Movie Review Terminator Dark Fate

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With Spoilers This disappointing sequel could be subtitled 'The Good the bad and the downright stupid.' Mixed reactions to this one. Getting to see it threw a nice surprise. The Odeon cinema here has cheap seats deals Monday afternoons, so watched Joker, (great and reviewed separately) and then went back in for T3 take two (more on that in a moment). First the Odeon points card that got me a few free screening Is now discontinued and as this second film of the day started at 5pm, the cheap seat offer was over, (at 5pm on the dot), but the girl on the desk told me that though not looking quite pensionable yet she was charging me as if I was so I still got a decent discount. Onto the film; great to see the dream team together again, Arnie, Linda Hamilton, and as producer, Cameron. Some great set pieces and an intriguing opening but the T1 shooting John so easily made me wonder why he didn’t do that the first time round. It relegates everything post T2 to alternative history. Then its onto the three new characters, Grace, Dani & Rev-9. Grace, the real hero of this movie Is intriguing and well played by McKenzie Davies. Dani (Natalie Reyes) is also good with emotional distress, anger etc., but her character is very arbitrary. She is just a random generic teenager. Her future amounts to an inspirational'don’t give up keep fighting' attitude for the resistance and sending Grace back in time to die saving herself, without warning her what to look out for and avoid. Clearly time can be changed here as John killing Skynet has led to a new killer AI Legion springing up instead, indicating that infinite variation will keep recurring meaning poor Sarah Conner will never be happy. Gabriel Luna is quite one dimensional as Rev-9 in a great series of slick CG! Tricks combining the T2 liquid metal shapeshift trick with being able to separate and tag team with his own metal skeletonal frame. His performance is rather wooden, especially when he tries making jokey lines Arnie could carry, like apologizing to people for destroying their sheds. We get an epic car / truck chase with the new characters before we really get to know who they are or why we should care about them. The chase looks like an ending scene rather than an early one. Only when Sarah joins in does the plot start to make sense. The chase editing is badly done, often with just random cars being bounced round the screen as the truck now-plough smacks them round. Dani’s boyfriend dies, something her future self could have warned Grace to try to prevent. The heroes set out to find the source of Sarah’s messages telling her where to go. This means smuggling Dani over the Mexican border, and also Sarah as she is a wanted criminal after her various Terminator killings. How exactly therefore did Sarah get into Mexico? Surely whatever false papers / bribe system got her in should get her out again. Worse, they take a long train ride with other Mexican refugees but then get off the train to meet a people smuggler conveniently know to Dani who tries to get them over the border. The whole train ride sequence adds nothing to the plot. They could have just gone right to this guy, who then drops out of the film with no other purpose once his one act Is done. Arnie, (the second appearance is where I started getting close to yelling at the screen John ‘You can’t be serious’ Mcenroe style. Having murdered John, he has nothing else to do but settle down on a farm with a family who don’t notice he is odd (as Grace points out), including a partner failing to notice he weighs about half a ton). The T2 Arnie has grown to like people and regrets killing John. How does he exist at all? With Skynet beaten in our timeline why didn’t he and the other Skynet Terminators Sarah has hunted just ceased exiting anyway? Why didn’t he / they work to relaunching Skynet? Arnie’s shed armoury, (celebrated like a wet dream ad for Texan NRA survivalists) has also escaped his partner. Even when he gives Dani the ten minutes Day Of The Jackal Melon shoot training needed to make her a perfect sniper the family don’t hear the unsilenced shooting going on in sight of the house. Police never turn up for any of the carnage in the entire movie. We only see the border patrol and later the air force guys. A Freeway pile up, dead bodies everywhere, a shootout at the border and on a farm, and a plane crashing into a dam, frightening off the entire staff, all fails to generate any investigation at all. Then another convenient friend with stuff scene – the heroes need an Electro-Magnetic Pulse Bomb and Sarah very conveniently knows a guy in the airforce who cheerfully fetches them one. He does stick around for part of the pitched battle to follow but not for long and the steel case with the EMP in it takes bullets rendering it useless making this another redundant build up to nothing. The fight on the planes is a cartoon. A refuelling jet crashes through airforce jets as if it Is another car chase, somehow failing to take damage itself in mid-air collisions before Rev-9 springs onto the hero-plane, which does end up a crashing fireball, somehow failing to fall apart or just explode. It Is very like the burning plane fight in Die Another Day. The plane crashes into a river a hair’s breathe from a hydroelectric dam, which should really break with that close contact with a burning big plane,with the heroes dangling on a cable from the top of it, in an armoured car, and Arnie fighting half the villain on the river bed before the truck falls in too, with the human characters surviving the huge fall and near drowning when the Rev-9 lets water in. They delay him by deploying a parachute underwater but surely the water pressure would stop it deploying. The humans seem as indestructible as the robots and presumably Grace’s enhancements include gills. The final showdown in the dam works really gets dumb. Half the machinery seems to serve no purpose other than crunching killer robots from the future. Grace sacrifices herself by ripping out her nuclear gizmo heart – great but a/. Why as future Dani knew this was coming dids he let everyone waste time getting the EMP bomb that was doomed to fail? b/. Why not tell Grace to bring a second unit? Why for that matter do the terminators and resistance fight with serious weaponry in the future but travel to the past naked and unarmed? Surely Grace could have created a way to insert a second heart unit weapon to chuck at theRev-9? A fun movie but proves that Skynet and Legion both get their hardware from ACME in Wile E Coyote fashion. Wile E might actually be a Terminator, after all constant falls over the cliff in his efforts to stop future Beep-Beeping never kills him. Youtube Terminator spoof Arthur Chappell