sarah Connor, and they hype her up to be some kind of "Terminator hunter", but she doesn't prove herself to be all that useful in the grand scheme of things. The movie could be made without her character, and almost nothing would be changed. Also, Linda Hamilton's acting felt odd at times.
However, I do like them going back to the roots of the first Terminator for the plot: a seemingly 'nobody' girl is on the run from a machine sent from the future to kill her, and the resistance sent her back a protector. It's simple enough to explain to someone over a water cooler conversation (unlike the plot of, say, Genisys), but effective enough to be the beating heart of the story. I like the design of the new Terminator-- Sorry, REV-9. He's actually menacing whenever he splits from his endo-skeleton, and Gabriel Luna does a great job portraying him. The CGI for REV-9 is actually really solid, and got a couple of "ooh, that's cool!"s out of me. The CGI of him leaping around like some sort of acrobat can sometimes look strange, but as a whole, that whole character is the most solid part of the movie.
The movie itself is kind of boring at parts, and some of the action feels too 'floaty', as if the characters are weightless. It seems like it's only rated R so they can drop a few more f-bombs (which actually felt unnecessary). All in all, it's not bad, but it's a bit rusty. Even though the future of the Terminator franchise is unknown (and we're bound to get another movie in 5-9 years), maybe it's time this tired metal endo-skeleton of a series is put to rest.
Review by Nancy L DraperVIP 8BlockedParent2019-11-04T14:49:07Z— updated 2019-11-06T13:31:00Z
To understand my response to this movie, I need you to understand my history with this franchise. In 1984, a movie came out that I thought I would never be the least bit interested in. I went to see it because my youth group was talking about it and, as their Minister of Christian Education, and their youth leader, I was always interested in interacting with them about the media they consumed so I could challenge their worldview with the cause of Christ. I was completely astonished to fall in love with the love story that was, surprisingly, at the heart of this weird, mechanical, apocalyptic movie. It became one of my favourite movies and I’ve seen it multiple times since then and it still moves me. That movie, of course, was THE TERMINATOR, a straight up 10 out of 10. I have since followed every subsequent addition to the franchise, including the very good TV series, TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES (starring Lena Headley). When this newest piece premiered, revisiting the woman that was the heart of that original movie, now 35 years later, I was at the first viewing of it, with great expectations. And, I found the true character arcs that first drew me to THE TERMINATOR: Sarah Connors (Linda Hamilton) hardened by the fight and grief, rediscovering her purpose, T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) conditioned by years of contact with humans, redeeming his mistakes; Grace (Mackenzie Davis) the self sacrificing warrior, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) finding herself in the echos that call Sarah back to herself. It was all there, plus a stellar threat and some wicked action sequences. So I, unapologetically, give this film a 9 (nostalgic superb) out of 10. [Pre-Apocalyptic Action]