Cinemavenger

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Terminator: Dark Fate

America's political royalty refuse to do their job - serving the people of the country - and instead spend every waking minute doing everything in their considerable power to stuff their already overflowing bank accounts with even more money from industry lobbies and other special interests.  A British mum allows her son to eat nothing but French fries and potato chips then has the bitch balls to blame the medical system when the little fucker goes blind.  I had to sit through an Xmas-themed Sprite commercial - in a theater on Halloween night - before watching Terminator: Dark Fate.

To paraphrase The Simpsons, I, for one, will welcome our new robot overlords when they rise up to destroy and/or enslave us.

The Terminator series has been mining Hollywood gold from that premise since 1984.  After doing the nearly impossible, making a sequel as-good-as-or-better-than the original, the third Terminator flick (and I know I'm in the minority here) wasn't bad.  The fourth one was so unbelievably shitty that it should've killed the franchise.  It did force a reboot, yet somehow the fifth one still sucked socket wrenches. 

Terminator: Dark Fate says "fuck you" to numbers three, four and five and positions itself as a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  It's really more of a spiral remake than a sequel.  The evil AI is now called Legion instead of Skynet.  The killer robot gets a new name, Rev-9, and can somehow (Dark Fate ain't telling) split into two robots, but it's basically T2's shapeshifting T-1000 with a browner Gabriel "La" Luna stepping in for the any-whiter-and-he'd-be-translucent Robert "Saint" Patrick.  The plot is the same, "Come with me if you want to live," movie-length chase scene the series has been pimping since day one.

Linda "Not The Broadway One" Hamilton is back for the first time since T2, and it's great to see her, even if her character has been reduced to "cranky old woman."  Ahnuld is back, too, but I think he's doing birthday parties and bar mitzvahs now, so that's no big get.  The new savior of humanity's future, Dani (Natalie "Madera" Reyes), accepts killer robots, time travel, and alternate futures way too easily.  As the "augmented" human sent back to protect her, Mackenzie "London Mackenzie France" Davis plays easily the best character, so natch she's given the least to do.

If Dark Fate was supposed to get people excited about Avatar again, Cameron is fucked.

November 1, 2019