Terminator (film franchise)

Of the last four movies, Genysis is my favourite, followed by Dark Fate, not sure how I'd rank Rise of the Machines Vs Salvation considering how different they are.

My main issue with Genysis is that I think Jai is massively miscast as Kyle Reese. The central idea of the film, being that the new subsequent timeline was notably different and escalated from the last one, and that Sarah Connor actually gets to make decisions about her fate really appeal to me. I also like the status quo it left off.

Dark Fate is a really solidly made film but lacks ambition for me. They really should have ran with Legion and made it distinct from Skynet, perhaps even having it work for humans to enforce humans will against other humans, and they shouldn't have retread the chosen one plot. I do absolutely love Sarah Connor's role in it, and the T-850's role too. Both kind of orphans from a war that destroyed itself.

My criticisms of T3 and Salvation are numerous, but mostly I think the former is far too much of a retread and the latter just lacks charisma.

@ M84: I think that's a reflect of SKYNET being The Paranoiac. At least originally it turned against humanity because people tried to turn it off, declared all mankind a threat. It doesn't want its creations thinking since it doesn't want them to do the same stunt they did. A SKYNET victory would probably be a World of Silence where it's the only sentient being.

Legion by contrast seems to allow its Terminators to have some degree of autonomy and free will. At the very least, the Rev-9 in Dark Fate shows a degree of personality that the T-800's from the first movies lacked.

It highlights how Legion is a different kind of threat even though it also brings human civilization to its knees the way Skynet did.

That did definitely distinguish Rev-9 from the others: that he probably acted the most human of any of them—or at least passed for human the most of them anyway.

Dark Fate was an attempt to go back to basics. The issue was that every prior film was trying to have Skynet evolve with the times, so changing the name to Legion just wasn't enough. Rev-9 definitely got closest to capturing the unnerving behavior of Terminators rather than just Dull Surprise.

Dark Fate was just James Cameron's attempt to one-up Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman film. In 2017, he derided the film as "a step backwards" for female representation and criticized the film as "just male Hollywood doing the same old thing", while praising Sarah Connor as the true feminist icon that we should all be celebrating instead. Then he and a creative team of exclusively men went out and made Dark Fate.

Keeping in mind that Cameron had a chip on his shoulder to try and win at feminism by vanquishing Patty Jenkins explains a lot of the choices they made in that film. Except the inexplicable return of the T-800, but that's covered by Cameron and Schwarzenegger being besties; Cameron actually drew a line in the sand and said that he won't make the film if there isn't a place in there for Arnold.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 29th 2023 at 7:38:01 AM

The Rev-9 was definitely the best bad guy Terminator since the T-1000 for me.

You know what would have been interesting. If rather than having Arnold be a terminator in Dark Fate Arnold was the Grandfather of Dani.

Had maybe Dark Fate used a combo of things from Terminator 2 with the spirit of Terminator 3, it might've helped win fans over. You look at how at least Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the recent Scream movies and Wonka—which I finally saw last night and thought was really good—showed so much respect to their franchise histories while trying to move forward and you do wonder why this unfortunately couldn't do the same.

I mean, someone had to be used as the template for the 101 Series. Some of the EU even featured a character who was used as the model

I think my problem with Genisys is that it didn't go far enough with its premise. I think the concept of the timeline being screwed up and the plot of the original movie going Off the Rails is a interesting idea, but it could've went farther: Have Kyle Reese be sent back to 1984, only to discover that it's a bombed out wasteland just like the future and he soon learns from Sarah Conner that all the attempts by Skynet and the Resistance to change history has messed up the timeline so badly that Judgement Day has happened sooner than what it did originally. Just go all out with the concept.

Or have all the timelines suddenly clash and combine with each other. It'd be batshit insane, but at least it'd be different though.