Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

If you asked me to explain the multiple alternate and parallel timelines at play in The Terminator and its sequels, I’ll quickly change the subject. I don’t fully understand them myself, nor do I believe any of the filmmakers have tried to keep the continuity house in order. What’s more, though, all these disparate timelines are far and away the least interesting thing about any Terminator film, which are at their best when they mash up impressive action sequences with an unstoppable metallic killer whose immortality may as well be lifted from a slasher horror film’s antagonist. 

Case in point, Terminator: Dark Fate, which ignores most of the sequels and pretends – just like its predecessors, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys – that only the first two Terminator films “actually” happened. For a franchise that continually rewrites itself, Dark Fate is an oddball legacy sequel (or legacy-quel, if you will) that works much better when it’s not sidestepping its own prismatic past.

 

Years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) averted Judgment Day and the rise of Skynet, a new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) arrives in Mexico City to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Assuming Dani will be the mother of some new future messiah, Sarah rushes to her side, only to find the cybernetically-augmented Grace (Mackenzie Davis) has already time-travelled to save Dani from the forces of the future.

 

What separates Dark Fate from the other Terminator sequels is the return, supposedly triumphant, of franchise forefather James Cameron, who had no hand in the preceding three films. Here, Cameron is one of six credited writers, but one senses that his voice rings the loudest. Each of the trio of protagonists is that very specific Cameron brand of Strong Female Protagonist – tough and resilient with only enough emotional complexity to feel human; indeed, their heroic prowess seems measurable by the size of their firearms, a Freudian insight which feels almost retrograde for 2019. What felt innovative for the 1984 original (and Cameron’s Aliens two year later) now feels familiar and perhaps overdone. It’s as though Cameron has returned to the franchise both to save it and to insist upon reminding us (however spurious the claim) that he invented tough-as-nails heroines. 

 

In short, it’s the girlboss Terminator, even if it doesn’t quite explore that concept until very late in the film, when we finally learn why Dani is essential to the future (in a plot twist that is telegraphed either effectively or obviously, depending on where you’re sitting). Dark Fate asks, “What if, this time, a lady helped a lady save a lady?” Points for finding a new angle on an old favorite, I suppose, and kudos to the trio of women anchoring the film for all doing a credible and watchable job. Hamilton’s return is ostensibly the centerpiece of the film, even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger reinventing his role as an aging Terminator, while Davis is a clever update on the Kyle Reese archetype. The film does her a disservice, though, to focus more on her physicality than her personality, given a brief flashback that only teases what she’s really like.

 

Then there’s Natalia Reyes, who has the closest thing to a character arc in the film, and it’s because of her emotional attunement as Dani that the film’s third-act twist lands at all. The film asks her to be John Connor and Sarah Conner and her own person all at once, and Reyes manages to take the film’s thin character sketch and finds a way to track Dani’s evolution from factory worker to future hero. I’d be just as happy to see any of these three come back for a future Terminator film, though I would recommend audiences not get too attached. We’ve been down this road before, with Terminator 3 and Salvation and Genisys each promising a new direction that never came to pass. 

 

We don’t, however, come to a Terminator film for internal logic or amazing new characters. After decades of fits and starts, we keep coming back for the bang-up action sequences, and on that count Dark Fate truly delivers. The film’s first act includes a freeway chase that’s very nearly as good as the one at the heart of The Matrix Reloaded (though I’m sure the proper antecedent is in Terminator 2, which I haven’t seen recently enough to recall with precision), and the pace never quite lets up. We’ve also got a claustrophobic sequence within an immigration detainment center, with a climax set amid an expansive pursuit over land, sea, and air. Throughout, director Tim Miller is constantly recalibrating the bar, both raising it for effect and narrowing his scope to give this action film a welcome degree of versatility. 

 

Dark Fate is very seldom boring, and perhaps the only sense of fatigue in the film is the idea that we’ve been told four times now that, no, no, this is what a Terminator film ought to do. At the core of the franchise is an irresistible – and proven – premise, though the box office receipts seem to be a tale of diminishing returns. As these films often remind us, the future is not written – and nor, it seems, are the sequels this film had been hoping to greenlight. Dark Fate may have portended its own future with its eponymous subtitle, casting the franchise prospects into uncertainty. 

Terminator: Dark Fate is rated R for “violence throughout, language, and brief nudity.” Directed by Tim Miller. Written by James Cameron, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray. Starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna.

Deadpool (2016)

After a torturous route to the big screen – including an ill-advised turn in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and a mixed-bag detour through Green Lantern – Deadpool is finally here. As if you could have missed it: the marketing has been spot-on but indecently profuse. Now that it’s arrived, billing itself as a kind of anti-Valentine’s Day movie, we can see that Deadpool is exactly what it promised – a no-holds-barred antihero satire of Hollywood’s biggest genre – even if the end result is maybe not as much as we might have liked.

In the part he was born to play, Ryan Reynolds stars as Wade Wilson, a verbose assassin whose terminal cancer diagnosis leads him away from the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and into an experimental treatment aimed at triggering his latent mutant genes. When the experiments horribly disfigure Wilson, he adopts the identity of Deadpool and goes after Ajax (Ed Skrein), the sadistic doctor who destroyed his life, much to the protests of X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand).

I can say as a devout comic book reader that Deadpool’s a tricky character. Some of his more misguided portrayals have either made him far too serious or unnecessarily zany, so it’s a very precarious balancing act. On this count, Deadpool is a real success: the characterization is pitch-perfect, and Reynolds is as at home in the red spandex as he’s ever been, dropping one-liners and breaking the fourth wall amid acts of quite astonishing violence.

There’s a lot to like here, particularly the portrayal of Colossus as an avuncular, overgrown big-brother type with a shockingly naïve understanding of what it means to be a superhero, coupled with a tendency to deliver bloviating soliloquies on said heroism. With his caricatured Russian accent, Colossus is the perfect straight man opposite the id-driven Deadpool, and his paternalistic chemistry with Negasonic Teenage Warhead serves as an absurdist reminder that this film exists within the X-Men film universe. Fans are clamoring to see the time traveler Cable show up in future Deadpool films, but let’s not lose sight of what a delightful riot this Colossus could provide.

At the end of the day, I enjoyed Deadpool about as much as one might expect; I left the theater with a smile on my face, having laughed more or less all the way through. It’s important not to lose sight of that amid my more critical notes, the first of which is that the marketing was really quite oversaturated in the sense that a lot of the good material had been spoiled by trailers and commercial spots. (Indeed, one joke from the trailers actually works better there than in the take they used in the film.) Maybe that’s just a casualty of Deadpool trailers appearing in front of nearly every movie I’ve seen in the last year, but the film didn’t quite live up to those original laughs and feelings of anticipation.

My other thought on Deadpool is that, for all the subversive fourth-wall breaking for which the character’s become known, the film actually does comparatively little of that. Much of the postmodern narration is conventionally accepted in contemporary film, so a self-aware narrator doesn’t pack as much of a punch as it does in the comics. Moreover, just quantitatively, the film doesn’t pull out as much meta-humor as one might expect (again, much of it is in the trailers); in fact, it proceeds roughly along the same plot threads as X-Men Origins: Wolverine – man experimented on, gains abilities, loses girl, seeks revenge, falls in with X-Men – in other words, a fairly standard superheroic plot for a character who is capable of so much else.

Put another way, Deadpool is a very solid, if conventional, superhero film seasoned lightly with the Deadpool metafiction and perhaps oversaturated with inappropriate content. Some of the funniest jokes in the film are about the shockingly low budget, a reminder that Deadpool is as much a proof-of-concept film as anything else, a test to see if moviegoers are ready for something like the ideal Deadpool film I’ve been describing. If box office receipts are any indication – breaking records in the neighborhood of $135 million – I’d say that Deadpool 2 is a foregone conclusion. Look, if nothing else, Negasonic Teenage Warhead is in a multimillion dollar blockbuster film. If that’s not proof the geeks have won, then consider Deadpool a failure. Good thing neither of those statements is true.

Deadpool is rated R for “strong violence and language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity.” The violence is really nonstop, quite bloody to the point of being cartoonish (both in terms of what’s shown and the attitude toward it). A number of crude innuendoes and expletives pervade the film, and there are several moments of male and female nudity. Best leave the kiddos at home for this one.

Heads up, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with another installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!