Terminator: Dark Fate **Spoilers from post 983**

johnny_ultimate

The thing I’m always baffled by is any suggestion a new Terminator film is the final nail in the coffin or anything like that. I mean, it’s now been three decades since the last genuinely good and well-received film in the series, and there have now been twice as many bad ones as good ones (disclaimer: haven’t even bothered with the last two, so going on reputation, and I’m classing T3 as bad even if it’s more watchable than the others).

The series had nowhere worthwhile to go after that thumb disappeared into the magma.

Kermit.de.frog

Yup it was wrapped up comprehensively in T2. Nowhere else to go with it.

No loose ends left for writers to work with.

Why everything since has been total rubbish.

CatFromHue

There is places to go and Salvation tried to go there.

The whole future war and sending Reece back has plenty of material to work with. They just made a massive balls up of doing it.

That's why I'm not too hard on Salvation for all its faults. It did try something new and did some good and pretty good things.

Sad Professor

I didn't have a problem with them playing the T-800 for laughs. After 4/5 films, I don't think there was anywhere else to go with that character. Might as well have some fun with it. But really I think they should have left Arnold out of the film and focused on Sarah and John.

IrishJedi75

Dark Fate was an absolute abomination of a film.It actually made Genisys look good.

And how much of an idiot is the director for blaming fans for the films failure? Maybe now he’s regretting calling them “ Closet mysoginists “ before the film came out.

The White Wolf

IrishJedi75 wrote: »

Dark Fate was an absolute abomination of a film.It actually made Genisys look good.

And how much of an idiot is the director for blaming fans for the films failure? Maybe now he’s regretting calling them “ Closet mysoginists “ before the film came out.

Miller doesn't strike me as someone who is capable of feeling humbled by failure.

pixelburp

The White Wolf wrote: »

Miller doesn't strike me as someone who is capable of feeling humbled by failure.

I'd put my neck out in saying that Miller will plateau out in his career pretty quickly and will disappear from prominence. Deadpool pushed him into a spotlight he probably wasn't expecting - or (whisper) really earned that much. He comes off as the new Josh Trank.

In fairness though, if I spent 2 years of my life working on a dream project (a new Terminator with James Cameron!), I'd be pretty cheesed off too if a bunch of internet toads got píssy before the film came out.

The final film was a mess, and maybe if he wasn't obsessed with Avatar, Cameron could have taken the lead himself instead of clashing with Miller.

IrishJedi75

pixelburp wrote: »

I'd put my neck out in saying that Miller will plateau out in his career pretty quickly and will disappear from prominence. Deadpool pushed him into a spotlight he probably wasn't expecting - or (whisper) really earned that much. He comes off as the new Josh Trank.

In fairness though, if I spent 2 years of my life working on a dream project (a new Terminator with James Cameron!), I'd be pretty cheesed off too if a bunch of internet toads got píssy before the film came out.

The final film was a mess, and maybe if he wasn't obsessed with Avatar, Cameron could have taken the lead himself instead of clashing with Miller.

Except HES the toad for making childish comments before the film came out.And when commenting on the films box office failure,he blamed it on the recpetion of previous films of the series.

Oh it nothing to do with the fact that he made a woke piece of crap right Mr Miller? Have fun taking responsiblity for the loss of over a hunded million studio dollars.Maybe dont insult fans before your movie comes out next time!

CatFromHue

I think Miller's getting a bit of unfair criticism here.

From what I read on wikipedia a lot of the problems in the film came from Cameron.

Cameron had a list of action scenes, for no particular film, that he had wanted to shoot over the years. He gave this list to Miller, so he could work them into Terminator: Dark Fate. The list formed the basis for scenes involving a dam and a Humvee underwater.

The decision to kill the John Connor character came from Cameron,

Those could possibly have worked out but the biggest problem in the film was Cameron's idea

Other filmmakers on the project had suggested making the film without Schwarzenegger, but Cameron disliked the idea as he and Schwarzenegger were friends.[51] Cameron agreed to produce the film on the condition that Schwarzenegger be involved.

Cameron devised the idea of a T-800 Terminator that is "just out there in this kind of limbo" for more than 20 years after carrying out an order, becoming more human

There's more on the wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator:_Dark_Fate#Production

Mark Hamill

IrishJedi75 wrote: »

Except HES the toad for making childish comments before the film came out.And when commenting on the films box office failure,he blamed it on the recpetion of previous films of the series.

Oh it nothing to do with the fact that he made a woke piece of crap right Mr Miller? Have fun taking responsiblity for the loss of over a hunded million studio dollars.Maybe dont insult fans before your movie comes out next time!

How was it woke?

mikhail

Mark Hamill wrote: »

How was it woke?

Perhaps the fella will speak for himself, but I think that label gets applied to anything female-lead at the moment, and it brings unnecessary political baggage into a film discussion. If it has any merit as a criticism, it's where the idea begins and ends with "What if X were a woman?" where X often stands for some beloved character who fans may resent being changed for the sake of it. Does that apply here? They introduced two women characters. Davis' character is an interesting refinement of the Kyle Reece character, with unusual strengths and weaknesses that helped make for some enjoyable action, dramatic moments of peril, and tensions with other characters. Reyes, though, is pretty much a platonic ideal form of the woke criticism, where X stands for John Connor. The character has minimal impact on the story, and is mostly developed in exposition.

jill_valentine

IrishJedi75 wrote: »

Except HES the toad for making childish comments before the film came out.And when commenting on the films box office failure,he blamed it on the recpetion of previous films of the series.

Oh it nothing to do with the fact that he made a woke piece of crap right Mr Miller? Have fun taking responsiblity for the loss of over a hunded million studio dollars.Maybe dont insult fans before your movie comes out next time!

Can you quote for me what he said exactly to prompt this response?

IrishJedi75

This guy explains this disaster of a film the best..


https://youtu.be/xyGrG-Hs2xk

Mark Hamill

mikhail wrote: »

Perhaps the fella will speak for himself, but I think that label gets applied to anything female-lead at the moment, and it brings unnecessary political baggage into a film discussion. If it has any merit as a criticism, it's where the idea begins and ends with "What if X were a woman?" where X often stands for some beloved character who fans may resent being changed for the sake of it. Does that apply here? They introduced two women characters. Davis' character is an interesting refinement of the Kyle Reece character, with unusual strengths and weaknesses that helped make for some enjoyable action, dramatic moments of peril, and tensions with other characters. Reyes, though, is pretty much a platonic ideal form of the woke criticism, where X stands for John Connor. The character has minimal impact on the story, and is mostly developed in exposition.

Doesn't Reyes character being so underdeveloped and minimal to the story contradict her being a "woke" character though (woke character being just as you described, "what if X was a woman")? Was there anything in the movie that claimed that she was the "chosen one" because she was a woman? Or that she was going to be better than John because she was a woman?
From a story point of view, she is just horribly underdeveloped (she is practically a maguffin) and nothing at all would change, either in story content or quality, if she was Daniel Ramos instead of Daniella Ramos.

I agree with your other points, that Davis' character was interesting and that woke is just a stupidly political criticism.

pixelburp

Ockham's Razor: Dark Fate failed because nobody gives a shít about the Terminator franchise anymore. A franchise that has been a dud for 30 years. Dark Fate only exists at all because Chinese audiences saved Genisys' underwhelming /terrible box office (1/3 of international money came from there)

The first half of Dark Fate was good, but in a purely generic, functional way. The back half was effin' slapdash. It wasn't worth the trip to the cinema either way.

Hollywood is 100+ years old, its machinations aren't that hard to deduce sometimes. All the YouTube bandwidth and cultural outrage can't detract from the hard figures and trends of three decades. The IP is a dud that ran out of road years ago.

CatFromHue

It failed because it wasn't good enough, if they'd made a good film it wouldn't have.

Homelander

It also failed because they're constantly rebooting it in grand fashion trying to latch onto the latest trends rather than weathering the storm and running with what they've laid down with audiences.

People just got fed up of it. They expect audiences to get invested in a cast or idea, then abandon it in favor of a shiny new reboot, which ends up being the exact same tat all over again with a different cast.

I mean if Dark Fate was a direct sequel to Genisys with the same cast as that movie, it most definitely would've been more popular at the box office, regardless of whether it was any better or worse than its predecessor.

I don't at all agree that Terminator is a defunct franchise or idea. There's excellent potential in it, done correctly.

Let Arnold go, for christ sake. Bring it back to it's horror-thriller roots, the threat of a terrifying and bone-chilling dystopian near-future where humanity live like rats in a sewer and emotionless androids roam the desolate, apocalyptic landscape seeking to exterminate survivors.

Not this utter crap we get getting served up that wants to be a jack of all trades - family friendly, action, comedy, CGI spectacle, whilst carrying as much emotional and dramatic weight as a feather.

They could make a film as good as the first one for €5-10m, compared to the $200m they spent on Dark Fate.

Literally would be almost zero risk in the streaming age, they'd make back production costs and profit instantly with distribution deals.

Start small and earn the respect back for the franchise.

I'd be happy to see another Terminator film done competently that's faithful to the original film, but after Dark Fate I'm not willing to sit through any more painfully generic, CGI-driven, tick-every-box productions.

pixelburp

Homelander wrote: »

[...]
They could make a film as good as the first one for €5-10m, compared to the $200m they spent on Dark Fate.

[...]

And again, those are the brass tacks. For comparison, the Jumanji reboot was made for 30-40 million, complete with a headliner like The Rock, and made 10 times its budget back. Now, it was a legitimately entertaining and fun movie which helped, but at those numbers it couldn't help but succeed.

Terminator doesn't need to be a 150, 200 million dollar behemoth. The original was made for 700k. But somewhere it got sucked under the wheels of Hollywood's law of scale, where it could only justify its existence at a blockbuster budget. Woke has nothing to do with the conversation when "success" only started at half a billion dollars. That's an insane projection.

If they're serious about this IP having staying power, as you say they need to ditch Arnie, and give the franchise to Blumhouse, or someone who understand creativity through adversity and restriction.

jill_valentine

CatFromHue wrote: »

It failed because it wasn't good enough, if they'd made a good film it wouldn't have.

It's the most positively reviewed Terminator movie since T2, so even assuming you don't like it personally, in theory the overall consensus of it being good should have been enough to get people to the cinema. But that's not quite how it works. Being a good movie wasn't enough, it would have had to be exceptional enough to get over the IP albatross of Genisys, which made bags more money despite being fecking dreadful altogether.

The budget would have been significantly lower if it wasn't for a number of issues outside their control (eg flooding of a set, having to move production), imho it was intended to be a relatively stripped back mid budgeter and then Mother Nature and Cameron-being-Cameron happened. The plane stuff and a number of the - imho ill advised - edits and reshoots came from him.

A substantial chunk of the rest of the cash went into practical effects, which people keep saying they want more of, so it's hard to apply internet wisdom here.

jill_valentine

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Doesn't Reyes character being so underdeveloped and minimal to the story contradict her being a "woke" character though (woke character being just as you described, "what if X was a woman")? Was there anything in the movie that claimed that she was the "chosen one" because she was a woman? Or that she was going to be better than John because she was a woman?
From a story point of view, she is just horribly underdeveloped (she is practically a maguffin) and nothing at all would change, either in story content or quality, if she was Daniel Ramos instead of Daniella Ramos.

She is a Macguffin, but so was John, and I think that's the point - not so much that there's always going to be some chosen one, but that so long as Sarah Connor has any say in the matter, she'll make one out of somebody. The bit when Grace tells Dani how important she is to her spells that out - all the stuff she's saying Dani taught her is stuff that she's going to learn from Sarah in the next few years, they have Grace quote Sarah word for word to showcase her influence.

mikhail

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Doesn't Reyes character being so underdeveloped and minimal to the story contradict her being a "woke" character though (woke character being just as you described, "what if X was a woman")? ...

Maybe I didn't explain my meaning, but I think underdeveloped was kind of my point. It's not a character, but a cosmetic change for the sake of it. In my book, a film being hung around such an underdeveloped character is bad in its own right, but as I understand the 'woke' criticism of it, it's that it's a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine attempt to make something with merit. But of course, a word like that means different things to different people, and that's part of the problems it brings to a conversation.

pixelburp wrote: »

...The first half of Dark Fate was good, but in a purely generic, functional way. The back half was effin' slapdash. It wasn't worth the trip to the cinema either way...

I buy that. Once they leave Arnie's adoptive family behind, it's just painfully generic action. Your mileage may vary on the first two acts, but the third is a dog.

johnny_ultimate

I'm not convinced a gritty low-budget reboot is the solution to this franchise's fundamental woes. I mean, it might be a better film than the bloated big-budget 'please no-one by trying to please everyone' affairs. But it'd also be doomed by association with the Terminator name. Why not just make something less weighed down by association with beloved films and convoluted lore if you're going down that route? Not much of a stretch to suggest something like Upgrade does a better job of channelling the essence of the 80s/90s action movie classics than any big-budget sequel ever will.

I'd fairly comfortably wager for the vast majority of viewers Terminator is 'Arnie as a badass time-travelling robot with a leather jacket and iconic quips'. You can spin-off in whatever directions you want from there, but there's an elegant simplicity to why Terminator works: it's a great chase movie with neat sci-fi flourishes. And there's an elegant simplicity to how T2 works: basically another chase, but Arnie's a good guy now. Being directed by peak James Cameron doesn't hurt, of course, but that's because James Cameron at his best knew exactly how to craft a damn good genre movie.

That's what I mean when I say there's nowhere left for the series to go. Attempts to expand beyond that will always be tainted by the iconography and popularity of those first two films. It's not unique to Terminator of course: many, many Hollywood franchises are stuck in this semi-lucrative (and sometimes less lucrative) loop of diminishing creative returns. And sure, the sequels from Terminator 3 onwards have all been varying degrees of bad beyond being mere franchise retreads. Like pretty much any idea, Terminator is just a series of limited potential - limited potential that IMO was efficiently and definitively extracted in two original films. Hell, most series don't even get two good films, so that's actually a fairly good showing!

jill_valentine

IrishJedi75 wrote: »

This guy explains this disaster of a film the best..

You wouldn't happen to have found that quote by any chance? I'd hate to mistake anyone here for the kind of person who uncritically gobbles up stuff that's not really true from Youtube channels selling rage tor clicks, like.

IrishJedi75

jill_valentine wrote: »

You wouldn't happen to have found that quote by any chance? I'd hate to mistake anyone here for the kind of person who uncritically gobbles up stuff that's not really true from Youtube channels selling rage tor clicks, like.

If you actually watch the video i posted.Its there.

Fysh

IrishJedi75 wrote: »

If you actually watch the video i posted.Its there.

Alternatively, as the person claiming this video is worthwhile you could rewatch it, make a note of exactly what Miller is alleged to have said (along with the source for when and where he said it), and you could post that here along with a timestamp for the relevant bit of the video.

That way you are actually substantiating your argument rather than expecting people to watch some guy on Youtube. There are too many rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, idiocy and utter bobbins on YT to be watching videos just on the say so of forum randos who won't give any further info or context.

Mark Hamill

jill_valentine wrote: »

She is a Macguffin, but so was John, and I think that's the point - not so much that there's always going to be some chosen one, but that so long as Sarah Connor has any say in the matter, she'll make one out of somebody. The bit when Grace tells Dani how important she is to her spells that out - all the stuff she's saying Dani taught her is stuff that she's going to learn from Sarah in the next few years, they have Grace quote Sarah word for word to showcase her influence.

John wasn't really a Macguffin. For as irritating as he was (he was so damn whiny), he did drive the main story with his own choices (e.g. he made the terminator go get his mom).

mikhail

Mark Hamill wrote: »

John wasn't really a Macguffin. For as irritating as he was (he was so damn whiny), he did drive the main story with his own choices (e.g. he made the terminator go get his mom).

He's also important to the Terminator's character arc. "If a machine can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too," is a really big part of the emotional conclusion of the movie. It learns that from interactions with John.

So very whiny though.

Mark Hamill

mikhail wrote: »

Maybe I didn't explain my meaning, but I think underdeveloped was kind of my point. It's not a character, but a cosmetic change for the sake of it. In my book, a film being hung around such an underdeveloped character is bad in its own right, but as I understand the 'woke' criticism of it, it's that it's a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine attempt to make something with merit. But of course, a word like that means different things to different people, and that's part of the problems it brings to a conversation.

That is why I questioned it. Calling her underdeveloped, I totally agree with, because it implies the solution is to develop her more. Calling her "woke" implies the solution is just make her a boy and all your problems are solved.


I know you weren't the one who called it woke, but I really hate that term. It is obviously just a way for insecure men to complain about women in movies becoming more prominent because even from a purely critical point of view, it's just so lazy a criticism. Movies and tv shows have always had "woke" characters, where "woke" is whatever that generation or periods socially popular trope is (be that token characters like the skater/surfer dudes, asian who knows martial arts or any of the movies that were just vehicles for their currently famous star). The problem, when there is one, is always of weak writing and underdevelopment.

silverharp

John was basically raised as a child mercenary, his whole life was training. this movie went with Dani Skywalker approach , one day of training and they are good to go. Why the tendency for Mary Sues? its just bad story telling.
I remember reading an article about a theatre producer whose job it was to read scripts submitted by aspiring writers, there were pattern with the bottom tier ones and one of them was essentially a garbage man finds an alien artefact and has superpowers. Now all these clowns seem to to be getting 100m budgets to play with.

pixelburp

"Mary Sue" is completely overused at this stage: it's redundant to throw it around when the character we're talking about is literally meant to be Humanity's Saviour - as was John Connor. Can't call someone that when the whole point of the franchise is the idea of the single unifying person who'll save us all. It's literally Mary Sue: The Franchise (with occasional moments of "Heavy Lies the Crown").

Dani didn't work because she was horrendously underwritten and the obvious scene containing her Big Speech fell incredibly flat. She wasn't a Mary Sue, just what I suspect was an afterthought in the writing; the return of Sarah Connor & her sparring with Grace was the actual main thrust of that film's first half. The misdirection about Dani's womb as the prize was blunt - but it's not like it didn't fit when compared against Sarah's own arc.

Dani wasn't a Mary Sue, just a really crap McGuffin in what I suspect was meant to be Sarah Connor's film - but somewhere in the drafts people got anxious there wasn't a Saviour character. And yeah, being a woman added an effective twist that worked ... ... for Sarah Connor.