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I liked Salvation a lot. It's bizarre to think it came from the director of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.
The series was wrapped after T2 and doesn’t need any further entries, but if you’ve got to bring it back I can’t think of a better way to do it than the way Dark Fate handled things.
Throwing it all under the bus and retreading the same ground with new characters?
It is the only good one, in my view.
Via my job as a Firefighter, I actually worked on the set Genisys when it was filming in New Orleans.
The most remarkable sequence to watch being filmed was the Golden Gate Bridge.
On the parking area of an abandoned shopping mall a section of the bridge’s roadway was constructed , along with railing and partial structural members. Traffic was added with stunt drivers and they actually flipped the bus.
In post, the entire rest of the bridge, and background were added. The final images are pretty remarkable.
None of this was filmed on the Golden Gate Bridge
Such as killing off Edward Furlongs John Connor in the first three minutes thereby rendering the first two films pointless?
Dark Fate is basically just a better Terminator 3, and it's a great example of doing too little, too late. Too many false starts and retreaded territory within the series to think it's anything more than just the previous sequels done better.
Yeah, as you said, there wasn't really anywhere to go with this story since T2, so it was a decent route to go down - and as you also say, Sarah was the interesting one anyway.
I thought Dark Fate was pretty decent and probably the best one after T2, but it does fall off a cliff a bit about halfway in or so. It was strange how the new Sarah character barely seemed to get any screentime, either.
For me Salvation showed how if you remove the real killer concept behind Terminator (i.e. evil robot sent back in time to avert its enemy's birth) there's not much of interest left. There was really one movie's worth of appeal in it, and Cameron managed a pretty incredible feat to make T2 as good as it was.
Interestingly (or terrifyingly) the idea of the machines rising up against us is actually a real and valid current concern, and potentially these movies might have numbed us to the dangers making it seem like a Hollywood fiction: risk from AGI (artificial general intelligence)
Once AIs start designing their successors and improving upon them (which is what we'll use them for) they will start to be out of our hands and that is likely to at some point lead to superintelligence, more intelligent than us, and beyond our capacity to control.
Some good scenes in this one, but not very memorable.
That’s awesome you worked on Genisys, @talos7, and pretty funny that the Golden Gate Bridge scene was actually filmed in New Orleans. Genisys is actually my favorite after the original. I know, I know, T2 has incredible action and a tearjerker of an ending and Hamilton’s great, but it’s really 90s and not in a good way and John’s kinda whiny and I’m rarely in the mood to watch it. Genisys delivered likable characters, humor that works, fun twists on the timeline, a really good score, and a refreshingly bright setting in San Francisco. I enjoy the film start to finish, and as I said it’s bested only by the original for me.
T3 is solid too. Arnold’s in top form. Stahl makes for a good John, Claire Danes works well as Kate, Kristanna Loken made for a fun and original new Terminator model, the truck chase was spectacular, and the film drove the narrative forward and had a great and unexpected ending. Salvation was solid also. I loved the whole idea of taking us into the future war. It does feel like a very different kind of film. I love the dark aesthetic of it all. But it also unfortunately feels like one action sequence piled on top of the other. Like the whole movie was built around the action sequences, and that probably isn’t too far off the mark from how the movie was actually made.
Dark Fate is the lousiest of the bunch by a fair margin. Overstuffed with protagonists, Hamilton scowling and miserable the whole time, no standout action sequences to speak of, offing John only to have a new character try to retread Sarah’s arc, only this new character starts out as a badass so she has nowhere to grow as a character and giving her not one, not two, but three protectors just makes them all seem a bit incompetent in the face of the antagonist in the end, a visually dark and messy climax that was probably designed that way to cover up the rough CGI. There’s simply nothing to recommend in this one. Mackenzie Davis was good. The movie had that much. But she needed a good movie to star in.
Pretty much all of the Golden Gate scene in A View To A Kill was filmed north of London! :D
For the close ups, true. But they did actually put two stuntmen atop the Golden Gate for the long shots, which is pretty dang cool.
I really wish they had kept the Sergeant Candy scene in. Would have made the film more memorable for sure!
What I personally would have done (for a start, at least) was drop Arnie. The film completely loses its way once he shows up and they have narratively pigeon holed themselves twice now trying to find ways to explain his age.
There's a really lovely scene from The Sarah Connor Chronicles where John Connor visits a park and sees a very young Kyle Reese in the distance. That got me thinking about how John really could have been used in a post-T2 sequel in an interesting way.
Dark Fate presents us with the idea that an AI war is inevitable, whether it be with Skynet or someone else - it's almost generational, with each threat having a different saviour. John Connor was the first, and now there's someone else. Instead of killing John off, however, I'd have kept him and used him as the protector character along with a grumpy, alcoholic Sarah. After living his life with the belief that he was the one who would save mankind, he now has to confront the reality that someone else now has that role, and he and Sarah have to ensure their safety. He would also, in a way, become just like his father - hence the scene where he would see young Kyle at the park; a decision-making moment for him where he embraces his new role as a guardian rather than the hero of the resistance.
You'd have to be careful to not retread the ground of the first film too much but something like that, to me, would have been more interesting.
I’m glad you mentioned The Sarah Connor Chronicles though, @CraigMooreOHMSS. That series was better than most of the films and should be looked to as inspiration for the right way to tell new Terminator stories on film.
True in the context of the existing finished film, for sure, but I'd argue that you don't really need a lot of things narratively - however it certainly doesn't make them any less nice to explore nor is there only one way to do it. I liked Hamilton quite a lot in the film, all the same. As you say, the second half of the film doesn't really measure up to what she was bringing to it.
Regarding another new guy; it wouldn't really bother me as long as the actor was good and played well off Hamilton, to be honest. It's really Schwarzenegger who's the established star anyway, and I'd be getting rid of him too.
It was a great show, criminally treated by a network that didn't have a clue what they were doing at the time. It did stray a bit towards the end of that second season, but overall I really enjoyed it. Headey was a great Sarah Connor. She managed to convey the same qualities that Hamilton had without being a copycat.
There's just no point in having two characters when you only need one. Sarah learning it's not about her anymore is the same as Sarah & John learning it's not about them anymore. Her role could have been given to two people in the first film (maybe her dad could have come along with her and Kyle), there would be no point though: films need to be elegant. John had a role and a story in T2, but there's no role for him here.
I think the stuff with her despising Carl is more interesting than playing her beat about being irrelevant twice with someone else.
Killing him off the way they did is certainly one way to go - but I find the alternatives to be a bit more engaging, conceptually.
There are only two.
You present it as him having the same arc that Sarah does in the finished film though. Which leaves Sarah with no reason to be in it.
As Sarah is the star of these films, and not John, I think it makes much more sense to give that story to Sarah.
I don't think that would remove her reason for being in it, no - unless the thinking is that an arc like that is the only thing that could be done with Sarah's character. If that's the case then I would disagree with that. There's plenty of things that could be done with her, too. Remember, I only suggested keeping the core concept of an inevitable future war with a new saviour that would need protecting. There's plenty of room for other things there to make the pieces fit around that. All that would have been needed is a decent script that fleshes out the relationships, establishes who John and Sarah have become since they allegedly averted the end of the world, and an actor who can bounce off Hamilton well. I really don't think it would have been too difficult really - which is why I enjoyed but was also frustrated by the finished film in equal measure. Davis did a decent job in the end as Grace but I fear her efforts were in vain as the last hour undermined the setup, unfortunately.
Neither Sarah nor John were the stars of the films to me, I must say. While I do love both characters, it's a tough argument to position them above the actual Terminator itself in those first two films. That's obviously not to say people don't like Linda Hamilton (or even Emilia Clarke later on, for that matter), but Arnie was always the big draw for people - at least until 2003. It's evidently not the case anymore, though. I definitely thought Dark Fate would pull in a more respectable box-office total with both of them back together (a big part of the marketing was the return of Hamilton), but I guess nobody really cared in the end.
Ultimately, all I'm saying is that while I didn't hate the route they took, there was plenty of room to use John Connor in interesting ways as opposed to just killing him off in order to accommodate an aging Arnie's involvement for the second film in a row.