beer_good_foamy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beer_good_foamy) wrote2019-10-27 06:54 pm
beer_good_foamy) wrote2019-10-27 06:54 pm
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Terminator: Dark Fate
So I just got home from watching Terminator: Dark Fate and I have Thoughts. Slight mild spoilers.
OK, like a lot of people, my relationship with the Terminator franchise has gone up and down a bit. I originally watched Terminator for the first time shortly before I saw Terminator 2 back when it came out (yeah, I'm old). Watching T2 on opening weekend was one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life; the whole audience standing up and screaming the moment Arnold's auxiliary power kicks in. Those two movies are incredible; the tight, grimy action of Terminator and the grand, emotional spectacle of T2, not to mention the incredible catharsis of watching T2 in 1991, when a different world suddenly seemed possible, when the idea of stopping nuclear holocaust seemed real even with the time-travelling robots.
Then came the cynical Terminator 3, whose ending I want to like more than I can; I still believe in those words a desperate Sarah Connor carved in a table somewhere in the desert, and T3 seemed like one long ripoff of T2 leading up to a sucker punch we didn't deserve.
Then things diverged; we got the quite good but much too short Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series (see this vid, rec'd bymaia), and on the feature side, we got Terminator: Salvation which made the huge mistake of actually putting adult John Connor front and centre and having to show why he was so important (turns out it was mostly shouting at soldiers until they did they obvious thing), and the unbelievably messy Terminator: Phil Collins which was just... confusing.
But the thing most of the post-T2 movie canon missed was obvious: Sarah Connor. (OK, so Phil Collins has a Sarah Connor, but...) The whole point of Terminator and T2 wasn't John Connor as a messiah, but John Connor as a representative of the generation that would never get to live if the apocalypse happened. Sarah Connor was the single teenage mom having to fight for not just herself but for everyone, who sees that the WORLD will end and focuses that on her son. Without her, John Connor is just another shmoe with an opinion on how to fix the world, and the Terminator canon an increasingly bizarre list of time travel paradoxes. (Viz this beautiful little fic by zmarlowe.)
It's like a giant strobe light, burning right through my eyes, but somehow I can still see. Oh, God. Look, you know the dream's the same every night, why do I have to--? The children look like burnt paper, black, not moving. And then, the blast wave hits them and they fly apart like leaves. It's not a dream, you moron. It's real. I know the date it happens! On August 29th, 1997, it's gonna feel pretty fucking real to you, too! Anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day, get it?!
1997 came and went, and we're still here. But, 2019, as the dread of apocalypse once again seems to creep into everything, Sarah Connor returns. Old, wrinkled, grey, and virtually carrying a sign saying "I can't believe I still have to protest this shit". And here's the thing: Terminator: Dark Fate, or Terminator VI if you will, works. It's not a masterpiece, but it works better than any of the three movies that preceded it, and better than it has a right to.
Much like Jamie Lee Curtis' return as Laurie Strode in Halloween last year (my thoughts here) Linda Hamilton repeating her most famous role is partly about handing it over to a new generation; about reminding them of who came before, the lessons, what doesn't change - and what does. Like that movie, Dark Fate is almost aggressively women-fronted: Hamilton, McKenzie Davies (you might know her from San Junipero, this is... different) as a soldier sent from the future, and Natalia Reyes as the teenage girl they both have to protect to make sure the rebellion happens, because the past always repeats itself (or so it seems). And then the movie starts having fun with our preconceived ideas of how and why that will happen, while Cameron and Tim Miller deliver T2-inspired action sequences almost non-stop, only one or two of which (we really didn't need that long scene aboard an airplane) seem gratuitous.
One problem the film has is the villain. Apart from having an unstoppable nanobot terminator, the supercomputer Legion (Skynet was stopped back in 1991, remember?) remains a very vague threat. In 1991, the threat was nuclear holocaust. In 2019, with everything as politicized and compartmentalized as it is, the movie can't really spell out any one real-world threat, so it just goes "It's the Internet, somehow!" and lets the viewer take whatever they want from it. Which is how you get a movie with an illegal Mexican immigrant for a hero and a passionate pro-second amendment speech.
But then again, that may also be the film's strength. Without having to dig into the exact mechanics of what may or may not happen in the future, what it delivers is great action, (mostly) great character work, and a message of hope that's sorely needed. This is, after three movies of telling us the future is written (or so confusing nobody can know what it is), a movie that says it matters what happens now, what choices you make now, whether you work together or turn on each other.
Plus, it reminds us that you fuck with Sarah Connor at your own risk.
So, yeah. Not perfect, not quite up there with the first two, but one of the best action movies I've seen in a while, and a movie that makes me happy, makes me punch the air and then keep a fist in my pocket as I walk out. I don't know if I'll still tear up at it 28 years from now the way I still do with T2, but for now it feels good.
OK, like a lot of people, my relationship with the Terminator franchise has gone up and down a bit. I originally watched Terminator for the first time shortly before I saw Terminator 2 back when it came out (yeah, I'm old). Watching T2 on opening weekend was one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life; the whole audience standing up and screaming the moment Arnold's auxiliary power kicks in. Those two movies are incredible; the tight, grimy action of Terminator and the grand, emotional spectacle of T2, not to mention the incredible catharsis of watching T2 in 1991, when a different world suddenly seemed possible, when the idea of stopping nuclear holocaust seemed real even with the time-travelling robots.
Then came the cynical Terminator 3, whose ending I want to like more than I can; I still believe in those words a desperate Sarah Connor carved in a table somewhere in the desert, and T3 seemed like one long ripoff of T2 leading up to a sucker punch we didn't deserve.
Then things diverged; we got the quite good but much too short Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series (see this vid, rec'd by
maia), and on the feature side, we got Terminator: Salvation which made the huge mistake of actually putting adult John Connor front and centre and having to show why he was so important (turns out it was mostly shouting at soldiers until they did they obvious thing), and the unbelievably messy Terminator: Phil Collins which was just... confusing.But the thing most of the post-T2 movie canon missed was obvious: Sarah Connor. (OK, so Phil Collins has a Sarah Connor, but...) The whole point of Terminator and T2 wasn't John Connor as a messiah, but John Connor as a representative of the generation that would never get to live if the apocalypse happened. Sarah Connor was the single teenage mom having to fight for not just herself but for everyone, who sees that the WORLD will end and focuses that on her son. Without her, John Connor is just another shmoe with an opinion on how to fix the world, and the Terminator canon an increasingly bizarre list of time travel paradoxes. (Viz this beautiful little fic by zmarlowe.)
It's like a giant strobe light, burning right through my eyes, but somehow I can still see. Oh, God. Look, you know the dream's the same every night, why do I have to--? The children look like burnt paper, black, not moving. And then, the blast wave hits them and they fly apart like leaves. It's not a dream, you moron. It's real. I know the date it happens! On August 29th, 1997, it's gonna feel pretty fucking real to you, too! Anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day, get it?!
1997 came and went, and we're still here. But, 2019, as the dread of apocalypse once again seems to creep into everything, Sarah Connor returns. Old, wrinkled, grey, and virtually carrying a sign saying "I can't believe I still have to protest this shit". And here's the thing: Terminator: Dark Fate, or Terminator VI if you will, works. It's not a masterpiece, but it works better than any of the three movies that preceded it, and better than it has a right to.
Much like Jamie Lee Curtis' return as Laurie Strode in Halloween last year (my thoughts here) Linda Hamilton repeating her most famous role is partly about handing it over to a new generation; about reminding them of who came before, the lessons, what doesn't change - and what does. Like that movie, Dark Fate is almost aggressively women-fronted: Hamilton, McKenzie Davies (you might know her from San Junipero, this is... different) as a soldier sent from the future, and Natalia Reyes as the teenage girl they both have to protect to make sure the rebellion happens, because the past always repeats itself (or so it seems). And then the movie starts having fun with our preconceived ideas of how and why that will happen, while Cameron and Tim Miller deliver T2-inspired action sequences almost non-stop, only one or two of which (we really didn't need that long scene aboard an airplane) seem gratuitous.
One problem the film has is the villain. Apart from having an unstoppable nanobot terminator, the supercomputer Legion (Skynet was stopped back in 1991, remember?) remains a very vague threat. In 1991, the threat was nuclear holocaust. In 2019, with everything as politicized and compartmentalized as it is, the movie can't really spell out any one real-world threat, so it just goes "It's the Internet, somehow!" and lets the viewer take whatever they want from it. Which is how you get a movie with an illegal Mexican immigrant for a hero and a passionate pro-second amendment speech.
But then again, that may also be the film's strength. Without having to dig into the exact mechanics of what may or may not happen in the future, what it delivers is great action, (mostly) great character work, and a message of hope that's sorely needed. This is, after three movies of telling us the future is written (or so confusing nobody can know what it is), a movie that says it matters what happens now, what choices you make now, whether you work together or turn on each other.
Plus, it reminds us that you fuck with Sarah Connor at your own risk.
So, yeah. Not perfect, not quite up there with the first two, but one of the best action movies I've seen in a while, and a movie that makes me happy, makes me punch the air and then keep a fist in my pocket as I walk out. I don't know if I'll still tear up at it 28 years from now the way I still do with T2, but for now it feels good.
no subject
Honestly, Sarah Connor Chronicles is probably the biggest reason I'm not going to see Dark Fate. But I will rewatch T2, because it's been almost ten years for me now, and every moment of it will always take me back to that transcendental experience in a darkened theater so many more years ago. And I'll continue to dream of Linda and Ron Perlman getting together to film a short but touching tribute to Beauty and the Beast, which I've been dreaming of since Bryan and Jane K did the "alternate ending to Breaking Bad".
no subject
And yeah, it bugs me that this movie very clearly decanonizes both the other post-T2 movies and the TV series, but hey, it's a time travel story so they're always going to have happened in other universes.
And I'll continue to dream of Linda and Ron Perlman getting together to film a short but touching tribute to Beauty and the Beast, which I've been dreaming of since Bryan and Jane K did the "alternate ending to Breaking Bad".
Heh. I'd love that.
no subject
I haven't seen the movie yet, probably won't until it's released to DVD, but it's always intriguing to hear these experiences and how context matters.
a movie that says it matters what happens now, what choices you make now, whether you work together or turn on each other.
An important enough message. I'd guess McKenzie was chosen more from her role in Halt and Catch Fire.
no subject
no subject
a movie that says it matters what happens now, what choices you make now, whether you work together or turn on each other.
Knowing that this is the message of the movie makes me far, far, more inclined to go see it.
no subject
Yeah. For all of T3s faults and strengths, that's the one that really bugs me; first they kill her in the beginning (offscreen, even), then they kill her idea in the end. This is Sarah's story, damnit.
Hope you like it if you do get to see it. Like I said, it's not quite up there with the first two, but it comes a lot closer than any of the other movies have.