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WHY TERMINATOR: DARK FATE HAS FLOPPED

11/11/2019

29 Comments

 
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I finally got around to seeing Terminator Dark Fate at the weekend. Now, I loved the first two Terminator movies. Controversially, I even sort of don't hate Terminator 3, which has at least one genuinely great action sequence, and an actual, didn't-see-it-coming, twist (spoiler: the Terminator really hates sausages!).

Salvation was slightly better than its reputation, though Genisys was utterly bizarre, and probably the most miscast movie I've ever seen. But... oddly... I don't hate it either, probably because its many, many, many, faults actually make it kind of interesting, in a messed-up way. You know: like a washing machine that discharges a torrent of ghee whenever you parp a horn.

Nonetheless, not one of the movies since T2 has come close to reaching it in terms of greatness. I love The Terminator, but it's a low-budget, punk-y, kind of a film; more horror movie than sci-fi. T2, by contrast, really ushered in the era of the summer action movie, pushing forwards special effects and action... while somehow having characters and a story with a ton of heart. I'd never seen anything like it, and upon release I watched it three times in the space of a week. 

Dark Fate is... it's... kind of... it feels bland. Like a waste of everyone's time. I didn't want to come away feeling like that, but it's nothing to nobody, and I didn't care. 

Fundamentally, it's just a retread of T2, profoundly inoffensive and unremarkable, but at least it's straightforward, and has a couple of really good performances from Mackenzie Davies and Linda Hamilton.

Even if I do have issues with the way they've continued (or not) Sarah Connor's storyline (SPOILER: they kill John Connor - the character the entire franchise has revolved around - in an audaciously throwaway fashion within the first five minutes - thus wiping the slate clean, and removing Sarah Connor's entire motivation... Instead, she just sort of hangs around, uninvited, with no real agenda). 

But I'm not here to talk about whether or not Dark Fate is a good film. I'm not going to get into the weeds of what it gets right and what it gets wrong.

I want to discuss why it has done so abysmally at the box office, because for some of us, on paper, it should've worked: they told us they were ignoring the sequels that everyone has decided were terrible, they brought back the lead from the first two films, James Cameron was back on board (albeit not in a directing capacity).  

And yet... not enough people were interested. It has flopped massively.

​Why? I've got a theory, and it isn't just to do with it being simply an okay sort of a film.
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OLD PEOPLE, OLD MOVIES
Linda Hamilton is 63, Arnold Schwarzenegger is 72, The Terminator came out 35 years ago, and Terminator 2 was released 28 years ago. All of us who were fans of the original cast and those movies are now at least middle-aged.

I think it's that simple: we're an ageing fanbase. We're old. The message I took away from Dark Fate - whatever that title even means - is that I, and others my age, are kind of on the cusp of being irrelevant to studios. And that's fine. It happens. OK boomer and all that. 

I mean, if you do want to appeal to us and our silver dollars... forget the kids, make a flat-out Terminator sequel with a small budget in the vein of the original, chuck ideas at it rather than budget, and you'll at least have reduced some of the risk.

Yet because T2 was a huge movie, in every respect, there's this idea that the Terminator franchise still needs to be huge. It doesn't. Much as I love T2, it never did. Indeed, Dark Fate's story would've worked fine without the ridiculous, CGI, plane battle at the end. It might've even improved it.

By targeting the ageing fans alone it might've at least given the studio a modest hit. Instead, they may as well have just fed hundreds of millions of dollars into a woodchipper. 

DARK CAKE
However, trying to have their cake and eat it was never going to work, because there's a generation who were born since Terminator 2 who simply don't care about it, who know the franchise only as a bunch of mediocre movies that were sequels to something that was made long before they were born.

In short: with younger generations, Terminator doesn't have cachet like it did, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't the all-conquering action hero he once was - I mean, he was a politician for years, for pity's sake, and it doesn't get less cool than that - and none of these kids have a clue who Linda Hamilton is beyond some grouchy old woman.

Dark Fate simply wasn't a good enough, mustn't-miss, movie to get the reviews that might've convinced some The Kids to overlook all that and give it a chance. 

It's one of the risks you take with this whole soft-reboot thing that Hollywood plays with these days. You can blame The Force Awakens: bring in a new young cast that, theoretically, should be attractive to younger audiences, bring back some of the old cast (in a diminished way) for the legacy fans, and hope that it's enough to kind of bring both audiences in. They've done it with Halloween, and now they're doing it with Ghostbusters.

Yet, I think it's a real gamble, and you risk failing to satisfy either audiences that you're trying to appeal to.  

For me, because of my age, that was the biggest disappointment with The Last Jedi; I wanted that movie to be all about Luke Skywalker, and it wasn't, because Disney (understandably, given what they paid for LucasFilm) wants to keep Star Wars alive for subsequent generations. 

Dark Fate doesn't continue the story of Terminator 2: it restarts it and repeats it, and so it feels unsatisfying to the older fans, who now have to suffer a bunch of annoyingly young people getting in the way. The younger fans don't get to enjoy a new thing, because it feels like a load of old folk have turned up to a party, and just want to tell you all about their aches and pains. 

Same, really, with The Force Awakens - which, I admit, I do like, albeit chiefly out of relief that they managed to recapture the spirit of Star Wars following the oddness of the prequels.

And also because it seems to point towards a movie - which didn't happen - that continues Luke Skywalker's story in a way that felt satisfying to those of us who remember the originals. They even throw out the tantalising prospect that Rey is somehow connected to the older films. But no. She's revealed to be some random girl. 
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SAFE BET
As the old saying goes, in Hollywood nobody knows anything, and I certainly don't. 

I mean, I even get why they went this route; Dark Fate feels like a safe bet, but in reality, with the benefit of hindsight.... it's a really, really old property. My generation tends to forget how long ago this series started, because most of us still think 1984 was yesterday. 

When I saw Terminator 2 in 1991, an equivalent to Dark Fate would've been a soft reboot of, I dunno, The Birds, bringing back an ageing Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren to help a couple of kids deal with a terrifying new bird attack. Only, they spent $200 million on it, and all the birds were massive, CGI, mutant things.

I doubt I'd have cared. But maybe I would've cared about a new film with a new premise, which ditched all the baggage, and just happened to be called The Birds. 

And that's the biggest problem with Dark Fate: it's a film bogged down by baggage and history. If they want to continue Terminator as a brand, it would've been better at this stage - ideally, after a few more years had passed since Genisys - to just start again. Do a real reboot. 

The Terminator offers what is, fundamentally a great, simple idea: a robot comes back from the past to kill the mother of the man who'll one day kill it. Dark Fate does its best to blow away as much baggage as it can - literally in the case of John Connor - but there's enough lingering to signal to younger audiences that it's a continuation of a franchise that they either haven't seen or don't care about.

It's beholden to the past, not only in its legacy cast, but the beats of its story. It's more concerned with trying to be a film like Terminator 2 than it is in trying to be its own thing, in trying to reinvigorate the property in a real, tangible, fashion. Consequently, it is in some ways less interesting than Genisys, which at least had enough conviction to try and do something different... albeit in a way that was even more beholden to the past, and batshit insane. 

So, y'know... I worry about the soft reboot trend. I worry about next year's Ghostbusters and Jurassic World 3 (which is also bringing back the original Jurassic Park cast), and I worry about The Rise of Skywalker - which looks like it's going to be the ultimate stab at pleasing both new and old audiences...

And I worry how many other once-beloved franchises are going to end up buried this way.
29 Comments
TJ link
11/11/2019 10:51:24 am

Great way of putting it Biffo. It genuinely just made me angry with how it washed away all the greatness of T2 and to be honest, I found the CGI unacceptably poor for a Hollywood Blockbuster.

Oh and I still maintain that Carl is such a stupid thing to have come up with and put on screen. Just no.

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Geebs
11/11/2019 10:52:53 am

I heard they were going to soft-reboot RED. A bunch of spunky teenagers will pick up the torch from a nonagenarian but still totally badass Helen Mirren.

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kyle
11/11/2019 11:29:29 am

I thought it was fine. parp.

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Reversible Sedgewick
11/11/2019 11:39:50 am

Still haven't seen Dark Fate... or even seen much of Genisys, despite leaving it on in the background when it's been on Film4. I think I'm in a once-bitten, twice-shy situation after letting myself get excited for Terminator 3, the film which made the nuclear apocalypse look dull.

Quick shout out to the Sarah Connor Chronicles, as per your article, it was perhaps the low budget-ness of that which made it occasionally excellent. The last episode of series 1 sidestepped the cost of a Terminator rampage by having bodies fall into a swimming pool while some Johnny Cash played. Great stuff.

Series 2 also had the lead singer of Garbage playing a urinal - and I have to watch the YouTube video of that at least once per six months to make sure that it wasn't a figment of my imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qN5s_PQU7g

If I had to save the franchise, I think the best route would be to find a nice Japanese animation house to turn it into an anime. In the vein of the shorts they did for the Matrix or Blade Runner 2049, but maybe a longer running series.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
11/11/2019 12:40:35 pm

The best thing about Linda Hamilton remains her rubbery tits that turn inside out. Watch *that scene* in the 1984 original if you don’t believe me.

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Dave
12/11/2019 06:26:29 am

Ummm, what?

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Bruce Flagpole
11/11/2019 12:41:14 pm

Great analysis Mr B. I've not seen Dark Fate, but it all rings true for me, especially with the comparison to Star Wars. As an old fan, I really wanted more adventures of Luke Skywalker. I can understand Disney wanting to reboot it and appeal to a new audience, but for me they've tried to remake it AND disguise it as a sequel, and ended up with the worst of both worlds...the old stuff is mistreated to let the new stuff shine, and the new stuff is undermined by the similarities and reliance on the old stuff.

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SCC fan
11/11/2019 12:48:52 pm

Someone else mentioned Sarah Conner Chronicles already. Good work.

SCC might stand as my favourite thing in the franchise, on par with T2 even.

If anyone is feelng dismayed at where the series went, please watch it and recoil in horror at the knowledge the studio axed it after only 2 glorious seasons.

It was perfection.

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Birch Vand
11/11/2019 01:14:23 pm

Cool! I bought the entire set of Sarah Connor Chronicles from CEX months ago, after watching and kind of enjoying Genisys. Not watched them yet, glad to hear they're good - plus, a different Queen from GOT as Sarah Connor!

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CheekyCrissy link
11/11/2019 12:49:02 pm

This is the thing about most modern 'BlockBuster Movies' now,
You're guaranteed to walk into a movie theatre, get bombarded and disorientated with flashy special effects and audio, ending with a music soundtrack that would be better suited to your son or daughter's Prom night party.

Then you will get up from your seat in a complete daze, wondering what the hell it was that you just watched..

THAT is the MAJORITY of what most big budget BlockBuster movies today consist of.

I graduated in May 2011 with a Masters Degree in Screenwriting and I was warned over and over that the quality of scripts that I write, MATTERED. If they were even so much below par, that producer your pandering to, will just simply tear it up and throw it, in the bin.

Fast forward to today, every big budget movie I have seen so far, all those scripts that SHOULD'VE been chucked in the bin, have ended up on the screen. And I shake my head and throw my hands up.

It's more about studios literally boasting to us 'Look how much money we spent!' vomited all over a Theatre screen.

Originality in movies today is rare (With the exception so far with this year's 'Joker')

Even with today's Prequel shows (Bates Motel I'm looking at you) Millennial ScreenWriters simply can't imagine a world without a Mobile Phone in it. (Have you seen Norman Bates call his mother on a mobile in 'Psycho'?)

Getting back on track..

If I was to re - write a 'Terminator' Movie, I would've kept it simple.
I would literally have used the entire Monologue Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese sprouted in the Car, in the '84 Original.

The Concentration Camps, John Connor encouraging & Instigating an Uprising, The Future War, ending with Kyle Reese being sent back to 1984.

That's all you needed. That's it.

Instead, it's a movie, I would rather wait until it arrives on Netflix.
Most of the movie is shown in the Trailers anyways.

Linda was clearly there for the Paycheck. Arnold just looks tired.

It's not a movie I'm going to add to my Blu Ray Collection anytime soon..

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Nick
11/11/2019 01:12:31 pm

Is this some form of meta-humour I’m not getting?

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Steve Perrin link
11/11/2019 06:29:07 pm

You should read my Terminator movie pitch...

https://littlebitsofgaming.com/2019/11/06/my-terminator-sequel-movie-pitch/

Better than Dark Fate.

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Dr Peanuts
11/11/2019 02:12:03 pm

More like Terminator: Fart Date!

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Nude.master
11/11/2019 05:27:59 pm

Dude, didn't you see 'The Birds 2'?
They even brought back Tippi Hedren!

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Moonbucket
11/11/2019 05:32:49 pm

Nail on head. Bond is 60, Star Wars is 46, Star Trek is 53, even Ghostbusters is what, 33 years old?

As much as I loved those franchises, with nothing new it feels like the fading embers of a dying culture...

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Fisty McTits link
11/11/2019 06:32:27 pm

T1 was alright, but T2 smashed its back doors in with a bigger budget, a unique story and effects that were beyond cutting-edge for its time. The ending was perfect. Can you hear that cash cow going "moooo?" Hollywood did.

Had this been the first Terminator film since T2, the TRUE T3 and Cameron-chops directed it, it would make our tits spin.

James, if you read this - fuck your Smurf sequels, all 20 or however many you're planning. Make a PROPER sequel to Aliens, and retcon all the bullshit sequels/prequels that followed. Terminator is far past fucked now and needs to rot/rust. Ta.

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Chris Dyson
11/11/2019 06:41:43 pm

Unless I missed a really fundamental plot point didn't the robot in Terminator come from the future and not the past? I might be mixing it up with Short Circuit again.

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Dave
12/11/2019 06:30:42 am

Biffo had a brain fart. The terminator comes back to the past, not from it.
Short Circuit doesn't have any time travel stuff as far as i'm aware?

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Bruce Flagpole
12/11/2019 08:42:43 am

But there's your T3 storyline...they go back in time and reprogram Johnny5 to kill John Connor

Robobob
11/11/2019 07:18:20 pm

I thought Dark Fate wasn't too bad. It probably did merit the "best since T2" tag, but that didn't need to mean it would be a brilliant film. I was coming at it from the point of view of thinking the trailer looked absolute shite, so, expectation management and all that.

It was better than Genisys - which was actually half decent for the first half an hour when it sort of did a twisted retread of the original film, and then lost its way as soon as they had the choice of jumping to 1997 or 2015 (or whenever it was) and they chose the wrong year.

It was much better than T3, which I don't like purely just because it feels too much like a spoof or pastiche, and I don't think the action scenes are particularly memorable or iconic.

It was on a par with Salvation, which I like, largely because it went its own way and did something relatively unique in comparison to all the other post-T2 films, which are broadly just pseudo-T2 remakes. Salvation also treats the source material seriously, and didn't waste time with the CGI shape-shifty nonsense which it seems no one can do as well as 1991 (which I don't *really* understand).

Dark Fate does piss badly on the memory of the originals, which is a shame, and there was something a bit too "Edge of Tomorrow" about the new future cyborgs. And they did sort of miss a trick with the whole "Sarah Connor is being sent text messages from the future" thing, they should have kept a bit more mystery about that, instead of waffle about neural nets from the old family man Terminator.

But I think it flopped partly because Genisys was itself a flop (all the goodwill capital the Terminator films had had been spent by that point: even the build up to it was low key even by the standards of Genisys) and partly because blockbuster Hollywood has more or less run out of ideas and skill in creating a decent story and now just runs all franchises into the ground by trying to appeal to everyone in a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none way, which you've fairly eloquently explained already.

And, let's be honest, how many times CAN we retread the same "they sent a machine back through time to try to kill someone"? It's a great concept but not a particularly "franchisable" concept, particularly as the opening sequence of every Terminator film now has to be "the future you remember from the previous film didn't happen, but here's a new one that itself will be ignored in the film after this".

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Prince Naseem Hamed
11/11/2019 08:00:53 pm

My Dad dressed up as the T-100 for my 17th birthday party in 1993. Nobody knows why, it wasn’t a fancy dress party. He did look a lot like Robert Patrick at the time though, and he wore the full US police uniform.
Anyway, our next door neighbour called the police because he was out in the street sprinting up and down the road holding an air pistol. When they arrived, the silent treatment he gave them didn’t go down too well.
A scuffle broke out, which spiralled into a proper fight.
My Dad bit the eyebrow off of one of the officers before they subdued him. This was all in front of my friends. I was so embarrassed I still haven’t been to visit him in prison to this day.

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Adam
11/11/2019 10:20:15 pm

That's a typically bang-on article, Mr Biffo. I saw T6 last week and was pretty disappointed by it. I figured having Cameron back in some proper capacity (I think he even owns the rights again now) meant that it would put the whole thing back on track. Nope.

I actually like T3 a lot (barring a few niggles), I really don't get the mass of hate for it online these days. It has some good action sequences, Arnie still looks plausible, and it feels like a Terminator film. T4 was awful and T5 was just incomprehensible to me.

Starting this new one by killing John Connor was, to me, just daft. It reminded me of Newt's death in Alien 3. Remember that kid you rooted for last time? Remember you were glad they survived? Well, they're dead now!! Here's some other folks for you to care about instead! The trouble was, I didn't. Yeah, Davies was pretty good, but Hamilton seemed out-of-character at times. And how come the CGI today looks so much less realistic than the effects in T2, now 28 years old? I liked Gabriel Luna in SHIELD, but he was SO DULL in this, absolutely awful. And why did it take about an hour to get Arnie on screen? So little was done with the 'Carl' character - imagine if they had a scene where he gets thrown through a neighbour's window, and then, when they realised it was the guy who had done their curtains for them, watched him apologise and promise to pop back round and fix them, or something like that? They just hardly bothered with anything like that.

I think the reason that a 35 year old 1984 film seems 'newer' now than a film made 35 years before 1984 did then, boils down to two things. Firstly, anything in black-and-white just instinctively feels 'old'; and secondly there seems to have been such a sea-change when Star Wars came out that anything before that seems old, and anything since seems modern. Maybe someone can explain that better than I have, but that's how it seems to me. Star Wars just changed everything.

Another massive issue with T6 was the music - if you really want to make it feel like a proper sequel to T2, get the guy who did the music to the first two back. Sadly, Brad Fiedel says he wasn't even asked. He rarely does film scores now, but he indicates that he might have done this one. I never understand why filmmakers don't seem to realise just how important the music is in creating the identity of a film series. Look at John Barry's Bond music, or John Williams' SW scores. To me, how a film sounds is just as important as how it looks. I'm not saying Fiedel could have saved Dark Fate, but it least I might have felt like I was watching a Terminator film again. I suspect a lot of people who didn't like T3 would have felt a bit differently if Fiedel had been involved.

Anyway, good to find somewhere to get all that off my chest.

For John.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
11/11/2019 11:13:08 pm

Please enjoy the original Alien 3 script before they changed everything:

https://www.awesomefilm.com/script/Alien3.txt

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Reversible Sedgewick
12/11/2019 02:02:26 pm

T4 was alright, at least when Simon Amstell used to do it,

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Bruce Flagpole
12/11/2019 01:43:21 pm

Every Terminator sequel should start exactly the same as the first film, but at the bit where the terminator arrives, one second later another terminator arrives, and then another with each sequel..the latest one says "It will be easier with x of us". I'm sure eventually they'll manage to kill her when there's enough of them.

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Robobob
12/11/2019 07:11:34 pm

Or for a variant of that, every Terminator from each of the sequels comes back to fight each other so it's their future that wins out. Connor just tries to get away from the blast zone. Or something.

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Lummox60N
13/11/2019 08:48:20 pm

Hmmm, I'm yet to see Dark Fate.
I loved The Terminator. It was grimy and "new". AND a little bit dangerous with its 18 Certificate when I was not, quite, 18.
I loved T2, at the time, it was COOL AS, really it was. But having tried to revisit it lately, man, it's dull, is it not? Overlong and bloated to the point of tedium, shored up by horridly ageing cgi. If it was a half hour shorter, I might actually have a lot more appreciation for it.
T3 was..."fun", but I can't get past the bit where she controls the cars by robot mysticism or somesuch. Probably midichlorians. I blame them for all the inexplicable plot-shoddiness on the silver-screen nowayears.
I REALLY liked Salvation. Properly. It was pretty much what I'd expected T2 to be, before T2 was a thing.
And Genisys just...well...it was a bit of a mess, wasn't it?

Truth be told, I'll probably get a bit of mileage from Dark Fate, simply because my expectations from a Terminator film are spectacularly low now.
More so after reading this.

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Random Reviewer
17/11/2019 07:59:31 pm

It underperformed because it was preceded by a string of disappointing outings which pissed away the last of the residual goodwill T1 and T2 had built up.

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Purplephlebas
18/11/2019 01:08:57 pm

Sorry. But T2 looks horrible now. I want the brat decapitated after 5 minutes. If that dooms humanity, I'm fine with that.

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