Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) – What Happened to This Movie?

You know that fake commercial in Tropic Thunder where Tugg Speedman and the Scorcher franchise keep coming back again… again… and again? That’s pretty much the Terminator franchise by 2019. Where over and over again it respawns and says “I’ll be back… but this time it’ll be different. It’ll be a re-imagining! Accompanied by another trilogy. No, this time we’re back with the old cast! And it’ll be like before!” It’s like Jim Carrey yelling at Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy “I can fix it! I can make it cool again, Stephen!” But will they? For some! Not for all. This is the story of what happened to Terminator: Dark Fate. The film that may have killed the Terminator movie franchise for good.

When Terminator Genisys performed poorly at the domestic box office, Skydance Productions (which suspiciously sounds like Skynet) was left with a choice. Forge ahead with their planned trilogy or wipe the slate clean. Originally, Skydance was happy enough with what the film did on a worldwide scale to move forward. But first, they wanted to know what went wrong at home. They would take their time and take a deep look into the market research to see how they should adjust. Apparently what that market research told them was to go with their first instinct and light it all on fire. And so they did.

After leaving Deadpool 2 due to creative differences with Ryan Reynolds, director Tim Miller was hired for the job. Miller had been the co-founder of visual effects company Blur Studio, where he created the killer opening sequence for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo among many other projects. And, of course, the insanely succesful Deadpool. But what the Hell was this film going to be about? What did the market research tell Skydance? It apparently told them to go and try to make Terminator 2: Judgment Day again. Thanks, market research.

So, what do you do if you want Terminator 2? You go and get you James Cameron. Who, thankfully wasn’t too neck deep in blue people at the time and was ready to, in some fashion, return to the franchise he created. So long as they promised to bring back his buddy Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which, if you can believe how stupid this is, some folks working on the project hadn’t intended to do.

Cameron, enticed by the idea of terminating the inferior sequels to his original films and making a direct sequel to Terminator 2, signed on as a producer. He had worked with Miller and his design studio before, and the production desperately needed a seal of approval from the man who made the originals. Although Cameron did give his seal of approval on Genisys. He effectively put a cigarette out on its forehead and moved on, saying, “we’re pretending the other films were a bad dream”. Ouch, Jim.

But what would this super superior sequel be about? We can’t just remake Terminator 2. You have to put lipstick on it first. They hired a team of novelists to come up with their takes on what the future of the franchise could look like. They then took that inspiration and hired “guy who has written every movie you’ve ever seen from the Dark Knight to Kickboxer 2”, David S. Goyer. As well as Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray. The latter of which had quite an interesting writing career to that point; having written both Bruce Willis erotica with Color of Night, and Tommy Lee Jones disaster flick Volcano. That’s range.

While these three gentleman are credited as the only screenplay writers, this script was touched by more hands than an in store X-Box 360 demo display on Black Friday in a 2005 Target Electronics Section. The Sarah Connor Chronicles creator Josh Friedman was among an entire group who helped Cameron come up with an idea for the initial story and Miller wrote many of the action scenes. Others were handed down to him by Cameron as ideas he’d thought of over the years but had never made. Even the actors had their hands in the crafting of the script at times with Schwarzenegger changing some of his lines and Linda Hamilton changing lines she didn’t feel were true to Sarah Connor. Cameron was sometimes sending over shots to be filmed by Miller just a day before they went to camera. The story that came out of all this haberdashery was a doozy.

The overall bones of the film were simple enough. A new Terminator called a Rev-9 with all sorts of cool new tricks would be sent back in time to kill a future adversary. This time, that future leader of humankind was a young girl named Dani Ramos. Not John Connor. Because they kill him off in the opening act *Record scratch* WHAT? Yeah, they scrolled down their list of options and decided to take everything that happened in one of the greatest action films we’ll ever see in our life time and make it pointless. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.

Of the decision, Cameron (a guy who once made a quip about other filmmakers “pissing in the soup” of his franchise) said, “Let’s just pull the carpet out from underneath all of our assumptions of what a Terminator movie is going to be about.” And with those words you would think the rest of the story was going to go places we never expe-no, it doesn’t.

The resistance also sends back their own genetically enhanced soldier to protect newJohn, then they team up with the T-800 and fight off the Rev-9 to save the future. Only the kicker is… this T-800 is the Schwarzenegger model Skynet originally sent to kill CGI John Connor in the first few minutes of the film. Having fulfilled his orders, he’s become a drapery specialist, the caretaker of a family, and spends his days anonymously texting Sarah Connor new Terminator locations. Because he feels bad about shooting her son in the face. Clearly, realizing it was him brings up old memories for Sarah. And the film reminds us of this every several minutes for the remainder of the film. All the way up until the T-800 gives his robot life to save them all with the parting words… “For John.”

The irony that the entire movie ended up as an ode to John Connor when the first few minutes were about booting his character from the franchise are in the words of Linkin Park “all too much to take in” for some. Miller would say of the moment, “You want to slap the audience in the face and say, ‘Wake up. This is going to be different’. I think I accomplished that.” Now there’s something we can agree on.

With the story decided and written production began 2018 in Spain, Hungary, and the United States. Arnold was a go from the beginning and brought his trademark comic levity along with a great haircut. Linda Hamilton reprising the role of Sarah Connor was a bit bumpier. Having mostly retired from acting, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to do the role at all. Cameron reached out with an email listing all the reasons she should and shouldn’t come back. In the end she decided to return to the role despite previously judging other sequels to T2, saying, “There will always be those who will try and milk the cow.”

The film will in many ways work or not work for you depending on how you feel about her performance. Dark Fate is largely centered on her character and her Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween 2018-esque return to the franchise. You could find it to be an impressive and rugged action performance. Or you might see it as a very rusty actress trying to bring too much of a “badass” edge to a character that becomes a little cringy.

One cool aspect of the requel sequel is Diego Luna’s Rev-9 character. The new T-1000 brings with him from the future some gnarly new gimmicks. The effects don’t quite live up to the jaw dropping moments coming out of the T-1000 back in 1991, but the ideas are cool, nonetheless. And Luna has the desired “determined yet quizzical” face structure and movements for the role. Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis fought hard for and eventually earned the role of Grace; the human/robot hybrid protector. Davis brought both a believable physicality to the role and just the right amount of rebellious attitude you would expect from a human being who people will not stop calling a robot.

Natalia Reyes was cast as essentially the new John Connor of the story and we were off. Reyes was likeable but it was hard to ever see what the movie was trying to explain to us this character would be in the future. Sure, Edward Furlong was a punk teenager in Terminator 2, but there was a rebellious side to him where you could picture him being a future leader of the resistance. Just needed a little bit of trauma and a few protein bars.

Speaking of young John Connor, the production had Edward Furlong on set for a day so that they could portray his likeness onto body double Jude Collie with motion capture technology. This small amount of participation bummed Furlong out quite a bit. The actor had been hoping to have a bigger role in the film but was ultimately brought in so that his avatar could be shot while ordering his mom a Corona at a beach bar. It’s a rough business. Schwarzenegger’s jacked child murdering T-800 was played by the same body double who played Arnold in Terminator Genisys, Brett Azar. Hamilton had her own body double for the scene in actress Maddy Curley, and she did not enjoy it. She continuously gave Curley notes about having the wrong movements or reactions and eventually went home and “cried her eyes out” after watching Curley play her character. She also, in her own words, said she “got a little crazy trying to micromanage” other stunt actresses movements during the rest of the shoot. Hamilton also said that she had a hard time understanding the script because of the large amount of action. And there was a lot of action.

Ultimately the film uses over 2600 digital effects with once again Industrial Light & Magic taking the lead on the project. But they did have to call in multiple other companies to help with the large workload. One action scene in particular featured a plane sequence which was filmed on the largest gimbal ever built at 85 tons. A design that took over five months to build and was sixty feet long, with a blue screen on one side for digital effects to be added.

There were great action set pieces throughout Dark Fate. From a factory throwdown to the chase scene that followed with the Rev-9 showing off some innovative updates to his abilities. Ultimately, though, the CGI was palpable throughout and sometimes the movements of the characters looked unnatural. It definitely didn’t have the attention to detail of a movie like T2, but what does? Cameron used that attention to detail ability in the editing booth for Dark Fate, knocking off a whopping 42 minutes from the films original run time. Cameron and Miller often budded heads in a friendly way throughout the production, and ultimately remain friends. Though Miller has said he likely wouldn’t work with Cameron again in this capacity, citing a need for more control over his own projects.

This leaves us with the question of why Cameron didn’t just direct the darn thing himself? And the answer is he was busy filming Avatar sequels. Always with the Avatar.

Terminator Dark Fate would release unto the world in the fall of 2019 and become an immensely disappointing box office bomb. The film grossed just over $260 million worldwide total. More than enough to buy groceries if there’s a good sale. But not for a movie with a nearly $200 million starting budget and a hefty marketing price tag. Dark Fate had needed to rake in almost double what it made. Just to break even.

Who knows why it bombed exactly. Perhaps the seal of approval from James Cameron meant little after he had just recently promoted Genisys? Were people not buying the lack of Schwarzenegger? It wasn’t the critical response. Dark Fate opened up to a “Fresh” score of 70% on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes and currently holds an 82% fresh audience score. Maybe it’s just time for the film franchise to take a long break. I said FILM franchise. Terminator Zero rules. Or maybe it’s what Linda Hamilton said herself, from the top rope one last time, “The story’s been told, and it’s been done to death.”

Maybe it’s because the people involved were so certain that their absence was the reason previous films didn’t work out. Yet, Dark Fate seemingly had nothing to say the first two films didn’t already cover. Still yet, for some, Dark Fate does round out a nice trilogy paired with the first two Cameron films and for them… that’s enough. And that is what happened to Terminator Dark Fate.

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