TERMINATOR: DARK FATE - Best bomb of the year

Rating: 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎
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Sometimes you have to take fandom out of the equation and objectively ask yourself "was this really a good movie?" Occasionally you luck into some luxury and don't have to. In the case of the new Terminator movie, I was able to just ask my girlfriend who I had recently dragged through the first two installments of the franchise what she thought of the new chapter in the murder robot series.

She describes her appreciation of Termintator 2: Judgement Day as "I don't love it." It's not really her type of thing. She did, however, "like" the first two Terminator movies which is something I will take all day. I can work with that. While my analysis runs the risk of being a bit too subjective, her opinions kept me honest with my objectivity.

Before we discuss my girlfriend's non-fanboy opinion on the new Terminator movie (I have wanted to write that sentence my entire life,) let's address how much house cleaning there was in the muddy storyline after T2. James Cameron, Director Tim Miller, and a writers room including powerhouse screenwriter David S. Goyers who penned the masterpiece The Dark Knight (as well as the mess that was Blade Trinity) decided to completely throw out the confusing and convoluted exploits of the various T-800s and the Conner Family featured three full-length sequels and a television series. Everything after T2 was tossed. It was a bold but proper move to directly follow up Terminator: Genisys by saying "yeah, let's just pretend Genisys and all that other stuff didn't happen." Let's just chalk these continuity changes up to time-travel multiverse theory, perhaps? With that in mind, we'll be focusing only on the first two installments in the franchise's lengthy and sometimes checkered past.

I have to applaud Tim Miller's team for taking this approach, but as Tony Stark once said, "you mess with time, it tends to mess back." And, while the think-tank behind the new Terminator was on the right track, the sins of the past still managed to catch up to these filmmakers. More on that in a bit.

Look, this was a good movie. It looked and felt like a Terminator movie. My girlfriend who doesn't exactly gush over the series thought this was a very solid jaunt through the Terminator universe after having just watched the first two movies. Even my handful of complaints were fairly nit-picky.

Yes, I didn't like the editing during the first chase sequence, but it was simply a matter of style preference. As an editor, myself, I hate choppy one second cuts. That "30 cuts in 30 seconds" stuff isn't my thing, even if the scene involves a high speed chase in a big vehicle driven by shape-shifting robot.

My litmus test of a girlfriend, on the other hand, had no problems with how that sequence was executed which means that most people will feel what Tim Miller wanted, which was some blazing hot, adrenaline-pumping excitement in a very tense blastoff into the cybernetic action that we knew we were signing up for when we got our tickets. That particular chase was the only portion of the entire movie that felt so rushed, and it's a style that's implemented in tons of modern blockbusters so it is what it is.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

James Cameron said that there was still blood on the walls after his creative fights with Tim Miller in the editing room. While I don't know what those battles entailed, I wonder if Miller's team didn't resort to more choppy editing techniques throughout the rest of the movie and Cameron maybe tried to stave it off and go for a more gentle passage through the gunfire and explosions. We may never know what those creative differences entailed, but I was very glad that the editing smoothed out after that first big sequence.

I didn't have many complaints beyond that. Everything else was really very solid aside from a few head scratching lines or ideas. They got the important stuff right. The characters were handled with such care that you knew Tim Miller was a fan of the franchise beforehand. Of course, the creator of the franchise, James Cameron, treated this movie like a daughter going out on prom night with her new boyfriend. "Don't bring my Terminator characters home past 11, Tim Miller." The filmmakers were as concerned with story-craft as they were about anything else.

Nothing felt out of place as they successfully walked the line between fanservice and the overloading of an audience with nostalgia just to remind them that they're watching a sequel to a movie that used to be really popular. You know that guy that was super cool in high school that you see at your 10 year reunion and he's turned into a total loser and keeps playing the "remember when" game with people but it's, like, weird and sad and gives you a newfound appreciation for your own life's trajectory? Yeah, Terminator: Dark Fate managed to avoid being that guy.

We got a nice stroll down memory lane without it feeling too forced. Sarah Conner dropped a lot of "f-bombs" and was so powerful and believable as a grumpy old lady with PTSD, a drinking problem, and a bazooka. Newcomers Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna were fantastic additions to the cast. The dynamic between Davis and Hamilton's characters was really fun and something that the writers enjoyed playing with.

Arnold Schwarzenegger stole every scene he was in for all the right reasons, but the best part was that this iteration was completely and totally different from any of his previous Terminator characters of old which gave The Governor a chance to shine in new and exciting ways. He was way more fun than I expected. As a theater employee, I love working a movie and getting to certain crowd pleasing moments. Arnold has a few lines that make the entire theater laugh, and that's the charm that was missing throughout the series after T2 that makes Dark Fate so wonderful.

Our story follows the same beats of the early Terminator formula but featured some new twists in this go-around to spice things up. We get some catch phrases but see the restraint of the filmmakers to not cheese it up too much. It's fresh but familiar. And it's all done really well by solid actors and filmmakers.

And, before I move on, I just wanted to shout out Linda Hamilton, 63, and Arnold Schwarzenneger, 72, for winning the GILF and DILF of the Decade awards. They both looked and sounded fantastic in this movie.

So why did it bomb? Terminator: Dark Fate actually has a better Rotten Tomatoes score than Joker, the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time. The problem with this film isn't with the movie itself. Maybe it's due to an aging fanbase, but the more likely culprit is a slew of awful sequels exhausting patrons. Naturally, that lead to a lack of faith in the series.

Terminator Gensysis... Gyenisis... however they spelled it... Terminator Gensisys, the predecessor of Dark Fate, was such a bad movie that they didn't even bother to spell "genesis" correctly.

You knew this was going to be a bad movie by just reading the title.

Did Sega try to sue them or did someone say "hey, let's spell this in a weird, cool way so the Millennials will buy into it." The 27% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably generis. Jeneras. Gen-R-Us? Generous. The 27% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably generous. Now they've got me doing it.

If James Cameron had his own time travel technology and a T-800 at his disposal, he should send it back to prevent those bad sequels from ever happening. And that's what I meant about time messing back and sins of the past. The ghost of Terminator Sequels Past finally caught up to the franchise and poisoned what really should have been a well-received sequel. The real dark fate is how little interest there will be in Terminator sequels moving forward. As of writing this, Terminator is on track to lose around $100 million.

As a movie-goer, I'm interested in exploring this new future more. The new robot technology looks pretty sick and I want to see how humanity survives the mechanical onslaught against an army that puts Skynet to shame. Sadly, we'll probably never see that sequel. Maybe when this movie gets treated to its digital release Paramount will manage to recoup some of that lost money. I mean, nobody liked "Scream Queens" until it went to Hulu. But I can't imagine another Terminator getting a green light for a very long time.

While the lack of box office success saddens me, I'm grateful as a fan that I at least got to see one more good Terminator movie. I found myself getting a bit emotional while I watched the real Sarah Conner and a believable T-800 blow things up in a movie that actually made sense. Linda Hamilton shooting at more robots in a movie that isn't fraught with continuity confusion sets the Terminator timeline right for the fans. So if nothing else we finally got a real follow-up to 1991's smash hit, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. If Tim Miller and James Cameron can take solace in nothing else, it can be that they've managed to please the true fans of the series while also appealing to those who "don't love" Terminator movies.

To conclude, Dark Fate should have breathed new life into the Terminator franchise but instead almost ensured that we won't be revisiting the series for a long time. If you've ever enjoyed the old school Terminators, go watch this movie. Or if you just like solid storytelling and robot on robot violence, also please go watch this movie. Or if you have $20 of disposable income, go watch this movie.