Terminator: Dark Fate - NOTES
I started to write up an actual review, but then LJ glitched and I decided not to invest any further energy into writing about a lame Terminator movie. This is a just a copy pasta of the notes I took while watching and immediately afterwards.
Why does John look scared when he sees T-800? His only experience with one ever was Uncle Bob who was good.
Grace exceptionally violent and superhuman strength is over the top
The CGI sucks so bad in this movie. I might as well be watching The Flash on CW. It’s literally the same quality. And apparently new Rev-9 terminators can fly/jump all over the place just like The Flash hopping around the outside of buildings.
Grace, the hybrid “augmented human” is supposed to be like a Kyle Reese, but she’s ultra-violent and just tosses innocent people (as if she has super hero strength instead of machine strength) and slams them into walls and stuff.
Grace keeps acting offended anytime someone thinks she’s a machine, as if being “augmented” with machinery inside her body is commonplace (which we learned later in the movie is not commonplace!).
Grace can sense a vehicle able to crash through a highway wall? Does she have superhuman hearing as well?
No tension during car chase. Where’s the music. So quiet I can barely hear it.
How in the world does Grace survive getting flung from the back of the pickup truck? Does she have no bones? Is her head metal? Does she have a brain?
Grace is like Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman combined.
Sarah more concerned about her car being stolen than finishing off the liquid metal?
When she locks Dani out of the motel room so she can get answers from Grace.
“Sometimes Mommies and daddies need to have private conversations” (Or something like that)
- Implies Sarah sees Grace as a man/Reese type character. Also implies she sees Dani as a child, but later she says she cares about Dani because she used to be her and it sucks. Makes no sense.
When Sarah tells Grace who she is, it doesn’t make sense that she says they stopped Skynet, changed the future and saved 3 billion lives and “you’re welcome” because it’s obvious there’s still a similar bad future going on - evident from Grace’s drop-in from the future to protect Dani from terminators. Also evident from the terminator on the bridge being unlike any she’s ever seen (not a T-800 and not a T-1000).
“Since then, I hunt terminators and I drink til I black out.” Except we don’t see her take a drink even once and learn later than this is only the 3rd time in 22 years she’s gone after a terminator? What else has she been doing?
Grace has Carl’s coordinates tattooed on her. How? Dani clearly did not make a mental note of the coordinates of Carl’s cabin while they were there, so I guess we have to assume that at a later date in the future, she figures out where Carl’s cabin was in Laredo and gets those exact coordinates to put on Grace’s stomach. But that would mean that Grace comes from a future where all of the events of this movie already happened. But if so, she would have known about Sarah Connor and told Grace about Sarah Connor. Grace doesn’t know who Sarah is, though. Something doesn’t work right with all that.
Reworded: Grace has the coordinates to Carl's cabin tattooed on her. But Carl is from a different future, so how would anyone in Grace’s time have known about the existence of Carl? It could only have been Dani, Sarah or Carl who put those coordinates on Grace, but then it makes no sense that Grace has no idea who Sarah Connor is.
Legion is a dumb name. The government would never name a defense system program that.
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On train to Laredo…
I HATE THIS DIALOG:
“And let me guess, Dani gives birth to the one man who can stop it… The future wants you dead for the same reason it wanted me dead.”
“But I’m nothing, I’m no one.” AGAIN!
“Yeah, you’re not the threat, it’s your womb.”
^ I don’t even understand what Sarah is getting at here. Yeah, of course they wanted Sarah because of her womb, but Sarah is acting like she’s upset they didn’t come after her for another reason. Like oh they only cared about me because of my womb, but I am more than that! It’s very clunky and dumb.
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“Fine, let someone else be mother Mary for a while.”
“If you’re mother Mary, why do I so want to beat the shit out of you?”
UM YEAH, ME TOO! Once again, this is just weird clunky dialog.
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Dani’s uncle believes the killer machines are chasing us story? LOL. Ooookay. But why would he ever care if Dani’s “friends” had done something illegal when being a coyote, he deals in illegality all the time?
Also, I feel like Sarah would’ve had a more trusted friend to get them to and across the border rather than trusting Dani’s uncle.
Why does the Rev-9 slice guards at the detention facility? Would’ve been quicker and easier if he let them run past him!
Dani accepts Carl way too quickly. She’s not even aware yet of the concept that a terminator can be reprogrammed and/or learn from humans. So when Sarah says he’s a machine and Dani’s all “I don’t care what he is!” it doesn’t make sense.
Target practice at Carl’s place… OMFG. “A terminator has just killed your whole family, what do you do?” Sarah says, then Dani, who moments ago couldn’t even hit the target with a pistol, makes successive accurate shots with a bigass shotgun. PUH-LEASE. Sure can hit watermelon target easier with a shotgun, but not from that distance in the hands of someone with zero experience.
How does Sarah, a US fugitive who’s been living in Mexico for… 22 years?… know a air force intelligence officer? And not only know, but know well enough that he’ll give her a couple EMPs?
What in the world does Carl tell his family? After 22 years together, he just loads up a van of weapons with some strangers and tells her to leave? I feel like this needed to be a Miles Dyson family kind of moment, where the family is brought in on who Carl really is and what’s going on, so we can believe they’d understand that he had to go stop a machine and probably wouldn’t be coming back but they could accept it because of the importance to humanity. “the day I warned them might come has come and my past has caught up with me” isn’t really good enough.
Why doesn’t Carl ever ask about why Dani is important? He’s giving up his family to help without even knowing what the stakes are.
I wish he would’ve put on his sunglasses. It was pointless to have him contemplate it and not do it. We already know he’s sort of “human” now.
MY FAVORITE SCENE IN THE WHOLE MOVIE:
Carl talking about drapes while they’re waiting for Sarah’s air force buddy to show up.
“There’s much more to it than just picking the right color. It’s the texture, the weight of the material. One wrong choice, it can destroy the look of the entire room. There was this one customer came to me. He wanted to have solid color drapes in a little girl’s room. I said don’t do it. You need butterflies, polka dots, balloons.” LOL. Would’ve liked more humorous moments like that.
Dani and Sarah casually standing on the rear hatch of the C-5 while it’s airborn. uh huh.
Sarah maybe, but Dani, no fucking way.
Why doesn’t Sarah make any suggestions about how to stop the Rev-9 after the EMPs are destroyed? It’s an endoskeleton, which she knows can be smashed and/or blown up or melted, surrounded by liquid metal that she knows can be melted down. It would’ve made sense to try to lure it to a smelter.
Dani in the future:
“Are we supposed to lie down and die because some machine decided it? Is that our fate? Well FUCK FATE.”
I hate this so much. And I’m not believing Dani as a leader at all. Seeing her in the future doesn’t work because she’s not that person now. Catching a tiny glimpse like we got of future John in T1 might’ve worked, but this, no.
Grace revealing who Dani is:
“You are not the mother of some man who saves the future, you are the future.”
Since when do men have to be downgraded for women to be strong?
The movie fails completely for me right there. Sarah’s womb speech was bad enough, but when it gets compounded with this bullshit, I’m done.
The line should have been “You are not the mother of someone who saves the future, you save the future.” But the “some man” is where it goes way off the rails in seemingly making a statement that men are bad or something. I hate this so much.
Sarah now learning that Dani is basically the new John Connor makes her all better. Meh. She already knew there was going to be a new version of John Connor even when she thought Dani was just the “womb”, so what difference does this point make?
plane crashing forever and all that are dumb and super over-the-top unbelievable. The movie completely falls apart here.
Humvee teetering on the edge of the dam. Seriously?
Neither Sarah nor Carl ever ask Grace about how the rev-9 works. You’d think they’d want to know about the splitting in two parts thing. I mean it looks like liquid metal over endoskeleton, but they should ask about it. In T1, Reese tells Sarah all about the T-800 and in T2, Uncle Bob tells Sarah about the T-1000. In this, we only learn that it’s a “rev-9” and that “you don’t kill it, you run from it.”
Dani shooting the Rev-9 and then tackling it. LOL. No.
I like when Sarah calls Carl to help Dani. She said she’d never call him that, but when they need him, she says it.
I thought the liquid metal part of the rev-9 was the brain, but in the end, it’s like all that’s left is the endo, so did they really need Grace’s power source to destroy an endo? I guess with nothing there to crush it with, it was the best choice.
Carl’s “for John” when he’s holding the Rev-9 in the well waiting for the power source explosion is a little weird. It’s like “I’m saving Dani, for John.” I guess he figured his own “death” would give Sarah closure and that training Dani as her pseudo John going forward would give Sarah a new purpose?
Sarah gets a Jeep again in the end :)
Barely any Terminator music on this whole movie. The tiny bit we get are not enough to give the movie a Terminator feel. Didn’t look like a Terminator movie either.
Overall, I had mixed feelings.
As a stand-alone, (as all the sequels since T2 have ended up being) it was fine, but as a true continuation, it failed. It wasn’t a sequel, though - this was a reboot disguised a a sequel. As part 2 in a trilogy, I think it would’ve worked much better. Axing John right off the bat just to replace him with a girl who brought nothing special or new to the story was pointless and upset me.
Less action and more story would’ve helped. Sarah’s journey was pieced in instead of feeling organic. Grace was unlikable from beginning to end. Dani was, I don’t know because I am biased against her for replacing John. Didn’t like the Rev-9 wasn’t as scary as either T2 T-800 or T2 T-1000. Yeah he was more advanced, but he lacked the monster-movie type of creepiness they both had. Might’ve helped if he’d had his own jaws music (y’know, the way there was sort of a “terminator’s coming” distinct sound for both the T-800 and T-1000).
IF there was to be a sequel to this, there would have to be a Kyle Reese in it. HAVE TO BE. He is presumably alive and well since his judgement day never happened. But he’d be, I guess about 25 years younger than Sarah, so it might be weird. I’d still like to see them meet, though.