With so many re-boots, re-imaginations of the Terminator franchise, timeline, storyline; its hard to keep up whether the latest instalment, Terminator Dark Fate, offers something new, or repeats the mis-steps of the other movies.
How many times must James Cameron, the director of two of the Terminator movies, come out and put over the latest Terminator movie; only then to put coded messages out in press junkets that he didn’t really much care for the movie. It’s become so bad, that I’m wondering if people can ever take Cameron at his word again.
So what exactly is the issue with The Terminator franchise, why does every other movie after “T2 – Judgement Day” try to retcon other Terminator sequels. Why still do they fall short? And why, does this movie not learn from these mistakes?
Put aside the many writers, re-writes and plot leaks this particular version, or the poor first trailers which did little to sell the movie.
Put aside the snide comments by Youtube! posters who declared that this movie was going broke because it went woke.
I’m not interested in such commentary. Such commentary doesn’t look at what the movie fails to bring; and that is, in my opinion, something new.
The original 1984 Terminator movie can be seen as a horror-thriller-chase movie, it’s sequel, offered multiple strands of character arcs framed by special effects and stunt set pieces.
As many other commentators have stated, the series was pretty much done after T2. Scenes edited from the movie, available through blue-ray, saw an ageing Sarah Connor narrating a hopeful future; and cementing the fact that there is “no fate but what we make“.
This core, central message underscored the whole movie and wrapped the whole series up. And yet, despite this; producers in Hollywood still wanted to make money from this. I can understand why, but from a story point of view, there is little direction the series can move to.
I’ve heard ideas from people that the third movie should be about a whole army of Terminator’s being sent to the past, or that the entire movie should be set in the future war that we see glimpses of in Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. Whilst both ideas are different, unless they wrap up the John Connor storyline, they too fall pray to breaking the idea of “no fate“.
If we look at Dark Fate, the core message of “no fate” is killed within moments of the first movie by a poor writing decision to eliminate a key figure from the storyline. This decision undoes the second movie, to the point that it ignores the central core message for its own end, to sell more tickets.
This is the key issue that all the other sequels also employ: They must ignore the issue of no fate, because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. There must be no end, storyline be damned.
So why does every movie following T-2 seem to fall short of audience expectations, and why does every movie seem to want to retcon the central core theme, and seem to want to retread steps.
Even in Dark Fate, the movie retreads steps that we’ve already seen in previous incarnations. They replace SkyNet with another AI; which is SkyNet in all but name only. They reheat themes, beats and storylines from other movies. They remove key figures from the mythos, only to replace them with other people that are exactly the same.
Whilst I’m sure most of these have been done to lay the foundations for another set of Terminator movies, I for one, am not sure if the series is already damaged, that it was already lost; and it doesn’t matter how many times it attempts to fix its own timeline, it can’t seem to bring anything new.
The one thing that connects this movie with other movies (be it the Ghostbusters remake, Star Wars, or others), is the use of nostalgia marketing to draw audiences.
I’m sure Dark Fate will have its audience, it will draw ticket sales and fans worldwide; however, it’s not for me.