Terminator: Dark Fate

Year 13, Day 234 - 8/22/21 - Movie #3,918

BEFORE: Diego Boneta carries over from "Monster Hunter".  I could have had Mario De la Rosa carry over from "Hellboy", but his role in this one was deemed a bit too small - he plays "Mexican Cop #1" or something like that.  I'll resort to that sort of thing if necessary, but I'd like to avoid it if I can - major roles, or at least named characters, whenever possible.  For that matter, I could have had Mackenzie Davis carry over from "Irresistible", but it wasn't really an option - "Irresistible" was really a "mortar" film, not a brick, it was just there to help me get to "Black Widow" at long last.  This is how my mind works, anyway.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Terminator Genisys" (Movie #2,314), "Terminator Salvation" (Movie #486)

THE PLOT: An augmented human from the future and Sarah Connor must stop an advanced liquid Terminator from hunting down a young girl, whose fate is critical to the human race. 

AFTER: I've already hit time travel as a topic a couple times this year ("Tenet", "Bill & Ted Face the Music", "Palm Springs", "When We First Met") and more movies are on the way, scheduled for late summer.  I've got a backlog of them, but most of the smaller ones are very difficult to link to, and then quite ironically I never seem to have enough time to get to them.  By the same token, I would have loved to re-watch some of the other "Terminator" films in preparation for this one, but, well, you know.  But it seems like that wasn't necessary, this one picks up its narrative threads from "Terminator 2" and none of the sequels that followed, which are now regarded as if they never happened. 

SPOILERS AHEAD for "Terminator: Dark Fate" - proceed no further unless you're caught up on this franchise!

Future is always in motion - now I have to go and try to figure out where this "Terminator" movie diverges from the realities and visions of the future we've seen before in the franchise.  All that traveling back from the future that the Terminator robots did to prevent certain things from happening didn't work, because the forces of good stood against those Arnie-Bots and Robert Patrick-bots and kept the bad things at bay, so that John Connor could grow up and lead the resistance.  Then "Terminator Genisys" happened, and they took the John Connor character in a terrible new direction - you just don't DO that to a character.  So after all that, letting John Connor grow up turned out to be a BAD idea?  

So there was another Terminator that got sent back to the past to try and kill John Connor AGAIN, and it looks like that one succeeded, because he's not really in this film, he's no longer part of the timeline, and his mother is still dealing with his death, even though it was years ago.  And we the audience have to deal with a new terrible future, one without SkyNet, but with a new overarching enemy, Legion, which might just be SkyNet with a new name, it's tough to say.  But somebody in the future is still building Terminator robots and sending them back to the past to kill key figures that will be important to the resistance.  

From a time-travel perspective, it's a little weird to think about the motivations of characters we can't see - especially when those characters are trying to change the past.  If you're in the future and you change the past, you might alter the timeline and make things worse, so care has to be taken to really focus and try to make things better, from your perspective.  This is because it's so easy to accidentally change the timeline in a way that means you no longer exist, and then where will you be?  Nowhere?  The fact that somebody sent a Terminator robot back sort of implies that they lose the overall battle against humanity - but they still have the resources to build and program a killer robot AND send it back in time?  

Then there's the paradox angle to deal with - we have this time-traveling killer robot, we have the resources to send it back in time, and we want to use it to change the past.  BUT, that could create a timeline where we DON'T have a killer robot, or the resources to send it back in time, and then, like, who sent the killer robot back to change the past?  Nobody?  OK, so it didn't happen, and now we're back where we started.  Fall back on the Hitler analogy, if you go back to the year 1889 and kill Hitler when he was a baby, then maybe you create a timeline where there was no Hitler, then there was no need to send somebody back to kill him, so in the end, you didn't do it, because it didn't need to be done.  So therefore you didn't do it, and baby Hitler becomes adult Hitler, so this whole endeavor just doesn't work, it goes around and around. 

This is why storytellers are falling back on the "alternate timeline" or "parallel universe" stand-by.  OK, we changed the past, now we're living in a different present, with many possible futures.  Great, it makes it easier to keep a franchise going, but does it bear any resemblance to the way the universe really works?  

Speaking of that - this is how franchises work, OF COURSE Arnold Schwarzenegger is in this one, playing a robot from the future.  This was probably the worst-kept secret in movie history, like he's RIGHT THERE on the poster, which most people see in the movie theater before the film starts.  So it's not much of a reveal in the movie when he shows up, yet it was filmed that way, as if it was going to be a big surprise.  Instead, we've known all along, so there's no surprise at all (yawn).  There are other surprises and reveals, but this just couldn't be one, if the promotions department insists on telegraphing it like this.  

Arnold's character here, one of (many?) T-800 robots seen in the franchise, is called "Carl" - you know, to distinguish him from the other robots who look exactly the same when they have their human-skins on.  But was this particular T-800 seen in any of the other films?  It's possible this is the same T-800 seen in "Genisys", and he came back in time to kill John Connor (again?) after he saw what the writers did to him in that film.  Death would surely be better than THAT.  But they never make this plot point clear, because then that would acknowledge that "Genisys" happened, and the filmmakers obviously don't want to do that.  Again, the worst thing about time travel seems to be the grammatical tenses involved - how do you refer to an event that happened in your past, but everyone else's future, and thanks to your time-traveling actions, now will NEVER happen, because you changed the timeline?  As Douglas Adams once wrote, that' the "Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive", and nobody really knows how to conjugate that. And that's just if you're the time traveler, for anybody else in the timeline, how do you refer to an event that was going to happen to you but now isn't, being described to you by someone who WAS there, but in an alternate future?  

Anyway, there's lots of action here to distract you from the complications of time-travel and grammar, they have to ALMOST kill the Rev-9 several times before they accomplish it, repeating as necessary until the end of the film.  Like the T-2000, this robot can turn into liquid metal and re-form, only it looks less shiny and more like black oil or ink when he does that.  He also has a robot skeleton inside, and he can split into two entities, the skeleton and the liquid metal guy, so he's like the Certs of the killer robot world, he's both a candy AND a breath mint.  Floor wax AND dessert topping.  There's a bunch of IBM commercials going around now that talk about a "hybrid" approach, being used by banks and factories and such, but then they never really describe what their hybrid is.  Sounds like a bunch of jibber-jabber, but this Terminator really is a true hybrid, and the heroes have to kill BOTH of him.  Umm, I think. 

Meanwhile, the old T-800 robot, aka Carl, has a significant other in Texas, even a stepson - he's learned how to mimic human emotions and fake his way through a relationship.  And he sells and installs drapes, oh, how the mighty have fallen.  Next you're going to tell me he's got a drinking problem, a second mortgage and a boat up on wheels in the yard.  Get it together, man.  It's no wonder when Sarah Connor & company come knocking on his door that he jumps at the chance to go with them.  Even though Sarah says that if he survives the mission, she's going to kill him herself - he's probably aching for the sweet release of death.  

What fans apparently didn't like about this film, in addition to the killing of John Connor, was the emphasis on female heroes.  Get over it, haters, the future is female, from the augmented humans to the aging mothers with weapons to the young women who can survive plane crashes by jumping into an ejecting Hummer with a parachute that then lands on a dam before falling into the spillway and sinking.  Men have no idea.

Also starring Linda Hamilton (last seen in "Terminator Salvation"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Mackenzie Davis (last seen in "Irresistible"), Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna (last seen in "Bernie"), Tristan Ulloa, Ferran Fernandez, Alicia Borrachero (last seen in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"), Manuel Pacific, Enrique Arce, Fraser James, Tom Hopper (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Stuart McQuarrie, Steven Cree, Georgia Simon, Mario De La Rosa (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Stephanie Gil, Daniel Ortiz, Blair Jackson (last seen in "Tower"), Phillip Garcia (last seen in "Okja"), Tarnue Massaquoi, Cleveland Berto, Christine Horn (last seen in "The Way Back" (2020)), Pete Ploszek (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Mark Weiler, Kacy Owens, Stephen Oyoung with archive footage of Edward Furlong (?) (last seen in "Pet Sematary II"), Earl Boen and the voice of Aaron Kunitz.

RATING: 7 out of 10 bags of potato chips