James Cameron owns up to the issues with Terminator: Dark Fate
James Cameron admits his team got "high on our own supply" while making 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate
Aux News James Cameron
James Cameron is known for many things, one of them being his impervious confidence in his own abilities as a filmmaker. Look no further than the current Avatar: The Way Of Water press tour for examples. Yet Cameron’s not blind to reality, and he’s willing to accept a setback if it comes—already, he sketches for Deadline possible outcomes for the Avatar series if the second installment doesn’t do as well as he thinks. (“But I don’t like to think in terms of failure, I like to think in terms of success.”)
Such was the case for Terminator: Dark Fate, a film that Cameron did not direct but produced and collaborated on the story. Speaking with the outlet, Cameron says he’s “actually reasonably happy with the film,” but he’s willing to take some responsibility for the notorious box office bomb. The issue, as he sees it, is he’s just too darn loyal.
“I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold [Schwarzenegger],” he explains. “[Director] Tim [Miller] didn’t want Arnold, but I said, ‘Look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years, and I could hear it, and it would go like this: ‘Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me.’’ It just didn’t mean that much to me to do it, but I said, ‘If you guys could see your way clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved.’”
He continues, “And then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie.”
So the real villain was ageism all along, huh? For the record, “We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991,” Cameron says. “And young moviegoing audiences weren’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.” That’s the kind of timey-wimey explanation that should pair perfectly with the Terminator series, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in real life.
Instead, “it was just our own myopia,” in Cameron’s opinion. “We kind of got a little high on our own supply, and I think that’s the lesson there.” Luckily, there’s no chance of getting high on the Avatar supply. Right? Right?
155 Comments
Cameron’s weakest movie is way better than any Marvel movie.
I don’t really think anyone’s issue with Dark Fate was that Arnold and Linda were both back.I think the main issue (***SPOILER FOR A 3 YEAR OLD MOVIE’S OPENING SCENE***) was that they pulled an Alien 3 and……..killed John Connor immediately, undoing the entire stakes of the previous films right in the beginning of the movie. Nobody wants to see the entire arc of the previous films completely rendered useless or futile.I think the movie could have worked if John Connor was still around and had forsaken his destiny, growing disillusioned with the idea of being the savior. Or, if John Connor had died at some point in the first or second act. But having him just get merked in the beginning, as a kid, completely destroyed all the goodwill the movie had for being a direct sequel to the first two great films.
i had a pretty visceral, nasty reaction to the cgi furlong, too.
Yeah the CGI Furlong was weird, but for some reason the CGI young Sarah was actually pretty good.
“…killed John Connor immediately, undoing the entire stakes of the previous films right in the beginning of the movie.”
Tell me how much you don’t understand the Terminator films…
We had five movies about John Connor’s destiny. We did not need a sixth one.
Which is why I suggested a movie that subverts that destiny.
His destiny was already subverted by the events of T2. The John Connor that gets killed at the beginning of Dark Fate was never going to grow up to be the savior of humanity against Skynet because Skynet’s rise was stopped. Problem is humanity still fucks around and finds out with AI and some other machine blasts us all to hell at a later time, creating events that bring about a new leader of the resistance. Why did that still lead to Terminators? Turns out AI aren’t much for original ideas
Lliterally nobody gives a shit about John Connor, except for the misogynistic dipshits who used that excuse as a stand-in for their actual issue, which was that it had multiple female leads
In those first two great films, John Connor was purely a MacGuffin. Ending that immediately was perfectly fine (and then the whole plot was about a new MacGuffin, but that’s a different discussion) and made for a great gut-punch.
I agree we didn’t need more John Connor, but offing him immediately was not a great way to start the film. It’s too much of a ‘fuck you’ to fans of the series. “Did you like T2? Didja like how John Connor managed to overcome almost insurmountable odds and avoid getting killed by a Terminator? Yeah, turns out he got shot in the gut by a different Terminator the next day. Kinda makes the whole thing pointless, doesn’t it? Merry Christmas, jerkoffs.”
Nah dude, killing kid John Connor was the most interesting thing the film did. It was a refreshingly ballsy twist in an increasingly stale franchise.
I mean I get it, I understand they wanted to gut punch people, but like I mentioned, it stank of Alien 3, where we just take what was basically the core through line of the previous movie and say “meh screw it”. It’s not as clever as Cameron wanted it to be.
ok so I actually liked Alien 3 too, so we’ll probably just disagree on this one 😛
I don’t mind Alien 3! It’s good for what it is. Which I guess could be said for Dark Fate. Not necessarily a worthy successor to the film that came before, but a decent enough time at the movies.
“Nobody wants to see the entire arc of the previous films completely rendered useless or futile.”If it’s well-written and doesn’t completely change a character, I’m down for plot fuckery.
I think the movie could have worked if John Connor was still around and had forsaken his destiny, growing disillusioned with the idea of being the savior.Isn’t that exactly what we got in T3?I don’t think John Connor dying did much to the movie for good or ill. I mean, they tried real hard to make us care about John Connor in T3, and Salvation, and Genisys, and it never quite worked after T2. Stahl was a weak John Connor. The original idea for Salvation (which would’ve had Bale play Marcus, and had Connor as the commander sensibly hiding out in a submarine) was interesting, but it got derailed by Bale and the end result didn’t really work. And Genisys kind of killed the idea that John Connor is the guy we care about with the twist in that movie (this time…John Connor is the Terminator!).The problem with Dark Fate was that it wasn’t a very good action movie. All those skills Cameron brings to the table were missed, and it turns out Tim Miller isn’t a good replacement. Also, there’s a problem with the franchise in that they’ve never figured out what’s next for the Terminators after the T1000. The closest anyone’s come to reimagining the Terminator side of the equation was the TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which focused on the terminators’ personalities and motivations more than “this one can turn her hand into a flamethrower!” and “this one has a skeleton drone!”
I definitely agree with your points regarding the action. Part of what makes Terminator work is Cameron’s penchant for spectacle and action staging.I understand the need to freshen things up beyond the narrow focus of just John Connor, but I think offing him immediately was just a move that was gonna leave a bad taste in peoples’ mouths. It’s the same thing that happened in Alien 3. You had Aliens which was all about Ripley becoming a mother figure to Newt, saving her at all costs (with the director’s cut showing that Ripley’s own daughter grew old and died while Ripley was in hypersleep). Then Alien 3 is just like “welp, she died.”
I think you’re taking the film’s premise—that this is T2’s only direct sequel—a little too much to heart. Killing off Newt and Hicks in Alien3 sucked, but I definitely would’ve been less upset about it if we’d had a couple of decades of not-so-great Newt Alien sequels before they decided “Hey, maybe it’s better if she just died on the trip back from LV-426. Let’s try that.”
Yes, because people watch the Terminator movies for John freaking Connor…I cant believe multiple people in the comment section actually made this stupid argument.
Your disappointment is understandable, but you have entirely missed the point of the movie. With the armageddon that makes him the savior of humanity averted, with the time loop created by sending his father back to 1984 broken, John Connor isn’t a figure of destiny anymore, he’s lost his plot armor and is instead just a teenager. Because he and his mom have already saved the world, his death on a beach in Mexico a couple of years later is no more meaningful or tragic than any other human’s.Moreover, the movie reinterprets the ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ cliche of sequels like this, and instead of it undoing everything Sarah and John accomplished just so they can do it all over again, they have a totally different apocalyptic future reaching back to snuff out humanity’s savior before they begin.This has three important functions: 1) it means that the first two movies still count–every person on screen is only alive because the Connors averted nuclear war; 2) it means that we can introduce all new characters and put them in this familiar story with similar threats and stakes. 3) it takes ‘the same damn thing over and over’ of it and makes it into part of the movie’s message. Yes, it’s a whole different AI tyrant from different desperate future, but that’s not (just) because Hollywood has no new ideas, it’s because history actually does rhyme, if not quite repeat itself. Yes, Sarah destroyed the Cyberdyne factory and tech that made Skynet possible, but some other group of researchers comes along and invents something functionally similar, because of course they do. Individual people can learn from mistakes, but humans collectively? We’re going to keep on doing the same terrible shit over and over again.To put it another way: Sarah and John saved the world from nuclear war back in the 1990s, but so what? Col. Stanislav Petrov absolutely prevented a nuclear in 1983 in real life by keeping his cool (and we should honor his memory), but the world has moved on, and those accomplishments are just old news. The nuclear detente of the Cold War was hugely consequential at the time, and that we didn’t have a global holocaust is 100% good, but we still have to face the rising tide of tyranny, a domestic fascist movement, COVID not going away, and of course climate change.
This is the Dark Fate we all face, that today’s present is tomorrow’s footnote, that all past is prologue, and just because we saved the world today doesn’t mean it will stay saved tomorrow. And that’s why John dying anticlimactically on a beach in Mexico not only works, but is central to the movie’s message.Or, to put it another way, yes it renders the first two movies futile, but that’s not because John dies, but because the world moves irresistibly on.
This trend of abasing oneself before putting out a new project is weird. I don’t know if it’s a flex or if MeToo has scared the shit out of men to the point that they’re making excuses before they fuck up now.Or it could just be OWMR – Old White Men Reminiscing. And, jfc, we’ve all had enough of that.
Right? The idea that men could look back at their pasts and admit any faults is so ridiculous. What, are we supposed to be learning as we go? Damn you, metoo movement! you’ve gone too far 🤣
while i agree in general, it’s very funny to do it about your 6th terminator movie, particularly since it only came out 3 years ago.
Pretty sure Cameron was barely involved in movies 3-5 though.
He didn’t admit any faults. He blamed it on Linda and Arnold being too old to be box office draws, which may be the stupidest thing he’s ever said.
WTF are you talking about?
Maybe it was a bomb, but I really enjoyed it. Miles better than either Salvation or Genysis (or however that was spelled). Old Arnold did just fine. Old Sarah was a bit creakier, but worked well enough, and the younger performances were all great.
It sucked, it tried to be woke by killing off John Connor and making a woman the leader of the resistance. Why did this need to be done? I don’t get it. It served no purpose other than pandering.And we’re not going to make this about misogyny, etc. No issue with female heroes, love Ripley in Alien and wouldn’t want her replaced with a dude.
Ha, some dumbass claiming that killing off John Connor was too “woke/feminist/etc.” in a series where Sarah Connor was the main character of the first two universally-beloved movies. To that I say:
The Terminator story was always her story, really. John was an important plot device but it’s always been about Sarah Connor. Chuds tend to forget that.
I don’t think your average cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers go to a theater without scaring everyone away, nor do they have tv/disc player in their sewer home.
Of course it was her story, she was an amazingly written and portrayed hero. John was the heir to her throne, dedicating his life to the to the trail she blazed for him. In T2, he goes from kind-of-a-little-jackass to an incredibly brave and emotionally intelligent boy, foreshadowing the man he would eventually be. For much of his life, Sarah was missing, and his cynical approach to life was a response to successive injustices, but then he became incredibly inspired by her heroism and greatness. The “chuds” who are forgetting “that” are not the people (rightly or wrongly) bemoaning wokeness of this movie, rather, it’s those who forget Sarah was good because she was Sarah, a great character, not because she existed as some kind of lame social commentary
.
It has one “n” and one “y”.. but not where you think.
Wait, I really liked Terminator Dark Fate. It was a suitable sequel to Judgement Day and returned the series to gnarly, hard R action violence that had been lacking. I blame the Dark Fate bombing on three straight dogshit sequels that poisoned the well before we finally got a good one.
Or maybe people heard they kill off John Connor in the first 10 mins and replace him with a female resistance leader, because reasons.
No one cares what chuds got mad about. That said, the actress sucked and it’s Sarah Connor herself who should’ve been the new timeline resistance leader.
Good reasons. We’d already seen multiple times that John’s story wasn’t that interesting no matter how they tried to tell it. (The greatly-missed Sarah Connor Chronicles as the exception proving the rule.)
I liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles too. But wouldn’t a more realistic plot to that show be that John just stayed in his room with his Summer Glau bot?
DON’T DATE ROBOTS!
Then they should have stopped making terminator movies, as the story has been told. Wait a decade and reboot the first one if they really need to tap that well.Or, and hear me out, create an original story with robots where the main character is female. Tired of these lazy gender swaps.
Yes, because people watch the Terminator movies for John fucking Connor. Super insightful take, definitely not some dumb misogynistic bullshit nonsense…
Good reasons, actually, as I outline below in response to NoWaitComeBack.
The reasons you gave are reasons to stop making terminator movies, not to shit all over them in a failed virtue signal.
Recognizing that time passes, people get old, and new generations come along isn’t virtue signaling, it’s just accepting an inevitable fact of life. And yeah, it is a good reason to stop making Terminator films, and come up with something new.
Killing John Connor off for a fiesty female leader of the resistance to replace him IS virtue signaling. There was literally zero need for it, just like the all female ghostbusters. There was zero demand, yet they supplied it anyways.
People do get old, I never said they needed to use the same actors, they can cast new actors to play these characters, but I still see no need to take a big steaming dump all over them by have John get shotgun blasted in the face 5 minutes in.
And maybe you are okay accepting the absolute laziest fucking writing mechanic around(gender or race swaps) but I’m not. They want diversity? Peachy keen! Create their own stories. Just like if DC decided to make a male wonder woman movie called “Wonder Man” i’d call it out. It’s not needed.
LMAO you’re so scared of women you can’t even handle a fictional one.
Im afraid of women for calling out woke pandering? Son there was literally no reason to kill off John Connor
Same, and I agree that if it had actually been the first followup to T2 it would have been much-better received. I have multiple friends who had no interest whatsoever until I finally saw it and mentioned to them that it was really good, and then after they watched they absolutely agreed. Although I disagree on the “three” there – I really enjoyed T3, although it obviously didn’t quite rise to the level of the first two.
Terminator 2 had the perfect ending, artistically, it should have stopped there. But if you’re going to have a sequel, this one wasn’t bad.
Terminator 3 has a better ending than T2. And the ending is really the best thing about #3.
i genuinely think 3 is underrated. it’s extremely derivative, but arnold isn’t too old yet, dames and stahl elevate the material and it has some solid meat and potatoes action.
Absolutely. I barely remember most of the plot of 3, but that ending is fantastic.
Yeah, that wasn’t bad either, but I still prefer the ambiguity of T2. Salvation was aggressively mediocre, and Genisys was just flat out awful.
What was ambiguous about T2?
It was ambiguous as to whether or not defeating the T-1000 and liquefying the T-800 was enough to prevent Skynet eventually taking over.
Whether the destruction of Cyberdyne would actually prevent the war
Seriously? Sarah Conner specifically says the future is now unknown, but she has a sense of hope.
No this is dumb, it makes everything that happened in T2 moot and pointless. Just like Alien 3.
T2 had a shitty paradox ending that made no sense with the rules of time travel previously established in the franchise.
100%. It was fun and certainly the best post T2 sequel. I thought the fight scenes were really well done and interesting. It wasn’t great, but it was a lot better than people give it credit for, thought it certainly pales to the original 2 and suffers from Terminator burnout.
Eh…I blame the odd plot holes that have been made fun of to death by Rick and Morty:
Robot: “We have won the robot wars in this universe! Shall we go to another and aggro the one woman that has been able to stop the apocalypse?”
Other Robot: “Yes, for reasons.”
“Even if costs us our exis…”
“YES, FOR REASONS!”
The other problem was that now there’s a knee-jerk negative reaction by lots of R-rated action fans to anything they consider pandering to a liberal viewpoint. I think this group got turned off by 3 female leads, one of which is Hispanic, and a story based in part on border immigration. I kept running into, “Why’d they replace John Conner with a bunch of Rey Skywalker copies?” during online conversations, and that was before it came out that John Connor dies in the first couple minutes of the film.The movie probably could’ve survived that, but also Genisys sucked donkeys.
See: the aggressively stupid comment above from chest_rockwell, who was kind enough to speak for the mouthbreathers in this comment section.
I wanted to love Dark Fate. Hamilton’s great, Arnold’s used well, and Natalia Reyes is good. Mackenzie Davis, an actress who’s been awesome everywhere else I’ve seen her, isn’t awesome in this, and the Terminator in this movie is kind of a nothingburger. Cameron ruined things in T2—nothing that’s come since has convincingly been a greater threat than the T1000, yet the subsequent movies keep trying, heedless of the fact that none of the subsequent versions feels like an upgrade. Having Gabriel Luna’s Terminator be a T1000 wrapped around a T800’s skeleton was kind of an underwhelming gimmick, and we never got a sense of how that was supposed to work or why anyone would design it that way, other than the fact that robot skeletons are a thing in the terminator franchise. And it was all the more frustrating because the terminators in the future scenes had a really impressive and scary design, just they weren’t really part of the story.The special effects weren’t up to Cameron standards, and neither were the action sequences, for the most part. Maybe some part of that had to do with the leads being in their 60s and 70s, respectively, but I think it sucks that Cameron threw Hamilton and Schwarzenegger under the bus.
Yeah, there was no practical application to Gabriel Luna’s terminator.The skeleton serves as sort of a drone but is more susceptible to permanent, physical damage. The liquid metal part of him is his consciousness but has reduced mass and can only maintain the separation for a limited time but together, while he can still change his outward appearance, no longer has any of the other advantages of the liquid metal part.
In keeping with the movie being essentially a reboot of T3, the Rev-9 (I think, right?) was just a reboot of the TX with a more plausible upgrade.
The next movie after T2 should have been the war with Skynet. Salvation screwed up what should have been the obvious storyline: the rescueing and prepping of Kyle Reese and the introduction of the Terminators into the war. Instead we get this week “I’m a human! No, you’re a robot!” story. I think the genius of the original two movies were that there was a pretty simple goal for the films. Don’t die! You save the world not by sneaking into Mordor or facing off against the whole alien army. You save it by not dyeing. You’re really just kicking that world saving can down the road.
absolutely hated that fucking movie, but i love that we officially have a trilogy of failed trilogy starters. that ain’t nothing.
Same, and I just found it ridiculous that they felt the need to kill off John Connor and replace him with a female resistance leader. It’s just blatant pandering. They should have wrote a different script.It’s funny cuz in the previous movie they turn John Connor evil and I was like “well it cant get worse” but it apparently can.
Guess you never realized the main character with the most development and most agency in the first two films was female.
I didn’t mention main characters in my comment I said the leader of the resistance. If you’re gonna be a smug little shit get your facts right.
“Same, and I just found it ridiculous that they felt the need to kill off John Connor and replace him with a female resistance leader”SARAH FUCKING CONNER IS THE HERO OF THE SERIES.
Kill yourself, you incel fuck.
Yeah, who thought having a female lead in a Terminator movie was a good idea? I mean, sure, it worked great in the first two Terminator movies, but… uh… I forget what my point was.Oh yeah! My point is that you’re a misogynist dipshit and you should take your bullshit elsewhere.
The comment says leader of the resistance not main character. Sarah was never ever the leader. Nice try tho kiddo 🙂
Split the hairs any way you want; doesn’t make you any less of a misogynist dipshit.
It’s not splitting hairs, you just decided to run your mouth without properly reading what I said. The complaint was never “waaaaah women main character!” the complain was that they killed off John Connor and replaced him with a female leader just to be woke.You guys really are on a crusade to rob certain words of all meaning: nazi, fascist, sexist, misogynist. Is that why you abuse them? Or is it just plain fucking ignorance?
Whine more, snowflake. Nobody’s buying what you’re selling.
You already embarrassed yourself by trying to act like I didn’t know who Sarah Connor is, I’d quit while you can son.
The world lols @ you forever
Imagine being dumb enough not only to think this, but type it out and expect people to agree with you.
Chest Rockwell isn’t really known for being smart. He’s known for being magician and looking like Han Solo.
It’s not about what I think, these are facts. I never said the movies never had a woman in a main role. I said the leader of the resistance was John Connor and they swapped him out for a female.So before you try this “herpity derpity Sarah was a main character” shit with me…think.
You wrote this after eating a giant log of dog shit, didn’t you? You sound so dumb, I am surprised you can even type.
Damn dude I’d be fuckin’ embarrassed if I had the same shit takes as you. But I guess you have an advantage in being completely self-unaware.
There’s a pretty good “dude, make like Skynet and become self-aware” joke starter here.
Projection noted.
I honestly didn’t think it was a bad movie. Not a memorable movie, but Linda Hamilton was bad as fuck, and the story for the OG 1984 T-800 made sense. It was a fine movie.
Cameron should probably cool it with the candor.
They killed off John Connor and replaced him with a fiesty latina. Just woke pandering, no substance.
“He continues, “And then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie.””
Having Arnold and Linda along were two of the GOOD things about the movie. They certainly weren’t the problem!
The biggest sin of that movie is not that it was bad-it was just boring. A few of the post Judgement Day movies have been rough, but they at least had entertaining parts. Dark Fate was just dull.Except for the early set piece in the factory, which I thought was very cool.
Hot Take: Dark Fate was fine.
Of all the issues with this movie, Arnold and Linda were not one of them. The fact he thinks that shows how little he understands what went wrong.
He’s not really saying that, though, is he? The way I parsed his comment was that once you get Arnold on board, it does tend to narrow down your creative choices.
Only if you’re a complete hack who suffered a complete lack of imagination after you turned fifteen. Oh, guess I answered my own unspoken question there.
Noted environmentalist James Francis Cameron has a Venezuelan frog species named after him, while lesser talent Phantom_Renegade does not.(man there’s been a lot of James Cameron articles lately. I can’t keep up and there are only so many Future Man quotes to throw in….)
He paid good money to promote this film, and those ads won’t click themselves.
Aww, you think I have talent?
It is what it is. It came, and it failed. It has fans. And it has people that hate it for different reasons. I didn’t care for it, but I understand that usually when people get together to work on a project, they kind of believe in what they’re doing. So it would make sense at the time Cameron thought it was going to turn it out well. He doesn’t get involved in anything because he sees it as a failure. Why it failed has been talked about already in previous old articles and message boards and what not. Not interested in going in circles with that. I do believe it will get made again someday. That’s about it. As someone has pointed out in the other comments, you have a trilogy of failed trilogy starters. But I highly doubt that’s the last of them.
Hopefully, the success of Prey might give the next Terminator movie some decent ideas.Wait, who am I kidding, they’ll just copy it like it was the smart kid’s homework.
Salvation had the opportunity to restart it while keeping connections with the original two films and blew it. Genisys had the opportunity to use the original movies as a gimmick for nostalgia and still failed. And Dark Fate had the opportunity to start directly from T2 but go in another direction and still failed. One too many times and audiences are kinda of burned out from them trying.I think the next best thing is just a clean slate. Take the concept, but don’t connect it at all with the original movies. Start over. Remake that premise but go in it’s own direction. No more Judgement Day in 1997, no more future War in 2029, or going back to the late 20th century. Push it all forward. By separating itself completely, they can go in any direction they want with that concept without having to worry about being limited storywise from the previous movies. It shouldn’t be a step by step remake, but just start over and try to create a new canon. Because a lot of the fans that were adults from the 80’s and 90’s are dying off. Many of the fans that grew up in the 80’s and 90’s kind of feel like T1 and T2 are good enough and want them stop messing with it. Many people that were barely born in the 90’s or not even born until the 2000’s see it more as a period piece and can’t really relate to those times. So the nostalgia gimmick doesn’t work as well they would hope. Right now a clean slate seems like the best choice in a bad situation.
Honestly, fine – if someone wants to make a Terminator movie that massively cribs from Prey, we’ll get a damn good Terminator movie out of it.
“It is what it is. It came, and it failed. It has fans. And it has people that hate it for different reasons. I didn’t care for it.”The AV Club
I thought Dark Fate was terrible.
It’s the only half-way decent post-T2 sequel, which isn’t saying a lot, but I liked it.
I didn’t hate Salvation, but it was forgettable enough that I may have forgotten even its flaws.
The thing is, this was exactly the problem with Terminators 3 and 5: rehashing and remixing the series’ stronger entries, with the same characters, instead of pushing the boat out and doing something new.It seems dishonest to chalk it up to hubris when it constitutes a failure to learn from not only the series’ own low points, but those of every classic franchise with nostalgia-bait sequels.
“And then Tim wanted Linda”
Take it easy, Tim, we all want Linda.
Sounds like Cameron is admitting that the issue with Dark Fate is the he, James Cameron, is just too darn wonderful sometimes.
Director, philanthropist, undefeated Little League coach, deepsea explorer, good at marriage. The list goes on, for he is truly a… Titanic talent.
He’s the king of the world!
He’ll . . . be back?
I’ll tell you what, though — I’d love to see Garth Marenghi’s Darkfate. (With Madeleine Wool as Sarah Connor and Todd Rivers as the evil Rev-9 Terminator. Garth, of course, would play the T-800 who learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of curtains and humanity.)
Garth is in fighting shape for it, having finally finished his epic TERRORTOME. Check out the audiobook, folks!
Had it on my phone for a week or so, just waiting for the right moment!
And at least we know there’d be no subtext.
Blaming the box office numbers on the age of your performers is not a good look. Linda and Arnold both put in stellar performances, and so did the younger members of the cast. Dark Fate was a fantastic look at gender, the Chosen One mythology that the earlier films marinated in, racism, immigration, and choice vs predestination. It was an awesome change from most Hollywood blockbusters (and I say this as a MCU and SW fan). The biggest issue I saw was that it wasn’t marketed, like, at all. I didn’t even know the film had come out until I saw it on Starz. It wasn’t the story, and it wasn’t the actors, it was that someone in the marketing team lacked faith in the product and didn’t bother promoting the movie. But Cameron is happy to throw the actors under the bus for his blue cat people, so what else is new?
Sigourney Weaver is a 73 year old playing a teenager.
I am very much expecting to hear that the original Terminator is being remade at some point in the next three years. They’ve tried every single sequel possible and all failed. They had trilogies planned for Salvation, Genisys, and Dark Fate – all cancelled. But Hollywood is never going to let IP die so they’ll just try rebooting it from scratch.
No, they’ve tried the same sequel over and over to diminishing returns. There’s a massive idea-space that hasn’t even been touched because they don’t think the fans will watch a film without Sarah or John Connor.
yeah, the problem is actually that they refuse to reboot.
That is the opposite of the problem
There’s a massive idea-space that hasn’t even been touchedAgreed. I was thinking about the fact that every Terminator movie boils down to “Skynet sends Terminator back, Resistance sends protector back” (although Genisys, for all its faults, at least sort of tried to do something newish), and started wondering, what if that wasn’t inevitable? I came up with the thought (and the TV series apparently had a similar idea at some point, but I haven’t watched it) that maybe the reason Skynet seems inevitable is that we choose to teach our first AI to be violent and give it access to nuclear weapons. What if we taught an AI to be peaceful and compassionate, instead?
Awhile back in a similar thread to this one, I brainstormed a bunch of ideas for Terminator movies. Pirate Terminator, Medieval Terminator, war between two Skynets, that sorta thing. My favourite of those was, Skynet sends a Terminator back to some ancient point in time to save humanity from some cataclysm, so that they can go on to create Skynet.In regards to seeming inevitability, remember the first two films were made during the Cold War. Doubtless they reflected very real, immediate anxieties of the time.
A Terminator shepherding a group of Homo Sapiens through the Toba eruption aftermath?
Come with me if you want to live, indeed.
I saw Dark Fate before anyone was able to tell me I was supposed to hate it, so I didn’t, and now I’m stuck with that.
They have special camps for kids like you.
I think Kevin Bacon runs one.
Not hating Dark Fate is a perfectly cromulent take. It’s only really Salvation and Genysis that you’re supposed to hate.
I can’t remember much about Dark Fate, other than I didn’t enjoy it. I thought Genisys was actually decent and would’ve allowed for the series to be continued. I swear the stupid spelling in the name was the reason why it failed. Although, I just checked and it made $440 million, almost $200 million more than Dark Fate. So maybe they should’ve just stuck with the Genisys plans.
I probably would’ve thought Genisys was 100 times more awesome if I’d learned John Connor had been turned into a Terminator while watching the movie. If that’d been an actual plot twist instead of something everybody knew from the first or second trailer, my mind would’ve been blown.
I haven’t seen Dark Fate yet, though have been meaning to, but I think its two biggest problems are (1) the three prior sequels to T2 sucked balls and poisoned the well for any future sequels, and (2) the first two movies, despite being all-time classics, might just not be capable of supporting a franchise. And that’s fine! Making one of all-time great sci-fi thrillers and following it up with one of the all-time great big budget action movies is quite an accomplishment. It’s just that despite Hollywood’s boner for franchises and cinematic universes, very few IPs actually have enough meat on their bones or have competent enough producers to support the franchise/cinematic universe model.
Linda Hamilton was one of the few good things about it. These movies were Sarah Connor’s story all along.
Killing John was dumb but Sarah and Carl are the best things about it
Headline: “Cameron owns up to the issues with Dark Fate”Article: “They were too old” -Cameron
Schwarzenegger shouldn’t be in any further Terminator movies.
One of many reasons why sequels after T2 weren’t worth watching is that each movie revolves around the T-800 model 101. A robot designed for infiltration and assassination, specifically, that for some reason always looks and sounds like the same Austrian body builder, despite it also being a different robot every single time.Casting Arnold in the first movie was brilliant. Remixing him into the hero in T2 is the only time that was iterated on in a way that was interesting. Now, if someone must make more Terminator movies (and of course they must, because it’s a property people recognize so there’s money to made), they need to do something new. Forget John and Sarah Connor, forget Arnold, forget “come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back.” Tell a new story about someone being hunted by an implacable killer, which is actually an unstoppable machine from the future in the guise of a human being.
And do it like Split, where we have no idea from the marketing or from the movie itself that it’s a Terminator movie until the very moment the story reveals it.
I really liked Dark Fate. I kind of think it would have worked better with just Sarah Connor and not the Arnold Terminator, but it didn’t bother me that much. They came up with an okay-ish reason to have an Arnold in there.
I think Dark Fate just suffered from following so many other sub-par Terminator sequels, especially so soon after Genysis or whatever.
I liked genesys but really didn’t like Dark Fate. Changing everything to reboot didn’t sit well with me. You have time travel, so you can still use skynet instead of redoing it as whatever system they had in dark fate. Plus they went too far in making the new terminators advanced. If they did a sequel to dark fate, then they’d need to push the technology of killer robots even further and way too far in my opinion.
I wish he had just said that the problem was that he didn’t direct it so of course it sucked.
The bigger problem with Dark Fate is that the second half is 90% CG, but I didn’t expect Cameron to own up to that mistake.
Sequels need to build on the previous films and not negate the point of them. Don’t kill Newt, don’t kill John Connor, don’t kill all the lead characters in Star Wars.
The line about “ageism” is why journalists are universally derided in modern society. He was making a professional observation about why audiences didn’t connect to the movie and your writer decided to enter their own victim olympics statement into the narrative as if anyone asked for it or wanted it. The inability to report on something without having to whine about some “ism” is bizarre and immature. You aren’t a teenager in college anymore. You are writing about adults, for other adults. We know we age.
I found Dark Fate pleasantly surprising; to be honest my main objections are the ones that I have to all ‘legacy sequels’, namely that there aren’t that many plot structures that support the idea of old stars passing the baton onto new stars in an emotionally satisfying way. And also the fact that conceptually, that’s not a particularly emotionally satisfying thing anyway, unless you are the kind of person who is comfortable with fan service replacing drama (and many are).
Dark Fate at least recognised that at their core, Terminator movies are chase movies. It was baffling to me that they made other Terminator films which didn’t emphasise this genre structure. The trouble with making a legacy sequel to a chase movie series is that there’s immediately too many characters. So you have to either bundle all your protagonists together and have them all involved in the chase as one unit, or you send them off in divergent directions. A chase structure requires clear and clean lines, I think: the actual structure needs to be overt and obvious, because the emotional reward in a chase movie is that you know where everyone is, and you understand the stakes of them being there. Some genre structures benefit from being obscured, but the chase structure doesn’t.
I’d have been happy without Linda and Arnold, I think. The movie would have felt cleaner if it was just a next-gen Terminator movie. But a far more exciting and interesting idea to me would have been a chase movie that’s just about the Sarah and the T-800: this endless chase across time, that will never let them rest. The assassins keep coming, and they have to keep surviving and running, and they have to figure out how to do it even as their bodies slow down and begin to fail. That has emotional legs to me – it could honestly have been a direct sequel without any of the “let’s introduce the new blood” stuff they always do, if they’d leaned into the fact that everyone’s getting older.
A movie about time-travelling killers does, you must admit, lend itself fairly obviously to being a metaphor for the fight and flight against time and death. Two older fighters trying to survive a lethal chase that never ends could have been really moving.
Having Arnold and Linda wasn’t the problem. That they got right.
Killing John wasn’t even a bad idea.
Here’s where it went wrong…
– An uninteresting replacement savior who hadn’t earned their place in the franchise like John had.
– An uninteresting villain who was so good as “infiltrating” they came back around and became unmemorable.
– A protector from the future who spends most of their screen-time needing to be protected.
– Yet another sequel that treats the war between humans and machines as inevitable, making John’s death (one way or the other) pointless.
– A climax shot almost entirely in the dark that’s genuinely unpleasant to look at.
– Taking the interesting idea of a Terminator retiring to a normal life and getting married, and exploring none of it. I had a million questions after that part and almost none of them were answered.
Dani was a fantastic character. They gave her a ton of characterization in a very short time, though many people disregarded what they saw because she’s Latina and a woman therefore uninteresting, versus John who “earned his place” by being born. (This is part of the film’s metatext.) They gave a glimpse of Carl’s life, more than we got for Miles Dyson in T2, but Carl wasn’t the point of the movie.
How odd.I actually liked Dark Fate quite a bit but if anything – there should have been more Arnie and Linda.Their performances were both the highlights of the film and the fact there was so little Arnold was disappointing.
The only problem that I had with Dark Fate is that it was boring. I didn’t mind Arnie or Linda being back, I didn’t care that they killed John at the start, I didn’t care that they added a female rebel leader, etc. etc. etc. I was really bothered by the fact that it was just kind of boring. You should never look at your watch wondering how much longer the film is when you’re watching an action flick.
“T2 is your granddad’s movie?” WHAT?! I think James seriously underestimates the amount of kids that grew up watching that one, while at the same time overestimating the rate of teenage pregnancies. That’s the only explanation for that one.
The thing that gets me is the last three Terminator films comprise a trilogy where each individual movie was meant to be the first part of a separate trilogy that never happened.
“ I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie.”The script. It was the shitty script that the movie couldn’t survive.
Arnold and Linda being old is the least of that movie’s problems.
James, if I’m getting a vote, I vote for sequels to Dark Fate rather than Avatar.