I’m back with the film By M.Schinke
The future is not set. There are no stories but what we tell for ourselves, OpinionNerds.
In 1984 director James Cameron literally unleashed one of his own personal nightmares on the world with The Terminator, a film about a machine from the future sent back to the present to kill the mother of the man who would help humanity prevail in it’s war for survival. Seven years later director Cameron would up the ante with T2: Judgement Day, where the humans team up with one of their enemies not only to protect a life but to take fate into their own hands and prevent their dark future from coming to pass. As cold war analogies both films resonate with multiple themes and strong central dramas. T2 effectively brought the story of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor to a close as it changed the future from an inevitability into a literal wide open road, which always made the idea of continuing the franchise seem, frankly, pretty pointless. There have been three other attempts at continuing or rebooting the franchise as a film series – Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys – and even a short lived, but well received, television series – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. None of them managed to light a fire in the fandom and the business of the Terminator IP has chugged along on it’s past reputation and the enduring possibility that there is another great Terminator story out there to tell. With Cameron on board as producer and having a hand in the story, can director Tim Miller’s Terminator: Dark Fate be the one to bring the franchise into the future?
Right away I want to say that, as far as intent goes, this film looks to do exactly what it sets out to. It creates a mechanism for extending the original franchise, does away with the storytelling from the entries that were found less than thrilling and is itself an entertaining action film that brings Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, the lynch pin for the franchises original entries, back into the fold. In terms of shepherding the film towards those goals, director Miller and all the storytellers involved have accomplished that task with flying colors. The question we fans of the franchise, and I think invested film goers in general, may want to ask is: is that, alone, enough?
The future is a raging war between the machines of Legion and the remnants of humanity trying to take back their world. In a desperate bid to destroy it’s adversary the machines send one of their own back in time to kill of humanities savior. The humans send a warrior back to protect their own and the chase is on! Will the machines kill of the seeds of our resistance before they take root, or will humanity live to fight another day? Directed by Tim Miller from a screenplay by David S Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray the film stars Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Gabriel Luna, Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film is produced by Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Skydance Media, Tencent Pictures, Lightstorm Entertainment and TSG Entertainment and is distributed by Paramount Pictures in the US.
There’s probably going to be spoilers from here. Look, if you don’t want a movie spoiled then maybe don’t read about it before you go see it? You pay the ticket; you take the ride.
Come with me if you want to live
Director Miller, who helmed the first Deadpool flick, once again uses his visual effects background to an astonishing and effective degree as he is able to create a presentation that impressively increases the scale of the fantasy sci-fi possibilities of the Terminator world. While not always 100% convincing there can be no argument made that the films presentation isn’t absolutely stunning. Everything about the presentation is gorgeous, owing much to the work of cinematographer Ken Seng shooting anamorphic on the Arri Alexa LF at 4.5K and finishing with a 4K DI, though it’s arguable if the director takes full advantage of the films 2:39 frame. Director Miller’s storytelling is easy to follow but it lacks some elements of fine detail or many, “artistic” flourishes. The pair don’t appear to have approached the film with any specific photographic style, opting for a mostly naturalistic look, though a number of scenes make generous use of the red/blue motif prominent in T2. It’s not strictly a meat and potatoes affair, but it’s not knocking on the door of any art houses either. This is neither a good or bad thing; it’s merely and observation.
The inherent challenge with any Terminator story after T2 is exactly how you have any Terminator stories after T2. That film saw Connor, her son John and a rogue T-800 Terminator destroy the machine program that would kill humanity before it came to be and preventing that future from occurring. The only project in the franchise to avoid retreading that ground was 2009’s Salvation, which took place in the future and avoided any sort of time travel shenanigans. The issue lies not in the nuts and bolts of making a plot function but to do so in a way that isn’t a retread of the first two films and doesn’t weaken T2‘s allegory. Dark Fate avoids some of the pitfalls of dealing with the time travel and rote hunter/protector tropes by just not engaging with them but it can’t get away from the fact that in order to continue the franchise after T2 you have to do something that somewhat diminishes what T2 accomplished. Dark Fate tries to do this but it’s only a solution on paper. The film states that Connor did prevent Skynet, the evil AI, from destroying the world, but humans just went ahead and created a different AI that is just Skynet with a different name: Legion. Not only did it turn on humanity, not only did it create an army of machines to hunt them including infiltrators designed to mimic humans that they call Terminators, and not only did it develop time travel that seems to operate exactly the same way Skynet’s would have, the future soldier we meet even called the attack on humanity Judgement Day. Though the film downplays its importance this does neuter the storytelling of T2 and sends the message that fate simply cannot be avoided.
From a basic storytelling perspective the film immediately hits some shaky ground as it starts by framing the storytelling from Sara Connors point of view. And though she enters the film pretty early on it’s tough to make the case that the movie is, “about” her. And this is where I begin to detach from the film a bit because, in my view,it lacks a clear emotional perspective. And without that, the movie is just a bunch of stuff that happens.
Dun-Dun-Dun-Da-Dun…….Dun-Dun-Dun-Da-Dun
The screenplay as rendered by director Miller is solid and well structured. Storytelling builds simply and logically with, “ease of use” seeming to be the priority. There are a number of themes at play in the film, with the theme of purpose eventually taking priority, though a strong theme of family is also present. But while themes are additive to a film they rarely tend to sustain it in the absence of a strongly rendered central story. Story, as we’ve discussed in the past, is the emotional journey of the characters. And when you have multiple lead characters, what you have as a story will often be found in the intersection of all their story arcs. Where all these characters seem to intersect is on the issue of purpose, but it’s something that seems to exist more on paper than it does within the film as rendered. Finding or having purpose isn’t something the characters struggle with, and the struggle with a theme or subject is what will typically constitute a characters arc. Purpose isn’t presented as something Dani needs or lacks, and likewise with Sarah, though you might think differently given the prologue. Grace and, “Carl” already seem to have their purposes well in hand, so while they exhibit examples of the theme, they aren’t dealing with it themselves so they don’t really have arcs of their own. It isn’t even present as a theme, as far as I can tell, until, “Carl” brings it up more than halfway through the movie. Looking back at the arc of the films storytelling there is an argument to be made that it is ultimately about Sarah Connor finding new purpose in helping prepare Dani for her purpose; to fight for the future they can’t escape. However that perspective makes the film, “about” Sarah, which it clearly isn’t, and would also mean that a lack of purpose is the challenge Sarah has to overcome, which is not storytelling the movie clearly draws. While Sarah seems to join the cause simply because she doesn’t have anything better to do, character arc is most especially troubling with Dani, whom the film is so concerned with making sure comes across as someone who could lead the future that she accepts and competently participates in the situation she finds herself in far too easily, in my opinion. When you start your characters growth at a seven out of ten, it doesn’t leave you a whole lot of dramatic room to move. We have a beginning point, and we have an end point, but the path between them is, in my opinion, shaky because the movie is more interested in making sure the characters are awesome than it is with pushing them emotionally.
To that extent Sarah also has to accept that nothing she could have done was going to prevent Judgement Day from happening and therein lie my deepest personal beef with the movie in the fact that it says you cannot fight fate, a message I find personally reprehensible. And if the movie isn’t saying that, then it doesn’t appear to be saying anything at all. And true, a movie has no obligation to deliver an allegory or anything like that, but what I feel truly separated the first films in the franchise from the rest is in their strong stories including their metaphor and allegory. In a way, The Terminator and T2 are strong metaphors for the Cold War era in which they appeared. The Terminator is a staunch warning about how our escalating pursuit of weapons to protect ourselves could eventually lead to our destruction, while T2 metaphorically represented the idea that joining forces with those we consider our enemies is the best way to change the inevitability of that destruction. And of course the allegory in T2 is that we are in control of our own destinies and we can choose what our future will be. Even the title of this film, Dark Fate, points to the idea that what is going to happen will happen no matter what we do, so all we can do is prepare to deal with it. Not only do I find the idea personally offensive for my own reasons I don’t care to elaborate on, I’m not thrilled with the way it seems to render the greater storytelling of the first two films meaningless. It’s great for keeping a franchise going, but not so much for storytelling that has meaning, in my opinion.
Bring It Back To Me
None of this means that Terminator: Dark Fate is a movie that doesn’t entertain. Indeed, what I’m looking for doesn’t seem to have been on the plate for this film to begin with, so nothing that I’ve brought up says anything about whether or not the movie as it exists is entertaining or not. In fact I think it will be entertaining for a great number of people because of how well produced it is. But in my opinion what keeps bringing people back to a film is in watching it’s characters struggle and overcome in a story that resonates beyond the confines of the screen. Like anything else time will tell whether or not this film crosses the divide between just being entertaining to being meaningful to fans of the franchise. I have my doubts. As strong as the presentation is, and as truly great as the work that was done to make the film happen on screen was, I just don’t know if it’s got that thing that’s going to continue to ring out in the hearts of the public. Certainly this idea that you can’t fight fate is going to put a damper on some of that enthusiasm as it sends a very disheartening message about our control over our destinies. If there was a plan to walk beyond that story in future installments the possibility of that is currently up in the air, so for now this is the final impression we are left with. The early Terminator films are indeed a product of their Cold War time period, but the stories they tell are just as relevant today as they were almost 40 years ago. It’s why they continue to speak to us and gain new fans. The productions that have come after seem to exist only to keep the franchise going, and that cynical intent seems to be what rubs people most wrong. After the powerful film that T2 was, I just don’t know if there is any way to continue the franchise other than to tell stories that take place in that dark future that no longer exists. And maybe we shouldn’t be trying to purposely undo a story that says we are in control of whether or not we destroy ourselves and tells us we can hope for something better.
Maybe the best lesson to take from all this is that when it come to The Terminator, perhaps it’s best if it just doesn’t come back.
Clever endings aren’t by bag.
Laterz
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