That reminds me. I forgot to talk about one last thing in my review.
In the C5 plane's cockpit, just before the REV-9 catches up to them in a refueling C5 plane, this is where they have the "big twist" and reveal that Dani is not only not the mother of the future, she is the one who rescued Grace in the future. This tiny woman subdued 3/4 people by herself--a black woman with a knife and two other guys--with the fourth (a white dude) pointing a gun at her. The only reason he didn't fire was because of the HKs hovering overhead.
By the way, in the first future flashback Grace had earlier in the film, we see the new Resistance riding in a very SkyNet-esque VTOL carrier with articulating arms holding the engines. This is the same "HK" carrier we see in the trailer flying over the truck with a skull that rolls off into a puddle.
So anyways, she points out that it's an HK to the guy and has an argument with him:
Dani: "This is what Legion wants us to do: Fight amongst each other. We need to band together"
Guy: "What's the point? We can't win."
Dani: "Why? Because an AI says we can't? Because it's our fate? Well,
fuck fate."
So he lowers his gun and she returns the woman's knife, says hi to Grace, and then walks outside to a bombed-out city street, where a bunch of the Neo-Resistance fighters pop out of the rubble. This is such a shallow & stupidly executed power moment for her. Why didn't she go in with reinforcements? She could've been shot in the head. It's the same kind of unnecessary emotional scene we got between a young Kyle Reese and a much older John Connor in Genisys. But I haven't gotten to the end of this yet.
So as we're seeing Dani walk out to her troops, Grace is explaining to Dani what she did in the future. This is what she said:
Grace: "You taught us that there is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
Sarah: " ... you're John. ... You're John."
This is the moment where Sarah realizes she was wrong, in her internalized misogyny, about Dani being the new "Mother Mary".
This is probably the dumbest scene in the movie, the T-800's final "For John" coming in a close second. This was not made for fans of T1 and T2. This is made for social justice warriors: people who hate genuine fans and nerds, shills and beta-orbiter cucks, and empty-headed, narcissistic, envious, spiteful third-wave feminists.
Let's go back for a moment and trace where the iconic phrase actually came from:
This is what everyone saw in 1984-1985. According to Wikipedia, the first home release was on VHS and BetaMax in 1985, and the first laserdisc edition came out in 1995. I believe this is where the general public first got to see this deleted scene, which Cameron probably cut to save its content for the planned sequel:
Depending on when this deleted scene was released, the first time everyone heard the "No fate" line was from John in T2, wherein he attributed it to Kyle as a message given to him by John in the future:
So depending on which cut of T1 you consider canon, the actual quote came from Sarah. She just rephrased what Kyle told her. So that's pretty much what Grace did with Dani's "fuck fate" line. I'm gonna agree with Dani here on this: Fuck this "Dark Fate". Even deleted scenes from T1 are more emotionally resonant than anything in this trash film.
Also:
However, at the highway scene, I was convinced up to this point that when she deflected the rebar thrown at her by the REV-9, she inadvertently impaled Dani's brother. I think what actually happened is the rebar embedded itself somewhere in front of the brother without impaling him, but when he lost control of the car and crashed into the highway barrier, the rebar bent and went right into his gut/liver. So, here's my suggestion: Grace is an enhanced human with drastically better reflexes, right? Have her catch the shitting rebar instead of deflecting it like a re:tard.
I have to reiterate this again, in the context of another scene later where Dani meets with her coyote uncle. In this scene, the way Grace proves Dani right about a killer cyborg chasing them is she slices a fly clean in half with a switch blade. She is perfectly calm in this scene, eating her lunch. Not in any away engaged in high-metabolism battle mode. So, taking this into account, it makes absolutely no sense why wouldn't have caught the rebar the REV-9 threw back at her. Dani's brother's death was nonsense.
Dark Fate might have worked out for audiences had Salvation and Genysis not existed, but they unfortunately do.
Killing John in the opening act would've been a harder pill to swallow back then, I'd wager. Unless you meant if it came out today, but it's the first Terminator film since 2003. In that case, I think it'd mostly play out the same.
Wow, it bombed? Who knew it would, what with it's barely being marketed besides the trumpeting of how it features STRAHNK WAHMEN, and the usual "ha ha look at all of the MANBABIES who are SCARED of STRONG WAHMEN" garbage.
There was an article I posted a few pages back talking about how Paramount was the studio that spent the most marketing any movie in this year, if not in the past decade or two. That movie just so happened to be Dark Fate, which explains all the commercials, couple billboards, and the promotional goodies I've seen for it.
What is striking is how mediocre and toothless all these films that followed Terminator and Terminator 2 are. You can't even take the Terminators seriously, they're like characters from a Saturday morning cartoon. The Arnold in Terminator and even Terminator 2 as the "good guy" is foreboding; that scene where John realizes suddenly he has to stop him from killing those two guys he just wanted to mess with is a fantastic scene. In all these newer films the violence is the same overly CGI'ed weightless violence that totally lacks in any visceral-ness and Arnold is cracking lame jokes in between overly CGI'ed fights with some TOTALLY NEW AND MENACING model of Terminator that isn't even a tenth as menacing as Robert Patrick running after a car.
At the time T3 came out, the superhero and CG-heavy films were starting to pick up. We had the Star Wars Prequels and Fox's X-Men movies in full swing, so even well before the MCU craze began, we had Terminator having to compete with these popular films, as well as itself. So I think this was the start of studios and/or directors attempting to turn the Terminator--both the franchise and the character itself--into a superhero-level threat. This would be the ongoing trend until present-day.
"Haha, look at these manbabies, being scared of STRANG WAHMANZ, these losers! Can't handle a bit of not being in the limelight! This is absolutely groundbreaking, we've never seen such strong female lead characters EVER before! Of course these crybabies whining about their childhood being ruined will just piss themselves and take their money elsewh- ... wait... Joker made HOW MUCH MONEY?!"
Gave you a
just for that.
The problem is that they want to copy Marvel's style of grand, outlandish action sequences. But that's not Terminator. Terminator isn't really about doing flips and stunts and shit - at least not the kind you'd see in Iron Man. The Terminator has to be something that gets slammed by a truck going 70mph and shrug that off without even limping, but he doesn't have to do kicks and flips while doing so.
Contrast modern Action sequences with the impact of the killing scenes in Joker. When Arthur stabs his former co-worker with scissors, you can't help but whince, since it feels very grounded and realistic.
Terminator movies should try to do that. You need to contrast the vulnerability of a normal human person with the invulnerability of the Terminator. Sure, it looks neat when two superhuman characters beat each other up with sledgehammers, but does that really carry any impact on the viewer?
Absolutely not. It's the same reason people are tired of CG: they spot it immediately and it flips a switch in the brain that says, "Oh, alright. This is a cartoon. I'm watching a cartoon. Or a videogame."
The loss of that visual, dramatic realism just cuts the Terminator franchise at the knees.
Mind you, I'm the kind of guy that loved the Zod vs Superman fight in Man of Steel, but only because it resembled DBZ better than the actual Dragon Ball film that came out years prior.
The Terminator franchise has had that problem since T2. If you've got two bulletproof robots shooting each other for two hours, where is the tension?
@Commander X and
@RomanesEuntDomus already gave good answers to this, but I would argue that you could make another Terminator movie with the same machines we've seen before. You could even go lower-tech. The idea is creating situations and set pieces we haven't seen before. We've seen the big canal chase in T2 by day, and the police-chase by night in T1. We've seen a chopper chasing a truck in T2, and a motorcycle chasing a truck in T1. The key is not just another chase when you switch vehicles or scale it up even higher, to the point where you need lots of CG to pull it off convincingly. The key may be copying something from old horror films instead. Maybe it's in simply not knowing that you're watching a Terminator movie, where the killer is merely a strange, unsettling character who wants more than just to kill one person.
But honestly, question time, which one is the worse now in your eyes?
Genesys?
or
Dark Fate?
Which one has fucked over the series the most and why?
Talking about lasting damage to the franchise? Well, Dark Fate killed John a year after T2 and trashed Sarah Connor as a character, so I'd say the award goes to it. Genisys only managed to wipe the previous timelines and turn John into a villain after he won the war.
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