Terminator : Dark Fate (2019)
Just to sort of get this off my chest: I FUCKING HATED how “Dark Fate” (2019) just wrote off John Connor like he was an ant easily squashed. As Edward Furlong said: they just smoked his ass. It left such a bad taste and I really couldn’t just include it as a part of the first two Terminator films because I felt “The Terminator” (1984) and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) have always been perfectly fine on their own as a team without any other sequel accompanying them. That certainly doesn’t change after watching “Dark Fate”. Now, after saying that, I thought the cast was uniformly excellent. I won’t take a single thing away from Hamilton (she is left with a lot of “Oh, fuck” and “Oh, shit” lines as the newest “Legion” machine sent forward in time to kill the newest “savior of humankind in the future” just keeps coming), Mackenzie Davis (as a human “upgraded” and sent back in time to help defend John’s “replacement” in the war against evil AI), Natalia Reyes (the replacement, who I thought was really, really good), and Schwarzenegger (a different Sky Net killing machine that was left on earth after his orders to kill John Connor were carried out, adopting a human persona as Carl, the paint guy, with a woman and her son from an abusive husband, regretting his programming once he sees how wrong his actions were years on earth in Laredo, Texas) as the leads. And special mention to Diego Boneta, as Reyes’ doomed brother, helping them early on in the film when Gabriel Luna’s REV-9 killing machine (very similar to Robert Patrick’s T2 cybernetic, seemingly unstoppable T-1000) tries to kill Reyes in their South of the Border car manufacturing building. I thought the car chases were better than what I read from those very critical of the film even if a lot of the underwater action did nothing for me. Davis as the protector with flaws (she is “built” for “bursts” and needs a certain cocktail of medications to “recharge”) acts her ass off in the film, often clashing with Hamilton, who is just fed up with being a fugitive and all the AI Terminator danger. I enjoyed, actually, how Arnold’s Carl actually helped to provide Hamilton with coordinates and location help to keep the Terminators at bay until the Luna model (the kind that can actually split in two, doubling the trouble) became a bit too difficult to contend with on her own. There is plenty of Reyes being told she must be kept alive although she tires of being corralled when she wants to help Davis and Hamilton during their struggles with Luna’s REV-9, vehicle pursuits, border crossing peril (I wondered to myself if Miller and his script writing team purposely chose to obliterate Border Patrol agents as catharsis because the REV-9 lays waste to a whole bunch of them), the usual exploded buildings, massive trucks barreling through traffic (and plenty of structural integrity of bridges and buildings and roads “compromised”), and even planes targeting our heroes. But the overabundance of CGI in all these sequels and the efforts put into overcomplicating what the future holds and how to alter the horrors that lie ahead always leave me appreciating the films I grew up with, realizing that the franchise just needs to be allowed to retire. Nothing against the cast and Miller…a lot of hard work did go into this, although all of the CGI poured into it reminded me of “Genisys” and “Salvation”. Liquid metal revealing that human skin is a lie and a metal skull hides underneath was so neat back in 1991 but as of now, we have seen it so much the bloom is off the rose. I think it is just time to call it a day. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Hamilton on screen and Arnold was fun in his appearance in the second half of the film, getting to right a wrong committed against John (“For John”) in helping to put down the ever-charging, practically indestructible REV-9. That animosity Hamilton feels and the fatigue is related by her effectively…she just wants to kill Arnold and understandably so. Davis, the physical demands and her getting across the human side to always override the technology that allows her to stay in the fight, was great casting. The “woke criticism” the film faced: I could give a shit about who was cast in terms of gender or nationality, these ladies put in the work and it showed. Arnold was a nice addition and was in just enough, I thought, to leave an impression. And Arnold was in super physical condition, too. Reyes, to me, was a very strong actress with a lot of charisma. When she confronts Hamilton and Davis about doing more than just hiding behind their protection, it is thrilling to see that leadership quality just “arrive” and it wasn’t a stretch to visualize her as a rock, a pillar that others could count on. 2.5/5
*The plane to plane action sequence was a bit CGI overload to me and Luna taking the form of others, killing the humans it replicates, is so similar to the T-1000, and it's again so beholden to extreme CGI. A lot of money was definitely spent but the film looks like a video game.
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