I’ve had some second thoughts about the box office flop Terminator: Dark Fate...
Believe it or not, I go to the movies — every movie — looking to love that movie. This was certainly the case with Terminator: Dark Fate, especially with the return of Linda Hamilton. I was rooting for her. Linda Hamilton and Terminator make up the soundtrack of my life. Plus, I can’t imagine an existence where you walk into a theater with a chip on your shoulder, where you’re looking for any excuse to hate the movie.
Because I resist this impulse, I tend to gloss over things, which is why my Dark Fate review is kinder than some others. Sometimes this glossing over technique works. Sometimes the gloss doesn’t hold, and after a few days I’m forced to admit, Yeah, that was so awful it took me out of the movie, even though I tried to fool myself into pretending it didn’t.
So, here I am a couple of days later, removing a pebble in my shoe I can no longer ignore…
Sadly, this particular pebble happens to be what should have been Dark Fate’s biggest hell-yeah moment: Sarah Connor’s (Hamilton) grand entrance in Dark Fate.
Minor spoilers coming…
One of the many questions Dark Fate has to answer is what Sarah Connor has been doing since 1991, since the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
As I mentioned in my review, it’s actually a cool answer. It turns out that before Skynet was destroyed in T2, they managed to send back a bunch of Terminators, stragglers if you will, and Connor’s dedicated her life to destroying them. Like I mentioned before, that’s a concept that might have made for a pretty cool movie: a stripped out, Logan-style, down-and-dirty genre feature… A weathered, aging, grieving, emotionally empty, alcoholic Sarah Connor roaming the world as a Terminator hunter. Sarah Connor is now a Terminator. If done right, I’d pay to see that twice.
Instead, what we got was an empty, over-CGI’d, all-girl remake of T2, but I digress….
Here’s the set-up…
Androgynous Terminator (Mackenzie Davis) and Half-Pint Diversity Hire (Natalie Reyes) are on the run from a Liquid Terminator (Gabriel Luna’s Rev-9) determined to kill the Half-Pint Diversity Hire because, you know, the future ‘n stuff. After a pretty solid chase sequence, they find themselves cornered on a highway overpass.
They’re doomed.
It’s over.
When…
Sarah Connor shows up out of nowhere in slow-mo to save the day. She hits the Liquid Terminator with some automatic fire and launched-grenades, and it falls over the side of the bridge.
Situation totally in hand — because she’s apparently done this dozens of times — a bored-by-the tired-routine-of-killing-Terminators Sarah Connor pulls a pistol and tells Androgynous Terminator “I’ll be back.”
She then proceeds down the hill to finish off the Terminator, and this is all total bullshit.
First off, when Sarah hits the Liquid Terminator with the grenades, it reveals itself to her as a Liquid Terminator. So she knows this is a Liquid Terminator, and she’s not surprised it’s a Liquid Terminator, which tells us she has not only been hunting and killing T-800s (the Terminators played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), she has also been hunting and killing Liquid Terminators (T-1000s), like the one played so memorably by Robert Patrick in T2.
So how the hell did she plan to kill this thing with a handgun?
Those of us who have seen The Terminator (1984) and T2, know how impossible it is to kill Terminators. Sarah barely survived Arnold’s T-800 in T1, and would not have had she not happened upon a factory with an industrial press. But this was nothing compared to what it took to kill the T-1000 in T2, and there she even had the help of Arnold’s T-800.
So how exactly is Sarah Connor killing off Terminators all by herself now?
Not only that, she’s 30-years older, and while I’m a decade younger than Hamilton, I can tell you that the physical difference between and a 53-year-old and a 33-year-old is significant. She’s 63.
This isn’t a plot hole, it’s a plot canyon. We’re supposed to believe that 1) a Social Security-eligible Sarah Connor is out killing Terminators all on her own, and 2) she’s doing it with the conventional weapons that failed so miserably at stopping Patrick’s T-1000 in T2.
Apparently, the filmmakers didn’t care because GRRRRRRL POWER. You see, Sarah no longer needs a man. Oh, no — she’s killing Terminators all over the world all on her own by brandishing a gun and a vagina.
This is not just terrible storytelling, it’s insulting to the intelligence.
Honestly, how hard would it have been to have Sarah show up with a weapon she had developed over the last 30 years, a Terminator Killer, some gizmo that takes these things down easy peasy, except…
Uh, oh… this Terminator is not like the Terminators I’ve been killing for 30 years… RUUUUNNNNN!!!!
Imagine her having this weapon when she promises to kill Schwarzenegger’s T-800 later in Dark Fate. Instead of sounding ridiculous — 110 pound grandma’s gunna kill her a Terminator — with that in her pocket, it would have added an extra layer of tension, something this movie very much needed.
So why didn’t they do that…?
Well, it’s not because I have a better imagination than producer James Cameron or screenwriter David Goyer, two of the best storytellers in the business. That’s for sure…
No, I think it was all about this woke-feminist garbage — this obnoxious, stupid nonsense that has Hollywood pandering to a handful of insecure, left-wing harpies on Twitter.
Rather than make Sarah Connor’s back-story realistic, the message became more important than verisimilitude: Here’s a woman doing a job a man can’t, the job Kyle Reese and even the T-800 couldn’t do — killing Terminators all on her own.
But, hey, geniuses… Where are all these pathetic, crybaby feminists you sought to appease? Where the hell are they? All that appeasement, and they still didn’t show up for opening weekend.
And this is why I use the term “woketard.”
Woke makes you stupid.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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