Terminator: Dark Fate Review (2019)

The latest Terminator movie, Dark Fate, is a symptom of creative impotence, not the gripping science fiction movie it probably should have been.

With all the credit of trust and low expectations with which you start watching, at the end you are left with the question: "So … and why did I watch all this?"

The previous film, "Genesys", although it also repeated a lot from the legendary first two films (the second, "Doomsday", is generally a masterpiece, a reference action movie and not the stupidest thriller), but approached this creatively, rewriting the rules, deceiving expectations viewer (at least visually, at the level of images: young and warlike Sarah Connor with the already traditionally kind T-101, an antagonist in the protagonist's body, a new evil terminator on nanoparticles - it seems that no one in Hollywood really understands how to realistically beat this technology in a plot but at least it looks cool). It wasn't good, but at least it was funny and worked like an attraction. "Dark Fates" cannot even cope with this.

The beginning is promising (it's a pity, the whole film was not made in such a way, with young actors exactly like in T2 - a delightful level of graphics), but then everything rolls lower and lower, all two hours.

A cyborg girl arrives from the future in Mexico to vigorously protect some left girl, on whose soul another evil robot arrives from the same future, now not from liquid metal or nanoparticles, but from a mixture of these technologies. And for some reason he also knows how to bifurcate - the titanium skeleton is separate, the empty shell is separate. Okay, I guess we should be impressed by this. But he does not frighten at all! Rev-9 has fifteen phrases in the script, he stupidly rushes forward, kills dozens of people - and all in order to kill this unknown girl who (spoiler) simply became the leader of some local community of people in the post-apocalyptic future … This is some kind of madness already - there is no "Skynet", Sarah Connor and the T-800 prevented its creation, but in the future, the technology of conducting cyberwar without human participation, "Legion", appeared and this global program started a war against people (okay, for now this is more or less realistic, this can really happen - listen to Elon Musk with Bill Gates and never, never google the phrase "Basilisk Rock", if life is dear to you - however, just kidding, google) … but why is this AI uses the same strange methods of dealing with a biological life form as Skynet? It is still necessary to think of it - "I/we are an omnipotent artificial intelligence capable of being everywhere, people depend on the networks that I/we turned off and my/our drones destroy them so that they don’t turn me/us off one day, because that I/we want to live forever - but LeT's SeNd RoBoT To ThE PaSt to eliminate the problem before it appears. " What?!

We are not shown the main antagonist at all (and Skynet / Legion is the antagonist) and do not explain his motives. There was no need for this in the first "Terminator", it was a simple, chamber story, a genre chase film about fugitives and a terrible pursuer who is almost impossible to kill. The realities of the monstrous future, where he came from, were not important for the story of Sarah and Kyle Reese, it was a story about a loop of time: Skynet sends an assassin into the past so that Sarah does not have a son who will become the leader of people in the future war against machines. but in response, her son sends his friend to help his mother, and he unwittingly becomes the father of John Connor … Skynet and creates John Connor, this is a story of action and reaction, actions in the past always create the future. The circle will always be closed.

This concept develops in the second film, where it turns out that Skynet not only unwittingly creates John Connor and forever changes the life of his mother, Sarah, but also lays the foundation for its own appearance when part of the hand of the robot destroyed in the first part goes to scientists and this gives impetus to research in the field of artificial intelligence, which will eventually develop in Skynet. The heroes of the film, together with an unexpected ally from the future, are trying to destroy this technology now in order to prevent the third world war, which was deliberately started in the future by a program that developed its own consciousness. Here Sarah, John and the T-800 do not just flee from the cruel and almost immortal pursuer, the T-1000, (although it is also here and looks really frightening), but they attack in response to break this cycle and save humanity from genocide. … It's a self-contained story that even had a happy ending in the extended version … which is completely crossed out by the next four films.

"Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" - Sarah Connor is dead, John Connor is a nervous middle-aged whiner, an evil chick with an adjustable bust and a machine gun arrives from the future, a tired Schwarzenegger fights with her with unclear motives, everything explodes, everyone is unhappy (ending - the only bright spot of the advertised film). "Terminator 4: May the Savior Come" - Sarah Connor is long dead, John Connor is a brave military man living in the future, where robots destroy people; in some garbage dump he finds Sally from "Avatar", who is half-robot for some reason, but wants to help people, they run from giant transformers and evil motorcycles, get lullies from the computer Schwarzenegger, everything explodes, everyone is happy. "Terminator 5: Genisys" - Sarah Connor is alive and well, John Connor is not yet in plans, stupid jock Kyle Reese arrives from the future, gets people from the good old Schwarzenegger, everyone runs from the T-1000 and John Connor, who in the future banged nanoparticles from Doctor Who himself became an evil terminator, which they said right in the trailer, but what they did not say was that in the end everything explodes and everyone is happy. As in "Terminator 6: Dark Fate" - yes, there, too, at the end everything explodes and everyone is happy, but also a little sad, because it was not in vain that the good old Schwarzenegger with a white beard was called to the cinema for twenty minutes so that he looked wisely goodbye with a red eye on a beautifully skinned muzzle and again, for the fourth (ha-ha-a-a) time in a series, saved everyone …

Listen, damn it. Who writes these scripts? In the credits: James Cameron, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray, Chalse Eagle, Josh Friedman, Gail Ann Heard … seven, SEVEN PEOPLE!

For the last hundred years, James Cameron has been busy with Avatars alone (four films at a time), who knows when they will be released, and for the money he will praise any film in the series in which there is at least something that he himself would love filmed, and David Goyer is a screenwriter of both the excellent "The Dark Knight" or the amusing series "Da Vinci Demons" and the controversial "Batman v Superman" … I don't want to offend anyone, but it seems to me that even a neural network would write a more interesting and a creative plot for this film than these seven people under the supervision of eight producers. And it turned out as if according to the scheme: "A girl from the present, who does not know about her significance for the future, wants to be killed by an unkillable male robot from the future drawn on a computer, and she will be helped by a man … no, let it be girl, - a girl from of the future, who is also a bit of a robot, but she will be very sausage so that the audience worried about her more, and let's also call Linda Hamilton to the role of an evil alcoholic with post-traumatic syndrome and dusty Schwarzenegger to the role of a daddy-sewing curtain, whose wife does not know that he is a two-hundred-kilogram robot with a nuclear battery inside, - oh, and give the guys from the computer department more work, we really need an unimaginable scene of a battle in a falling plane, filmed in the pavilion by a flickering camera of car chases and somersaults tumbling around like dummies digital stunt doubles, - let the guys work! "

ЯI don't know what it was. On the one hand, there are, of course, bright moments - it's nice that Sarah Connor was somehow remembered and her character IN PRINCIPLE somehow, more or less convincingly, changed from the second film, well, good old Schwarzenegger is Schwarzenegger, and no matter how old he is now, a hundred or ninety. But they don't really do anything about the plot! If their roles are cut out or replaced with other characters, nothing will change, they are not so important stories, and they do not develop much. Except Sarah Connor, who walked a sluggish path from a gloomy and disbelieving mother who lost her son to a gloomy and weakly believing in some kind of hope of a woman who found a daughter in a man in whose place she was also many years ago. It was somehow … normal. And, well, the second main character, a Mexican influencer in the distant future, under the influence of "terrible adventures" also turns from a simple girl into a brave one. But she does not have any special qualities as a character, she is initially an empty protagonist with whom you can associate yourself, but due to endless pursuits and simple dialogues, she does not have time (in two hours of the film, yeah) to reveal herself as a person. All we know about Dani is that she has a brother and a father, and they were ok in Mexico until an epileptic Grace came running and aggressively rescued her from a semi-liquid bifurcating empty-headed killer robot. Grace herself, which is felt by the main character of the film … is also empty. The actress simply has nothing to play in the intervals between well (mostly) staged fights, chases and a riot of special effects. As a result, the problem of the main idea of ​​the film is felt even more acutely: why exactly does Dani need to be saved from murder in the past with such great efforts? What, in the future, everything is so bad with motivating leaders? ..

The Terminator concept has outlived its usefulness.

You can tell the story twice, changing the accents and genre, developing the idea, as T2 did. But the series stumbled already in "Rise of the Machines", "May the Savior Come" with its focus only on the terrible future of combat turned out to be too experimental and weak in the script, "Genesis" with jokes and surprises repeated "T2" without making the script clever, but " Dark fates "fell somewhere very deep. This is what is now commonly called the "soft restart of the series" - a bashful name for a set of hackneyed self-repetitions, boring (but, as someone believes, working) clichés, when everything is familiar, but seems to be new - and a story if it turns out to be successful , it will be possible to continue in a bolder vein - but who takes the risk when proven ideas pay off? .. Big cinema is not art, but the expensive work of hundreds and thousands of specialists, which should pay off. But creativity shouldn't disappear from the industry. Films should surprise (and even more so not throw all plot twists on the viewer at once in commercials, as happened with "Genesis" - I hope these advertising geniuses were properly awarded), moreover, it is with history and characters, - with visuals and good special effects of problems now not (in contrast to the relevance and credibility of their application). The mainstream American cinema, which is called upon to fill the house and hit the box office, is suffering a protracted creative crisis, and I hope that someday it will end. Otherwise, the inevitable will happen and the more such films there are, the less successful they will be.

And rightly so.