Terminator: Dark Fate. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Terminator: Dark Fate indeed lives up to its name. It is not only a blisteringly dark fate for this once storied franchise, but it also in many ways captures the dark fate of America’s mindless capitalism, a society in thrall to meaninglessly regurgitated pop culture symbols stripped of all that once made them great and then smashed out in great dithering waves to please a public that no longer knows what it wants and wonders why the things it has are so empty inside.
Terminator Dark Fate is awful, terrible, putrid, insulting garbage. It was always probably destined to be that way, given what the last three films in the franchise were, and considering that most franchises are doomed to diminishing returns over time. And yet, foolishly, in some corners of the world where men are beasts and beasts are just the remnants of God’s light, hope endured. Hope that with James Cameron and Linda Hamilton returning to the project, it might be good. Hope that maybe with Deadpool’s Tim Miller signed on to direct, it might be good.
But sometimes hope is just another fool’s delusion. And so it was. The first indication that this movie was going to be bad was that David S. Goyer wrote it. If we are being charitable, we might say that Goyer has contributed to some films that were good in the past. But his most recent credit was as the screenwriter for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, not just one of the worst super hero movies ever made, but truly a mark against human progress that a group of people, collectively, could have all looked at that script at any stage in the production process and believed that it deserved to be made into a movie. The other sign of trouble was when it was announced Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be in it.
I have nothing against Arnold, and I suppose from the studio’s perspective it would have been sacrilege not to include him. But from a story-telling perspective - What would make this a good story? - it was always going to be nearly impossible to shoe-horn him into the story. Why? Because the Terminator is an unstoppable, super-human force. That’s why Arnold, with his expressionless god-like physique, was perfectly cast in the original. It’s why turning him into the good guy in Terminator 2 was such a stroke of genius. He played the perfect character, and then that character was inverted perfectly.
But now Arnold is old. He is no longer an embodiment of unstoppable antagonist inertia. He has been, quite visibly, slowed if not stopped by time. And de-aging him would have been a disaster, as Will Smith just found out in Gemini Man. So there weren’t really any good options. But nobody wants to see Old Terminator. It’s just… not something we want to see. An aging, but still badass Sarah Connor? That works because Sarah Connor is, and always has been, a human character. So seeing how the passage of time has effected her, but not dulled her edge, was pretty awesome and also very human. But Old Man Terminator? It was never, ever going to work. We don’t care if this machine has found some semblance of peaceful repose in the long tail of age. That was never a role this character could fill.
That was a puzzle the story was going to struggle to solve no matter what. But it still doesn’t excuse how shoddy the rest of the film’s structure is. This movie just takes the template from the first two films and re-uses it, full stop. Instead of John Connor, now we have some new and totally forgettable future leader of the resistance who needs to be saved and we have a new guardian from the future and a new terminator trying to get them. Literally the only change is that the new terminator is a combination of the old terminator but this time with a liquid metal exterior. That was the idea these buffoons came up with. We’ll just take the terminators from the first two movies and, wait for it guys this is gonna blow your mind, we will combine them.
What kind of creatively bankrupt brain trust would come up with such an insultingly unoriginal idea? And then they just go through the motions, but with even shittier CGI than Cameron used in 1991. It’s an appallingly bad film on every level. I hated Terminator: Dark Fate. I despised it. I mean, a bad movie is a bad movie. But this movie takes everything that was so good about the first two terminator movies - the imagery, the narrative structure, the characters, the ideas - and just recycles them in a shameless money grab that assumes the audience will be too brain dead to realize what is being done to them. It is an insipid, garbage film unworthy of the pedigree and I fucking hated every second of it.
