TAKE ONE Presents... - Pod With Us If You Want To Live 6: TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019)

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Simon and Jim finish their journey through the Terminator franchise with Tim Miller's TERMINATOR: DARK FATE. They get into whether the film is actually good or if they've just been down in the Terminator mines too long, the film's positioning in dialogue with TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, Linda Hamilton as a rare example of a female 'geriaction' star and the film's depiction of female aging, the film's refreshingly contemporary representation of Mexico and the politics of the US-Mexico border, Arnold Schwarzenegger's great performance when he's actually given an interesting arc for his character, and how the controversy around the film's opening scene links to THE LAST JEDI.Content warnings: nuclear war and apocalyptic destruction; murder and violent death including the shooting of children; body horror and removal of skin; xenophobia and border control violence; mental illness and substance abuse.Our theme song is Terminator Theme Song (32Stitches Remix) by 32Stitches available on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/32stitches/terminator-32stitches-remixFull references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/W5YPVM4F/collection

to Take One Presents, pod with us if you want to live. A podcast where we're watching all the Terminator franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hi, Jim. Hello, hello. Today, we're on the last Terminator film for now.

2019's Terminator Dark Fate. This was directed by Tim Miller, came out in 2019 and is the last film in the Terminator franchise. Linda Hamilton returns, Arnold Schwarzenegger returns and it's very much

as we'll get into a direct sequel to Terminator 2 Judgment Day. Jim, I'm going to say right off the bat. I think it's good. Yeah, we'll get into that. Yeah. My relationship with this film was very, very odd. I'm not going to go as far as that, Simon.

I'm not going to go as far as that. I do think it's significantly better than some of the shite we've spoken about from the last few episodes. Yeah. Maybe I've got something akin to Stockholm syndrome. I've been down in the terminated minds for so long. But coming up and seeing a chink of light is enough for me to go mad.

but what is your relationship with Terminator Dark Fate? When did you first see this? I did not. So I'd seen it before I'd re-watched it for this. It was a film which completely passed me by during its original cinema run. I can't remember why that would have been, so that would have been summer of 2019.

Not particularly sure why, to be honest. You know, I would say the same. Like, this came and went for me, without me even noticing it was coming out. I don't know if there was no marketing push or whatever to this, but it completely passed me by. Yeah, so I eventually watched it when... It came out in November 1st, 2019.

Which is... Oh, okay, right, so I... You know, worrying reports were starting to come out of China about... a new virus that was spreading. Yeah. So I think ironically... Maybe that was just in the back of our minds. I think it was to the extent.

So this would have been around the time that my wife was doing a stint for her PhD in Washington, D.C. So I would have been over in the States for Thanksgiving. Then I may even have been there for Christmas that year. I can't remember. But anyway, the point is I would have been traveling a lot

this time before then suddenly we were not travelling and no sinless were open so I think that's probably why it passed me by so I didn't see it at the time I eventually watched it in early 2025 again when we were back to travelling

again I watched it downloaded on an iPad on a plane because I thought that's available on Netflix I'm going to actually finally watch this as Tim Miller intended yeah as Tim Miller intended yeah I just I did I feel like it didn't make any cultural impact.

Like, you know, people don't particularly talk about it in terms of Terminator films. It's obviously out there. But I don't hear it discussed in the same way that I hear even, like, salvation mentioned. Or Genesis, frankly. Or Genesis, not for good reasons, I don't think. But I do think it clearly made more of a... More people saw it, I think, is the, you know. He says, without.

remembering the box office for either of them but I'm pretty sure more people saw it So in terms of production There was going to be a new trilogy of films After Terminator Genesis Which we discussed in the last episode That didn't happen because Womp wompwom

Yeah It fell apart So David Ellison The founder of Skydance Who Own the Rights Went to Sorry, has to be done their one's favorite nepo baby

David Ellison went to Tim Miller who was the director of Deadpool with ideas for a new Terminator film and Miller was going to direct

Deadpool 2 but instead took on Terminator and they brought back James Cameron as a producer and James Cameron came with his own ideas of what could go into it

Cameron was especially intrigued by the proposal to make a sequel to Terminator 2 which ignored the events of the subsequent films. All those films he'd hawked before. Yeah, as we said in the last episode, he said they were great when they were being marketed and promoted, but afterwards he says, no, they're shite.

I was only doing that as a favour to Schwarzenegger. Oh, dear. So Cameron was a lot more involved in this film than the other films. You know, not the ones he directed, but Free Salvation and Genesis. Yeah, I think he's got an actual story credit for this one as well, right? Yeah, yeah. Because he contributed some significant things which we can talk about.

Miller also asked a group of sci-fi novelists on how to reinvent the franchise. Joe Abercrombie, Neil Asher, Greg Behr, Warren Ellis and Neil Stevenson. And this is how they came up with the idea of the half-human, half-machine character. even though that had already been done in salvation presumably no one saw that they also brought in David S. Goya and his writing partner Goya wrote the Dark Knight

trilogy he also wrote Batman Re Superman Yeah Among other things His writing like he's written some really great stuff He's also written some pretty bad stuff whatever other opinions may be available

not everybody shares my opinions about man of steel for instance yeah anyway so one of the big things that Tim Miller really wanted was Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor they in fact wrote the role they wrote the film with Sarah Connor in it before they approached Hamilton

so if Hamilton hadn't said yes they had no backup plan She was semi-retired from acting at the time but came back because of Cameron and because she felt the character was well represented. Yeah, so the film came out in the United States on November 1st, 2019. In 2019, which is a year I don't think we've discussed

on the podcast before, but in 2019, the highest grossing films of the year were number one by a long way, Avengers Endgame. The big franchise, I want to say Topper because it feels like the MTCU ended for me with Avengers Endgame, but it has limped on. Emphasis on Lamped, yeah. Did you hear that they're re-releasing Avengers End Game

with like 30 seconds of new footage that will link to Avengers Doomsday? That's the second time they tried this trick, because they re-released Avengers End Game with some like, I don't know, like some Hulk post-credit scene or something. Yeah. So this is just so it can overtake Avatar, basically.

Presumably. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck sake. This is ridiculous. And then I'll re-release Avatar when Avatar 4 comes out. It's like, oh, dear God, right? It's just going to be an endless game of one-up in gym, right? Which of the, like, it'll just be, eventually cinema will just become Avengers,

and Avatar sequels, re-releasing the original in cinemas at the same time, just to sort of like constantly be the bit, like, ridiculous. Whoever wins we lose. Yeah, yeah, there you go. These are all Easter eggs for the eventual Take-1 Presents MCU series, where we watch all 40 films and 50 TV series. I don't, like somebody said to me on Blue Sky the other day, I think, or something. Like, they consider doing an MCU read,

but if you're taking, like, everything it's meant to, it's like the equivalent of like 75 films at this point now. It's like it's got like the Peter Parker. It's got like all the Peter Parker's and the X-Men films and the Fantastic Four films. No, screw that. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Start of course with the first Marvel film, Howard the Duck.

Yeah, I was literally about it saying. I need to be a completest. I need to watch Howard the Doctor just so I can fully get the reference in Guardians of the Galaxy, you know. Yeah, I don't think that's yet MCU canon, but it can't be far off. It's coming. Anyway, yeah, the highest grossing film of 2019 is a vengeance end game

by a long way. It is followed by the Lion King, the live action, the quote-unquote live-action version. Frozen 2, Spider-Man Far from Home, Captain Marvel, Joker, Star Wars, the Rise of Skywalker. This is rough. This is rough.

man, this box office, Jesus Christ. Oh, boy. This is some rough shit this. Oh, dear. It really is. Toy Story 4, Aladdin, presumably. The live action, Aladdin. Oh, God.

A live action version directed by Guy Ritchie. I'd forgotten he directed that thing. What? I didn't know this. Guy Ritchie directed. the live action Aladdin That guy's filmography is impossible

awful Oh dear And finally in 10th place Jamang to the next level You know So this is a rough old year So I'm looking at the I'm just I'm looking at this right

So I'm looking at the global one I think when I'm looking at kind of like The biggest releases of the year And the best film amongst them By some distance is Frozen 2. Now I haven't seen Frozen 2, so I'll have to take your word for it.

I think it might be. As a father. As a father to a daughter, I accept you. I know plenty of the songs from Frozen 2 at this point. But genuinely, I don't think it's too bad, actually. But, you know, I've probably got some

Toy Story 4 fans who are having a good old shout at me over that, but I really did. Like Toy Story 4 is fighting, I just think it's completely superflu. It's fine, yeah. You know, and then after that, I don't know, you can make a case for the Jumanji sequel. False Windows films surprisingly fun, to be honest.

I enjoyed Spider-Man, far from home and Captain Marvel, for MTV Films. I mean, Cat Marvel is fine. It's one of these films where it's had quite a lot of kicking since then. I don't really know why. I mean, I don't think it was brilliant, but it was fine. It was fine. It was good for those films, yeah, it was good. Yeah, you know.

Like, you know, I liked Brie Larson in it, I thought Jude Law was good. You know, it was fine. It was perfectly watchable. I mean, if it comes to it, I like Avengers Endgame. I think it does what it needs to do for the franchise, and it's pretty successful as a film in its own right. It's just the context of it. It's the shame it's got wrapped up in all this wider MCU baggage. Yeah, no, I mean, I remember being really into kind of like, you know, Avengers End game coming out.

I went in expecting to hate it because I hated Infinity War, but I felt like they really did a good job of wrapping things up well. Like they landed the plane, which I didn't expect them to be able to. Yeah, I think that's the key thing for it. I mean, I say this a lot when we're going over films. Like you kind of need to take them on their own terms, right? Do they succeed in what they want to do? And like it or not, you can like the MCU, you can not like the MCU.

I've had a very up and down experience with it. That film, I think, did what it needed to, right? Have I seen better film? Yes, I have, but I've seen many, many, many, many more worse films, you know, and I think it did exactly what it wanted to do. Contrast it with the Lion King, which I thought was dreadful. Like, you know, second highest grosses for that year. I genuinely really dislike that film. Sure.

So that is the cultural context into which Terminator Dark Fate is released. A lot of franchise films and a lot of franchises that are at the time a lot more successful than. Terminator, you know, less forgotten. So it comes out in that context of a lot of blockbuster releases. And yet not a summer blockbuster. This was released in November, sort of, just before Christmas. It did make more money than X-Men Dark Phoenix, though. Is that right?

Yeah. Actually, this is a fun fact for you. It made a smidge more money than Parasite. so make it out what you will interesting but yeah let's get into it and start running through the film so the film opens with old kind of CRT style footage of Linda Hamilton Sarah Connor

in Terminator 2 relaying her nightmares of nuclear war we get a kind of instant repositioning back towards the nuclear anxiety that's so animated the Cameron films and have been lacking in the films in between. We see waves

lapping on a beach, gradually uncovering a human skull and other human bones, and terminates are storming the beach like the Normandy landings, but then it switches because a Linda Hamilton voiceover tells us that this is a present that didn't happen, and instead we cut to 1998 in Guatemala, where a de-aged Linda Hamilton

which is a de-aged Schwarzenegger kill her son, John Connor. And this John Connor is played by Edward Furlong and is a young version of Edward Furlong. So they got Edward Furlong in to do like, I don't know, half an hour of motion shoots just to get how he could walk and then replaced him with this CGI version

of himself as a child, like from Terminator 2. and I think it's worth lingering on this for just a second I'm sure we're gonna we're gonna talk about this sequence and kind of where it sits in the the film and kind of the story it wants to tell right but I do want to linger on for a second because it's maybe a slightly less flashy

example of it in terms of what the end result is I actually found this CG I've seen some people complain about it I think there's maybe a little bit of a sort of plasticy sheen to Schwarzenegger, but otherwise, I thought this was absolutely flawless. It looked great, yeah, I thought, until I read that thing about Edward Furlong... I thought they might have used, like, unused footage in the master of something, like, yeah. I thought they'd used unused footage, but yeah, they got Edward Furlong in and Cgied around him.

But it looked great. Like, it looks like, John. Connor from Terminator 2. So the death of John Connor, early in the film, was Cameron's idea. He said in an interview with, well, in an article for IGN by Jim Vevioda, he says the idea that we whack John in the first 30 seconds, that was my idea. I said, if we really want to surprise the audience and we want to get everybody off balance, let's just get that right off the table. Let's just pull the carpet out from underneath

all of our assumptions of what a Terminator movie is going to be about. Let's just put a bullet in his head at a pizzeria in the first 45 seconds. As tactfully, delicately puts Zerbras from James Cameron there. And Tim Miller says in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, everybody was in pretty strong agreement, and the way to start it was you want to have this dramatic impact. You want to slap the audience in the face and say, wake up, this is going to be different.

I feel like that. Accomplish that. I hate the violence of it. I hate the idea of a kid being shot. But the dramatic fuel that it gives the story is kind of undeniable. And in terms of the tone it sets up and the story he wants to tell, right? I'd say, I don't think it's a perfect film.

We'll get into some of the comparatively minor issues I have with it later. But I want to compare the killing of this one single child in this film with the spree that Cristana Loken goes on in Terminator 3 Yeah

Right Like just as an example Like the absolute handbrake turn and tone That these films take from one film to the next Right This is what makes me loud Like there is a little bit of a controversy with that And like, you know, I'm with you kind of like

I don't like the idea obviously But like the way the film handles it is so much more impactful than it was in that other sequel where they do basically the exact same thing off camera, right? So, yeah, I find the reaction to this a little bit interesting, you know, and this idea of like killing John being so controversial when they made them into fucking terminate

in the last film. Yeah, so, you know. I've put that in my notes as well. Like, there's a lot of controversy around the killing of John. So a lot of critics and fans really didn't like this. plot beat and argued that it didn't work and it was bad foot to set up the film. They're not, interestingly, most of them that I've read around aren't arguing that the

killing of a child in the first minute of the film is in bad taste or whatever. That's not the argument. The argument is that the killing of John Connor as a character is some kind of sacred cow that cannot be done. The Messiah! Yeah. Yeah. But he's not, like textually.

they changed the future in the end of Terminator 2 so he's not the Messiah anymore he's just a very naughty boy he's he's not the Messiah anymore he's not the leader of the resistance and as you said

they already did this in Terminator Genesis not that anyone saw it but they turned John Connor into a Terminator and then tore him apart in you know quantum time bubble things I think more importantly also, like, it inadvertently ends up being a sort of like a little bit of a metatextral thing going on here

because, like, you know, you go on later, and I'm not going to linger on it, because I'm sure we'll cover it later, like when it's assumed that the, you know, the Danny, the young woman who they're going to end up pursuing in this film, is the mother of the Messiah, basically, right? And it turns out she is, it's like, it's this assumption that you can't move beyond this male Messiah figure. right and you're seeing that even in the you know the film kind of critiques that idea but you're even seeing it in the reaction to the opening scene of the film but I just like

it's just it feels like such a sort of like hilariously unaware criticism to have of this film right it's wild it's really wild to me Robert Yannis Jr of cheat sheet said in an instant the entire crux of the franchise the human resistance led by John is torn away

no mate like Sarah Connor is the crooks of the franchise we talked about this when we talked about salvation this pivoting from Sarah Connor as the main character to John as the main character sorry in Terminator 3 we talked about this

was also he's been played by five different actors you know it's like it gets torn away in the most popular film in the franchise the end of Terminator 2 he's not the human anyway, I think this is fine. I don't mind them killing John off immediately. I quite like it for the shock value and the idea that we're doing something different. That's fine to me. I mean, they certainly, I mean, they've done this before. I think this is a stronger way of doing it. I mean, I think they probably could have ended up with a much more interesting film earlier in this franchise's history. If they've done this.

something like this. You know. The one last thing I want to say about that though is it, in some ways, it actually this criticism of it kind of reminds and the time at which this comes out, this is relevant as well, because I feel like there was a lot of this stuff kicking around the internet at the time. The controversy over this and the reaction to it

feels a bit the Last Jedi to me. Yeah. You know, and the issue here isn't actually they kill John Connor. What they're actually reacting to and by this I mean and he says this as he records this having not shaved for weeks

angry men with neckbeards on the internet right? What they're actually what they're actually railing against is not that it's that the the filmmakers have gone

against the secret texts you know right? It's the insufficient respect is being shown to Terminator 2 in particular, right? In the same way that people got very annoyed about the portrayal of Luke Skywalker and The Last Jedi

and the foregrounding of female characters there is that it's not seen as a bold storytelling move and you could argue to toss about how well that works. I think it works. I think you clearly do too. But that's not the actual criticism they're making here. What they're actually reacted to is the repudiation of the thing. that they really like. Yes.

And this is a bad time for Terminator Dark Fate to do that, to make that kind of bold move, in the year that the Rise of Skywalker comes out, which is entirely a capitulation to a vocal minority of Star Wars fans who didn't like an Asian woman in their Star Wars. Yeah. Or in the case of Lord, they're just a woman. Yeah.

A very popular, well-regarded, woman actually. Yeah, because she told Oscar Isaac that he was an asshole. So, no, that's what I find interesting about this. It's framed as a storytelling critique, but it's not. It's not. Yeah, there we cut to, we cut from there to Mexico City 22 years later. We see a time bubble emerging on a

road bridge and a young woman falls out of it. She gets confronted by some cops and she takes them out like a terminator. The camera artfully avoids showing any frontal nudity by only cutting around her or having a cop standing in front of her boobs or whatever. We cut to a young woman, Danny Ramos, who's played by Natalie Reyes. She is looking after her family. They own a dog called Takedo, but the subtitles translated as taco. As she and her brother leave their apartment, a time bubble emerges in their courtyard and a young man falls out of it. And he's some kind of shape-shifting terminator, because he generates himself some clothes, and he's looking for Danny. So Danny and her brother arrive at their factory workplace, and their brother has been replaced by a robot, symbolism.

Meanwhile, the Mackenzie Davis robot that we saw from earlier, and Danny's dad also arrive at the factory. But the dad turns out to be the morphing Terminator and he about to shoot her when Mackenzie Davis intervenes. They run away and do some fighting and whatever. So I found these opening scenes interesting because of the emphasis on Spanish

speaking and Mexican characters. These first few scenes are almost entirely Spanish dialogue, subtitled Spanish dialogue, which is pretty interesting for a US blockbuster. There's no like yellow Mexico filter. you know, it's not all yellowed.

And I think, as we'll learn, I think it's an interesting symbolic move to go from a white man as the leader of the resistance to a Mexican woman. Hmm. It is an interesting opening this in terms of the line because I would say it's a pretty significant chunk of the film. It's basically, it's a Spanish-language film

for a huge chunk of it, right? Yeah. And I think for a Hollywood, blockbuster, that's a pretty bold maneuver, right? I think what's interesting here and it continues for the opening of the film is also the way that Mexico City

here is portrayed, right? Yes. This is not, like you say, it doesn't have that yellow filter that Holly was so fond of using for Latin America in the Middle East in particular, right? And, you know, even the contrast I've made is with

shows that I love, right? Breaking Bad better call Saul or kind of like Keeks. I think one criticism you can have of them and I don't know how much weight I put in it but I think it's a fair one is kind of like you know the way it shows Mexico

and sort of like Mexicans. That is not here right? This is a modern urban city with development and jobs and you know it's it's indistinguishable apart from the language being spoken from

any other kind of like, you know, dense urban place that this could have been set in the States. And I think that's, that is interesting because that is not something that you see in, frankly, quite a lot of American films. And you certainly don't see it in blockbusters like this one. So I think that is an interesting way to start it. The way it develops from that in terms of the way the location goes, I have some thoughts on that. Some of the things are good and interesting. Others, I'm less in. But this, this is an interesting move. I think it sets up some quite rich ideas actually as the film goes on. So Marian Kagvergnate is a scholar who has written a lot about Terminator Dark Fate. And in her book chapter, Seeing from the Border Cosmopolitan Solidarity in Terminator Dark Fate,

in the book Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema, she talks about the representation of Mexico in this, and specifically contrasts it with previous films in the Terminator franchise. and the Terminator TV series, the Sarah Connor Connacles. So these films present Mexico as a place of escape from civilization, and all it entails, like killer cyborgs and the police. But this film, like you said, Mexico is no longer associated with the wilderness outlaws, but has entered the contemporary modern world of civilization, where its less attractive features.

Like Los Angeles, it is characterized by crowded highways and streets, urban sprawl, and square factories, buildings. The film thus makes a clear attempt to anchoring itself in Mexico, with Mexican characters speaking Spanish among themselves. This is quite unusual for a pre-pandemic Hollywood blockbuster. Yeah, like this is very much not off the grid. It's very on the grid, you know, and that's not something that's happened. It's not something that happens a lot, and it's also not happened in this series, I mean, like, you know, as indicated there, right? Yeah, we'll discuss this a little more as we get into it, but she also talks about how Mexico and its people are presented as

community-oriented in contrast with US individualism. So yeah, against this background of Mexico city, Grace and the Ramos siblings escape. Grace explains that the Terminator is a robot from the future, and she is an augmented

human. She has been sent to protect Danny. There's a car chase, which is decent, but kind of it's not up there with the best action scenes of this franchise. The Rev 9 is the Morphing Terminator, played by, I think, Gabriel Luna.

Mm-hmm, yep. The Rev 9, he is a layer of nanomachines over a robot skeleton. So the nanomachine layer and the skeleton layer are able to operate more or less independently, which essentially gives him two bodies. And I think this is well communicated visually and is a pretty neat development

as a kind of Terminator we've not seen before. Diego gets killed, Danny's brother gets killed, and the Terminator's car blows up, Grace pulls Danny away and they get kind of pinned between the skeleton and the nanomachines

when suddenly Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor drives in and starts blasting. She says to Grace and Danny, I'll be back. Everyone cheers. And then she goes to ensure the Terminator is dead and they steal her car.

Grace is struggling because her metabolism is attuned for short bursts of anti-terminator activity, so they steal a pharmacy, steal from a pharmacy, and Sarah kind of catches up with them there. Sarah takes them to a motel and they medicate her, and Danny mourns her family's loss, and Sarah tells her that she has to live with her grief. And I think these opening few scenes where, like, Sarah Connor properly comes back in its way,

I think Linda Hamlin's great in these opening scenes, right? You know, her line deliveries and so in the line she gets her, they're that absolute perfect level of quippiness. It's more of a sort of rye sarcastic humor, right? Which fits the sort of like slightly cynical, weathered character that comes into this film from her. And I really, I really like her performance here. She's terrific.

She's really good. She gets some really great kind of Sarah Connor style dialogue, and she really commands the screen. She seems to be bringing, you know, Linda Hamilton has been very open about her mental illness and substance abuse issues, and she seems to bring that experience to the role, so it all feels pretty raw.

She's really good. Again, Miranda Kagregnay has written something else about Terminator Dark Fate. Can't actually. heroine's age, the return of Sarah Connor in Terminator Dark Fate. This is in feminist media studies. And she talks about Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton, returning to this role that she had previously played 28 years earlier.

She said it's a very rare instance of a female action hero returning to the screen, played by the same much older actor. She compares it to Sigourney Weaver, who last appeared in an alien film in 1987 when she was 48. but the sequel that she was going to be in, the Neil Blumcombe film was never actually greenlit so she didn't actually come back to it. So she has looked through other films and talked about Carrie Fisher,

who returns to play Princess Leia, and then appears in Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. But she's a supporting character. Instead, she only found two films that featured female protagonists, played by women over 50, blockbuster films Terminator Dark Fate and Everything Everywhere All At Once

Talks about how the senior Sarah Connor has visibly aged But she is resolutely active She's a source of regeneration in the film rather than degeneration She has developed and made herself A force to be reckoned with And she contrasts this later with aging masculinity Which I think we'll talk about when we get to Arnold Schwarzenegger Another article by Krista Van Ralt, a paper presented at The Terminator at 40 Conference, talks about Hamilton as a Jerry action star, you know, which is when these old action stars go back to being the expendables or whatever, you know, Schwarzenegger going back and doing that.

But she talks about how there's no attempt made to disguise Sarah's age in Dark Fate. She has aged. Her hair is grey now. But she has combat skills and stuff. So yeah, I think Linda Hamilton's really good in this. And he's an interesting representation of a woman action star. So we get some of a flashback on Grace. In the future, she is in a burned out city, you know, chock full of human schools like these cities always are.

This takes us back to the kind of salvation colour scheme of the future, all browns and greys. She gets injured and volunteers to be augmented. So she wakes up and she tells Sarah she's from 2032. Grace has never heard of Skynet because Sarah and John changed the future. Since John was killed by a Terminator that Skynet already sent back before they change the future, Sarah now hunts Terminators and drinks. She also gets encrypted texts from a mysterious source with coordinates and timestamps as to where the terminators are going to be, so she goes there to hunt them. Grace discovers that the texts come from the same coordinates that she mysteriously has tattooed on her body, and also that the Rev 9 was sent from the future by Legion, an AI built for cyber warfare.

and so they form this kind of uneasy alliance. We don't get much more on Legion as an entity. Which, in the context of this film, like, some of the something's gone before, I think it's fantastic. Yeah. I genuinely, if you think back, and like we've gone on quite a long journey through this franchise, right? I think, and I'd spoken before about, I can't remember, I think it might be the last episode for Genesis, right? Because that's the one that kind of gets properly caught up in time travel mumple-jumple-jum. Right, that's properly convoluted.

Right. And I made the reference to, kind of like, some of the best time travel films don't linger on the precise mechanics, right? or if they do that's their thing right is leading into the mechanics when you try to over-explain it but you're not actually that interest it all starts to fall apart

now I've referenced Looper right when they can't before where they openly kind of like just cast it aside during conversation between well I would say the two characters but technically the one character right but this film right

it is quite refreshing how uninterested it is in the logic of the time travel mechanics. Within the film, right, I think there's a bit of noise around it's like, oh yes, no, it's, you know, it's a direct sequel to it, right? But within the film itself, it's not terribly interested

in it, right? And it's not, like, it doesn't have any about how this relates to previous films beyond kind of, you know, Sarah and John survived Terminator 2, John was killed, right? Like, that's kind of the, that. And it's,

as a result, it's a lot more in keeping. with the first Terminator film and Terminator 2, where there was a certain amount of talk about it to kind of logically establish how characters related to each other, but it didn't linger on the mechanics of it. And that is very much to this film's benefit. Yeah. No, it's fine. It gets all this out of the way.

Yeah. But yeah, they need to head to this mysterious location in Texas, and so they need someone to take them over the Mexico-US border. Another interesting development in kind of the representation of Mexico in that you can't just cross the border. Like at the end of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor just crosses into Mexico at the end of it. Like this represents it as if you are going from Mexico to the US,

that is a process. That is something that is hard to do. And I'll get into this in a little bit, a little bit, because there's so much around this. Meanwhile, in a data center in Mexico City, the Rev. Nine hooks into the internet and finds out where they're going. Yeah, Grace explains how things just stopped one day

and planes fell from the sky, etc. Nukes and EMP strikes, that kind of thing. And Sarah speculates that Danny is another person who will give birth to the savior of humanity, and therefore the threat is her womb. And she's fairly cynical about this. they go to Danny's uncle who says he can get them across the border

and the Rev 9 disguises himself as border patrol to kind of intercept them again interesting like Robert Patrick being a cop in Terminator 2 it's interesting that the soulless terminator here makes himself border police like a faceless avatar for state-sponsored violence and he just uses the border cops

as tools for his violent aims directing them in different ways ways. Yeah, there's all sorts of layers here in the, and one thing that I find quite interested, like, during this, I don't want to jump too far, but during the sequence, eventually in attempting to try to get to Danny, the Terminator, dressed as a border patrol engine,

basically ends up fighting and impaling border patrol agents in pursuit of this woman, right? And so it's kind of like, and I realize within the text of the film, like obviously he doesn't have anything. interest in, you know, securing the US border. But it is interesting to actively

depict someone in that garb, in that environment as being completely uninterested in that. It is their pursuit of violence against a Mexican woman is actually what he's there for. It's a complete

sham how he appears to be, right? Yet he, you know, There's another, when he arrives at the border facility, he's basically just waved in, because he looks apart. He looks right, you know? And like that, you know, and like you can argue about how well the film develops this and things like that. But the very fact that it's doing this is a stark contrast to, in particular, three and four. And I think even Genesis, like, you know, we spoke about some of its ideas around kind of like data sovereignty and this sort of thing. But it doesn't do anything. can do anything with the minor, right? This one is at least more obviously,

like it doesn't need to develop it further. You know, the comment is there just in portraying it, which it wasn't in Genesis, right? So no, it already has a lot more interesting ideas going on than almost all of the other sequels bar Terminator 2 put together, frankly. Yeah, so Marianne Kaganagmugney, in her book chapter about this,

talks about how this Terminator Dark Fate offers a possibility of what Cooper and Runford called seeing from the border and the alternate perspective to that of the US. The film makes the border visible, which is quite rare in films that are not specifically about the border. And like I said, it looks different than it does in previous Terminator films because it's much harder for Danny to go into the United States because she is a Mexican immigrant,

emphasizing the power imbalance that makes it very easy for US citizens and cooperation to enter Mexico, but very hard for Mexican workers to follow the same route as the goods they have contributed to making. So yeah, it's really, it's an interesting move. And again, perhaps I'm just starved for interesting themes from this franchise, but I found it really rich and interesting. But there is a lot to glom onto here. I mean, even like the idea that, you know, you can argue about kind of like the plot mechanics that mean they need to go to the states, right, because of the whole, you know, we'll come to that. But I think even the idea that in order to obtain safety or find kind of like what they need to do, they need to cross the border and that is an impediment and it puts them in danger having this sort of like elaborate, you know, prison.

like apparatus that they need to kind of like navigate their way through that is an interesting idea in and of itself right and it you know and you know you'll get kind of like films that covered this from a very kind of like literal standpoint but this is kind of dressing up

in sci-fi furniture and the fact that it's chosen that as the scaffolding for it that is interesting you know yeah with specifically the US state being the antagonist being the barrier that is stopping our heroes from achieving their narrative goal.

It's an interesting positioning. So our heroes get taken to a US detention centre, and the Rev 9 arrives there. Sarah gets flagged as dangerous, so she gets taken elsewhere. Grace escapes the medical area, and there is this great bit when she's doing this, where does they take the prisoners? And this medical worker just says, like,

oh, actually we call them detainees. And McKenzie Davis gives her this withering look, Yeah. It's really good. It really gets across this person trying to justify their inhuman work, and McKenzie Davis having none of it. It's really great, really interesting. But they eventually escape and they steal a helicopter. Grace attempts to ditch Sarah, but Danny stands up for her. And so they fly away. They fly to the tectus coordinates. Yeah, now at this point, this is. This is where Cagmugney says that Mexican characters and Mexico disappear from the last third of the film. She talks about how from this point onwards Danny gets overshadowed by the two white US American women who treat her like a child, as he says that we therefore see a gendered version of Manifest Destiny sweeping through dark fate, where the United States brings progress and equality to women from backward and patriarchal countries. the US characters are every time presented as Saviars with Grace and Sarah appearing out of nowhere to destroy male threats.

I'm not sure I'd go that far. I think Danny still doesn't have as much to do from this point on, but still has stuff to do. And for a US blockbuster, I'm happy with the kind of representation of Mexico in the first half, even if it does move away from that slightly. Yeah, and I think I'd say that observation, it's not entirely without merit. but the one thing I will say is Danny develops and has already, by this point in the film, started to develop as a character, right?

In terms of kind of like the amount of responsibility that she takes and kind of like, you know, coming up with, you know, kind of like get your shit, get our shit together attitude. And I think that criticism to an extent kind of overlooks the fact that this is the sixth film in this franchise, right? She basically, at the start of the film,

shares many characteristics, but it's actually a lot more capable, I would say, and a lot more strong will than Sarah Connor was in the original Terminator, right? You know, so if this was the first film in this franchise and it was being presented this way, and they were new characters, yeah, okay, maybe.

But I think the thing is, they are drawing an explicit comparison between her in this film and Sarah Connor in the first film, so they can then be subverted to some extent later on, right? So I think you know, you can't come into this

with Danny being a, like, you know, this well-developed resistance leader who's incredibly capable and all the rest of it from the off, because then she has no arc, you know? So I don't think the criticism is entirely without merit. I think it disregards a lot of context

about what this film is in conversation with, though. Yeah. So they fly to Texas. and they go to the coordinates and they find a cabin and they find a drapery business run by someone called Carl and the cabin turns out to be occupied by Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800

who Sarah understandably wants to kill because this is the Terminator who killed John. And it turns out that Carl, the T-800 has been waiting around for what, 30 years, 28 years after killing John and in that time has developed a conscience. After killing John, he met a woman and he cared for her family.

He raised her child as his own and he realized what he'd done to Sarah. He kept on learning even after his mission was complete and he decided to give meaning to Sarah's life by sending her the texts about the incoming Terminators. Now, Arnie is, for me, a revelation in this film. He's fantastic compared to the previous. two or three films. He gets so much more to do as Carl, as this Terminator

who has turned human, and he feels a lot more dialed in than in the previous films. You know, he kind of has reflections on love and humanness and family that give on so much more to work with. I think it's his best performance since Terminator 2.

I think I would probably I think I would probably agree with that, right? I think the one thing I will say is it's a different, it's a totally different role and a totally different performance. Completely, yeah. To either of the other ones he's done. Well, it kind of alludes to Pops in the last film.

So in the last film he was Pops, who had slowly become more human, but not to this degree. This fully embraces the idea that over time, this kind of machine would become human. human and become more human and develop more of a conscience. And Arnie plays it like that way. He plays it as more human.

You know, he has a home, he's giving out beers, he's, he's a lot more genial and warm. And it feels like a development. It feels like realistically he has developed over 28 years. Yeah, I think what's interesting about it, though, is that it's still, in a good way. I'm not saying this as a pretty, like, it still is slightly robotic, right, but in a way where it makes sense, right? Because the pops, like the pops role,

and I do think there were interesting ideas in that role in Genesis, I just don't think they ended up developed particularly well. Like, the way that they convey the non-human part of him is through sort of like very wordy dialogue about time travel concepts and robotic. You know, and that's, that's, that's, that's,

And it's played for laughs, some good, some work, some doesn't. But that's how to convey it. Here, it's more, and it's actually, like, again, this is where you end up with some fascinating laser here, because, like, he is this patriarchal figure. He is, you know, the protector of a family. And the way that he is kind of, like, still shown to be slightly robotic is he is kind of a man, for want of a better word, of few words, right? Yeah.

Like, that's portrayed as being the robotic part of it. And it's just interesting to sort of, like, take that concept of the idea of kind of, like, the strong silent type as being, you know, the robotic part that people grow. Like, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot going on there. And I think you can read into it what you want. And it plays humor quite well as well, I think. Like, at one point, I think. at one point

he gets a few bullets put in him and he just kind of like Kamloos down and says that that'll be hard to explain to and forget the wise and it's like it's it's humorous but it doesn't require three sentences to deliver the bunch line you know he also gets animated about his

drapery business and explaining the kind of minutiae of drapes at one point which is quite funny yeah so it's good so I think To my point, yes, I do think it's probably his best performance in this franchise since Terminator 2. I also think he's been given much better writing than he was in either Terminator 3 or Genesis, though. Yeah, I mean, Kagvergne talked about the aging masculinity represented

and how this contrast with the aging femininity of Sarah. So with Sarah and Carl are successful ages, you know, they're not dependent or abject. but Carl embodies what Josephine Dolan calls vintage masculinity where sensitivity signals maturity like an old wine that is improved of age and late fatherhood remains a claim to youthful viral potency yeah I think this works where pops didn't because they do more with the idea of Carl a human a robot who has become human where they didn't with pops so they specifically contrast it with Grace

a human who has augmented herself to become more like a terminator, and even Sarah, who has lost some aspect of her humanity, her humanity, to make herself more terminator-like. So there's all these interesting ideas around kind of augmentation and transhumanism and picking up and losing humanity and becoming more robotic, and Carl feeds into all that. So it feels richer because of the narrative around it and the characters around it. Yeah, honestly, this film does have a lot more going on in previous ones, right?

It's like saying, it's like being given a glass of water after crawling through the desert, right? Exactly. Yeah, you know, and the water might not necessarily be the most interesting thing, but you're just desperate for something, right? But I think there are interesting ideas going around here, because I think also the parenthood one is quite an interesting thing, and its effect on masculinity in particular, right? because you have this contrast of a violent machine who killed a child, right, has become a settled family man. Yeah. And then on the other side of it, you have a bereaved mother who was basically doing everything for her son up to that point. She's now become this sort of like avenging nihilist almost, right, in the absence of her son.

So it's like positioning it as a moderating influence is actually really quite fascinating. But it does it without being more. in a way that I think Genesis lent towards a little bit, right? I don't think I quite got there, but it was close to it. And the one part that I found fascinating was when Danny asks Carl if he loves his family, right? And it's a moment where I think it would be very easy to take that character and humanize him completely, right? But it doesn't take that route. And it also kind of harks back to Terminator 2 in a sense, because he doesn't, I think the exact.

I can't remember the exact line, but it's something like, you know, not as a human can, right? Implying that what I understand it to be, yes, but it's not the same. And it, to me, it was a fascinating thing where they've humanised them, but not totally. It's maintaining kind of what that character is. But it also harts back to Terminator too, and the kind of like, you know, now I understand why you cry, even though I can, you know, I never could. Like that, that aspect, right? It's a direct line. It's consistent in a way.

that for all the interesting aspects that the Pops character could have had and did to some extent, it's more in keeping with what has gone before. It's a development, but it is consistent. Yeah, this is what I like most about this, is that it feels like a genuine evolution from Terminator 2. I mean, clearly this film is in dialogue with Terminator 2, very explicitly. But this feels like a genuine evolution of the T-800s arc from that film. and the problem that the previous filmmakers have had with T-800 and R. Swartzonaga

is that he was designed to be an unchanging character. He's designed to be an unchanging robot. And Cameron, it was Cameron's idea to do this. Cameron has figured out a way to make that character interesting and to evolve him. Like, what if the T-800 kept learning after it completed its mission? That's a genuinely interesting development for that character. That works. But they decide to...

They have a discussion and they decide to set up a killbox, using Danny as bait to lure the Rev9 into it. Carl has lots of weapons for this purpose, but you suggest that they'll need a military-grade EMP weapon. Carl sends his family away, and there's kind of a touching steen where Arnie's stoicism hides his pain, and he says, I won't be back.

Sarah tells him that when it's all over, she'll kill him. As well as the I Won't Be Back line, he also gets a little moment where he goes into his cabin and picks up some sunglasses, considers them for a moment, and then puts them down again. It's perhaps a bit cheap, but I did appreciate that. It's cheap, but I liked it, a symbol of him embracing his humanity rather than adopting his kind of mask that he used to wear. it's not just that I did also appreciate if you think about you know

bits of Jealous Terminator 3 in particular even the bad to the bone segment in Terminator 2 I actually kind of appreciate it was like no we're done with this shit yeah

we're moving on we're done with this yeah you know like with the killing of John it's a clear signal that we're moving on things are different yeah

yeah so the gang go to meet Sarah's military contact who hands over the EMP but they're disturbed by the Rev 9 who is shooting from a helicopter. They flee to a nearby Air Force base and they drive into a military transport plane. They fight. The EMP gets damaged in the fight and during this time Grace tells Danny that it was her who found her in the future and saved her because Danny isn't the mother of the leader of the resistance. She is the leader of the resistance. It's not her womb that's important. she is the new John.

It's not really clear to me why Grace couldn't have told her this before, but there we are. No, and this I'm not sure, this is where for me, I don't think the film falls apart. I wouldn't go as strong as that. No. This is where it starts to get a little bit shankier

in my view. Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, just in terms of production and cinematography, there's a lot of night scenes at this point, and they were way too dark on television. I'm sure these are fine in the cinema, but they were way too

dark for me. So I struggled to follow what was happening in the action scenes. Yeah, and I will say, I don't know if the action scenes are all that. No, no. In general. We'll talk about this more when we're talking about the film as a whole at the end here, but I think this

point here is where it starts to indulge in plot conveniences and shortcuts a lot more. and I think this is where because they now need to find a kind of action-packed way to round this off

a lot of the interesting stuff we spoke about starts to take a bit of a back seat and I'm not convinced the film has the technical verve to keep that momentum you know and so this is where it starts to dip a little bit for me

I think. Yeah I think the film as we've discussed, sets up a lot of interesting themes and does interesting things with them. Like we've talked about the border. The border crossing is an interesting representation of kind of US imperialism and the othering of Mexico. It does kind of these interesting things,

but the conclusion doesn't really bring them together. The conclusion is just a big action scene. I should go wrong. I think it would be fine. If it had the capability to pull that off that the likes of Terminator 2 did, right? But for better, I mean, not for better or worse, for worse, it doesn't in my view, right? No. So there's more action on the plane.

The Rev 9 flies a plane into their plane and another fighting shoes. Danny, Grace and Sarah end up in a Jeep that gets pushed out with the plane. It's probably good action if I could see what was happening, but I couldn't on my TV. I didn't particularly but it's another one of the sequences along with kind of like when the Rev 9 is in the you know the factory in the opening scenes where the disregard for the laws of physics

is just a little bit too much for me to really get invested in this and this is one of the things I'm referencing when I say it starts to kind of like fall apart a little bit in terms of what it's doing ultimately our heroes fall into a hydroelectric dam like a reservoir over a hydroelectric dam. There's a pretty decent underwater bit where Carl and the Rev 9 fight underwater. Yeah, ultimately our heroes

struggle up the dam. Grace is struggling with her metabolism again and asks them to use her power source as an EMP. They all decide to make their last stand at the hydroelectric dam. Grace chops up the Rev 9's nano bit and Carl throws about the skeleton bit. Carl and Grace push the Rev 9 into a turbine which blows up and because Grace is dying, Danny takes her EMP to blow up the remains of the Rev 9. Yeah, Danny ends up EMPing the Rev 9 in the skull and Carl drags him over to a pit in the dam and throws them both over. And there's a pretty good Arnie death where he slowly gets stripped of his human components and whispers at the last second for John.

The film ends with a scene of Danny going to see Young Grace at a playground in a visual parallel to how Sarah's skeleton was gripping the playground fence in that scene in Terminator 2. And Sarah and Danny drive off with the implication that Sarah will prepare Danny for her future. Krista Van Routt in her conference paper says that just as Carl no longer pre-programmed by the machines of a non-existent future is now free to find his own purpose, so Sarah is no longer beholden to the biological imperative, no longer a mother or a walking womb in waiting,

but free to choose her role as Danny's mentor. So they drive off into the future. Yeah. Now I believe they had envisioned this, again, as the first film in a new trilogy. is this the third one because it has not meant me a trilogy of salvation in a row it's just ridiculous that stop making things trilogies yeah and james cammon was going to write the sequels and began work on the film in 2020

but it didn't didn't didn't pan out like that you know the events of of Dark Fate completely erase Schwarzenegger's T-800 character from existence in any way, but Cameron didn't rule out the possibility of Schwarzenegger reprising the character. You know, saying he could come back in some way. But got cancelled because of, probably like COVID had an impact on this, but also because the film underperformed based on what they wanted to do. Mackenzie Davis said the seventh film

would not have been a sequel per se but would have been a spin-off focusing on grace in the future war similar to Terminator Salvation but didn't get made yeah you'd also think they'd learn from the

we want to make a film about the future war stop making really do you yeah stop planning tillages you maniacs it's just address Right, because this film, and I do have my problems with it. I do think there's some effects work, which is, I'm not going to say it's bad,

because I don't think it is in terms of kind of like the Rev Night. It's actually probably pretty good on a technical level. I just don't find it particularly compelling or something about the visuals of the nano-o-shund. And this applies to Genesis as well, like John Connor and, what was he? Was he a 3,000 or a 5,000? 3,000, T-3,000, whatever the hell he was, right? there it applies there as well it's just it's just not as compelling a visual

as the the T1,000 termedator 2 it's just not um you know so like that that is not amazing I do feel the action scenes towards the end are you know they're just lacking a bit of

va va va voam you know yeah right it's just all a little it's just all a little limp in that regard that being said, right?

And I'll maybe say this more for the sum up episode, like when we look at the series as a whole, right? I look at the components of this film and this film should have been the Terminator films, The Force Awakens, right? Like, it has that same, it has that same mechanism of making judicious use of the older actors who are associated with the film, but using them in a reasonably interesting way to then pass it across to a newer cast, right? And that's why I think they did well in The Force Awakens.

I don't think The Force Awakens is a perfect film, but I think it does a lot of things very well, and that is one of them, right? This film, I think, could have done similar. I think had this actually genuinely been Terminator 3, and this was the film's legacy sequel era beginning, I think there could have been something here. So I think it's an interesting case

amongst all the kind of like series we've looked at here where it's not actually related to the three films that came before it, yet it carries the weight of them. That is actually kind of what sinks it in the end. It gets pretty. dragged down by franchise fatigue because this comes out

too close to those films and is just tarred with that brush I wouldn't have before we started you know researching this franchise and going through these films

I wouldn't have been able to tell you that this is a complete break from those other films and is a sequel to Terminator 2 I didn't know that to me these were all just of a part you know

I guess I thought you had to see Terminator Salvation in Genesis to see this and understand what's going on. Which is not true, but he gets tired with that brush. And the thing that makes me laugh about this is there are so many ideas kicking around in here

which have been dealt with by the third, fourth and fifth films, right? Just worse, right? But done better here. So like, yeah, like the inevitability of judgment-dain kind of like the fact that if it's not SkyNet

it's going to be something else, right? They've kind of covered that in Terminator 3. Right, that's the ending of it. The Terminator 3 was a crap film, right? The idea of the human machine hybrids, and I want to come back to McKenzie Davis briefly, actually, when we're talking about the films as a whole, but like the idea of human machine hybrids, right?

They covered that in salvation, but again, it's done better here because I think the grace. character is a more interesting character than, it's a more interesting character than Marcus is written in that film. I think there was potential with that character, but they didn't

take advantage of it in any way whatsoever, right? So that, so I think Grace is a more interesting character. I think McKenzie Davis also is a much better actor in Sam Worthington. I want to talk about her performance specifically. The idea of Terminators are robots gaining human-like

traits or consciousness, they covered that in Genesis and to some extent. salvation, right, with the hybrid part of it. The advance of technology was covered in Genesis. These are all things that have been covered by some of the previous films, but not in interesting ways. There's nothing compelling about them here. There is here.

Now, I think the film kind of flubs its final act, and it's just a bit of a bit of a nothing, to be honest. And I think, in all honestly, I do wonder that plays a little bit into kind of the idea of this not being great and it not necessarily and I don't think it got as bad a reaction as certainly the two films that preceded it but it's it kind of ends on

it's a shame the film ends with its weakest segment I think is the problem here because there are more interesting ideas here it explores them but the execution itself and this does this does apply earlier in the film as well

I think like the action seems they kind of lack a bit of visual verve, you know, they're not very memorable, so it has a lot of good ideas and I think it does a decent idea exploring them in the dialogue and kind of the character interactions

but the type of film this is, it needs something a little bit more sugar rushy to get you to stick with it and I think it will lose a lot of people in that final act basically. Yeah, agreed. I think

it does have a lot of interesting ideas It's developing them better. It's better written than the previous three films. But the action's lacking. There's not a memorable action scene in the way that I can remember, you know, the race through the L.A. River in Terminator 2 or the police shootout. I can remember those. I can't remember these action scenes.

They're just not that compelling. Yeah, and this is where, you know, if you think about kind of, If you think about Genesis Salvation Terminator 3, I would say any of the ideas that those films will look to bounced off my brain. The action sequences, also for the most part and all, maybe with the odd exception here,

they're also bounced off my brain. In this one, the ideas it's exploring have not. Right? And that's what I will remember about the film. The action sequences are still bouncing off my brain here. Yeah. So judged against Terminator 1 and 2, like it's still nowhere near it,

but I think I've discussed several times through the series. Very few things are. I do think this film, for all of its flaws, and I do think it has flaws, particularly in that final ad, I mean, the major character is a case in point. This guy who's an acquaintance to say it turns up, hands over in the MP in a briefcase, and then within about five minutes they're flying on a military airline or something.

Sorry, what the fuck just happened? Yeah. You know, like, you know, like that doesn't make a lot of sense. And then everything after that is a little bit, kind of like, it's a little bit generic, right? So this film has a lot of problems. I don't think it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination, very far from it. It is fucking light years ahead of the three films that came before it. Absolutely light years.

Yeah, I think it's really good until they cross the border into America. Yeah. No, that's not fair. Well, actually, I think, I think once... Once they leave Carl's cabin and head to, like, the airspace. when they need to head to the air for that that's when it falls apart to me yeah and it doesn't feel particularly well connected to the rest of the film either it feels like

it feels like a climax sequence that was taken from a different draft and grafted on because they needed something to they needed a big finale yeah right and I think it suffers for it like I would even say the setting kind of like within the damage it's actually quite visually it looks quite similar to genesis in my view yeah that's true you know so it does start to kind of

unravel a little bit and I think that it's a shame because the end feeling you end when I first watched this right I think having rewatched it I've come out more positive than when I first watched it and my first view was not negative by much stretch

but you just kind of come out of this with the sense that this series is just kind of creatively exhausted at this stage, right? Because, and it's unfortunate because I don't think it's this film's fault. And that's what I mean by like it's carrying the weight of the films that went before it. It's because it has so many of these elements, right?

I, like genuinely, I think if you watch nothing, like, if your experience of the Terminator's franchise was Terminator 1, Terminator 2, then you didn't watch anything and then you watch this, right? you'd probably watch this and think okay it's not as good as the other ones but yeah okay all right yeah fine but like because it has so many of these things it's done before like human machine hybrids and

everybody judgment day you know technology the series has done this before I think some people will then switch off but then when you get to the conclusion of the film there's nothing to wake you up and pay attention again if anything the film ends up doing the obvious the opposite and that is a flaw of this film

but I think my feelings on this film are different to my feelings on the series I watch this film and end up feeling the series is probably pretty tapped out at this point right? But I think it is unfortunate that it's done so.

And I'll save some of the longer thoughts I have for this for when we're talking about it as a whole because I think a lot of this is tied up in kind of the history of this series and who's ended up working on it and continuity of creative vision and this sort of thing. And it's just, it's kind of fascinating because it's completely, it's completely all over the shop, you know, in a way that,

you know, the other series that we've looked at, in a way that they are not, right? Even the alien, even the alien series where we've kind of gone, we've spoken at length during that series about the kind of like proper identity crisis that series goes through. This has, and I think I alluded to it a little bit in the, the earlier episodes, right? This one also has it

has an identity crisis of sorts, but it's expressed in a very different way. Yeah. Yeah. In a very different way. I find that interesting. I'd say I'll save that for the next episode. It's a discussion that needs room to breathe, right?

But yeah. Yeah, I'll have to think about the franchise as a whole and think about the identity crisis. Because I can see one, I'll just have to think about how to articulate it. but that is for our next episode yeah and it's the same here it's this this this film

this film is truly dragged down by being deterred it like it's a weird way it's truly weird it's really dragged down by films it has nothing to do with it and actively rejects like it's yeah but now I'll say that I wasn't dragged down in the same way that you were I was really energized by that first

two-thirds of the film where it's got some really strong ideas really good script and is working well. And I think that really good two thirds carried me through the just fine finale and left me with an overall impression like averaging out, this film's good, you know? It's like you say, it's not Terminator 2 or Terminator 1,

but it is good. And I felt that relief coming from Salvation and Genesis, especially, that this is at least good. This is a decent film with some interesting ideas that falls apart a bit, but I didn't feel dragged down by the same kind of Terminator fatigue that I think you're describing. No, I do wonder some of the rejection of it, like, generally, is, like, one thing that this film is definitely not, right?

In contrast to Genesis and a lot of other sequels that are kicking around it's definitely not nostalgia bait right I mean we kind of alluded to it a little bit with the opening scene in why I'm to John but like it like this film is very largely uninteresting callbacks I mean there's a couple of little lines here there

right there that specifically reject that kind of callback culture like I'll not be back when he picks up the sunglasses like you say the immediate killing of John they're kind of more kind of Last Jedi allusions to what happened in the past, but actively rejecting it and saying we're moving on.

And I appreciated those quite a bit. I like those moments and I like that blank slating of things, that willingness to say, no, John's gone. John's got shot in the face immediately, which is what I liked about the start of Genesis, this idea that there was a blank slate but then they just filled it up with the same things then they just went for the same lazy nostalgia

and you don't have to do that no here they didn't they repudiated it quite a bit more forcefully and that feels like Cameron that feels like Cameron coming in and exerting some kind of artistic role over it you know creative control yeah and this is what I'm talking about

with kind of like the continuity of creative vision I'm not going to go into that in detail, because I'll save it for the next episode. But with this film specifically, right, it is possible to do this. I mean, like, films have done, like, you know, you've got the Creed series, which has spun off of Rocky and has ended up. I haven't seen the last one, but certainly Creed One, too, like, they're good films in their own right, and they have something to see, right? It is possible to take something like this and kind of, not a proper maybe smittle, but kind of like take a fork, right? And I think this film had the potential to be the point where this series makes that fork, right? In the same way that kind of like the Force Awakens went to focus on new characters, but still involved, the older ones.

The same thing that Creed did, right, that is possible to do this. But you need to have filmmakers who are interested in saying something and doing something with it, right? And for all my issues I can have with J.J. Abrams, J.J. Abrams did that with the Force Awakens. Ryan Johnson definitely did it with The Last Jedi. and Ryan Cougallor did it with Crete, right? But the thing is, these are filmmakers who are interested in doing something with it, not just making another entry for the sake of making another entry, which frankly is what Rise of the Machine's Salvation Genesis smack of in retrospect.

One other thing I did want to quickly mention. Another article I found about this film is a study by Taylor Winter, Hannah Zimmerman, Damien Scarf, who wrote an article for Jammer Network Open on the association of watching a film with prejudice towards mental illness. And they only mentioned Dark Fate because they used it as a control group. What they actually did was investigated associations of the film Joker with prejudice towards those with mental illness. So they took people who had watched Joker and took people who had watched Terminator Dark Fate

and did a measure of their prejudice towards mental illness after them hypothesizing that Joker would be associated with higher levels of prejudice towards individuals with mental illness which turns out to be the case in yesterday kind of an odd control group to use given that Sarah Connor so clearly

is devoured by grief and Hamilton is bringing her own experience of mental illness to the role yeah funny but there we go. That was just something I came across in my research. So yeah, that was Terminator Dark Fate.

Next episode, we will discuss our longer-term thoughts on the Terminator franchise, how this franchise looks as a whole, and what possible identity crisis is expressed across this franchise. We'll also rank our films, which I haven't done yet. And we'll have to think about that. I also haven't done yet. And I also, as I've said before, I infamously hate star ratings

and rankings, so I don't know how I've managed to involve myself in the podcast series where the crescendo of each one is ranking that was in the series. You know, but never mind, it's not linger on that. Yeah. Yes.

We'll discuss that next time. Do you have anything else on Dark Fate? continue wrapping up? Not particularly, no. I think anything else I have to say about Dark Fate is probably best expressed is probably best expressed in that

some of the episode will do. I think anything else with it, it's how it sits in relation how it sits in relation to the other films. And just how he expresses things more interestingly. Actually, the one thing I will say is actually just

it does ideas from other films, better, right? Is I did find it interesting that it went back to this idea of Legion being kind of this thing that was embedded into military systems and that then

ended up an oppressive force because it rose completely back on Genesis and you know the terrible scene with the nurse kind of like talking about oh it's great, I can look on my devices and it's wonderful right. I think it was quite interesting

that it's positioned as, the way I phrased it is, it's an impressive and invasive top-down effort, you know, like surveillance, digital data, right? It's that rather than this bottom-up abdication of personal sovereignty, right? That, you know, and you can argue to toss about which one actually is in reality, certainly from my own personal prejudices that fits better with my idea of what's actually going on in the world, right? And I think it's a more interesting one to express in a film, you know, so,

that's what's this film it does a lot of things that the other films in the series do it does them better but it suffers from things

having been an absolute pig's breakfast of it earlier yeah you feel like you've seen it before

even though this film is doing it so much better and in such an interesting way but it suffers from that so yeah

we'll get into the franchise of the whole in the next episode so do join us next month for that for now thank you for joining us

you can find more cinema criticism and film reviews at take one cinema.net where there is long form film reviews discussions of festival films and art house cinema and you can also listen to previous series of this podcast on this podcast feed

where we've done Alien Jurassic Park and Mission Impossible so far you can also find Take One on Mastodon or Blue Sky or wherever. You can find us on Mastodon on Blue Sky and talk to us there. But for now, yeah, thank you for listening to us. And until next time, when we'll discuss the Terminator franchise as a whole, we will be back.

See you then.