She’s a “walking temporal disruption” trying to protect her son whose father was a man from the future sent back to protect her.įor Daniel, this makes her more cyborg than the Terminator. I also hope he won’t mind me summarising it.)ĭaniel’s focus is on Sarah Connor - “mother of the future, goddess, warrior”. (I’m hoping one day that Daniel will publish this take for himself. The journey into and out of this place is an interesting one and it reminded me of a lecture I went to a few months ago given by Daniel Rourke in which he gave the best analysis of T2 that I’ve ever heard. The most interesting example for me is perhaps that Sarah Connor’s insane asylum sequence is changed up for a Texan detention centre for illegals who’ve crossed the US-Mexican border. Initially, the updated settings and politics feel incredibly timely for a time-warped franchise such as this. In many respects, that is precisely what the filmmakers have done here, and it is what makes and breaks this film for me. The first 20 minutes or so of this film felt like they were just going to remake T2 but for today. Terminator: Dark Fate at first feels like it has taken heavy notes from the reboot of the Star Wars franchise. It has never been this franchise’s strongest message. Individual survival supposedly trumps any sense of collective responsibility. A Terminator-dominated world is not our fate because our fate is what we make for ourselves… But it seems our fate is also to keep making rogue AI…? It’s a hopeful line that is uttered within minutes of the iconic “there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves” and it left me feeling pretty jarred. Dani, this film’s “John Connor”, future leader of the resistance - or “militia” (because she’s Mexican I guess?) - is keen to point out that we made these things so we can take them down. This is not just history repeating itself but the future too.īut there’s still hope. This is driven home in Dark Fate in a scene where the saviour-from-the-future character, Grace, explains that Sarah Connor may have stopped Skynet from taking over but humans ended up building something else instead: Legion - yet another rogue AI that has its Oedipal and military-industrial complexes murderously entangled, threatening the entire human race after it decides to hunt it for sport. Individual fate may be fluid but repeatedly it falls foul of a much bigger plan. It’s meant to be a hopeful motto for most of the franchise’s characters but it betrays a weird templexity that is as integral to the franchise’s continuing existence as to that of the universe in which it takes place. “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves” is one of the most famous lines from the Terminator franchise but it’s also the least effective and discussed. I don’t think there’s a way to say why I think this exactly without spoiling just about all of it so come back later if you’ve got plans to check it out. As an action blockbuster, I enjoyed it, but as the latest offering in a franchise so tied up with theoretical readings, it raises a lot of questions - questions that both strengthen the film as entertainment and undermine it as politicised media. TL DR: I thought it was really interesting. I went to see Terminator: Dark Fate this evening and have thoughts.
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