Terminator: Dark Fate

Re-Writing History Re-Writing the Future
or
"Saved Three Billion Lives. Enough of a Resumé For You?"

James Cameron is back to the Terminator franchise, the one he started way back in 1984, now credited as Executive Producer and Story-Author of Terminator: Dark Fate, which basically ignores the other franchise movies after Terminator 2: Judgement Day no matter how much or how little they featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and serves as a direct sequel to Cameron's Judgment Day—rubbing out all of the three movies that have come in-between.

Which makes Cameron a Terminator of sorts behind the camera.

Basically, he's spiffing up the timeline because it WAS getting a little confusing—now is it Linda Hamilton or Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor?; and fer pity's sake, how many JOHN Connors have there been—Christian Bale or Jason Clarke or Nick Stahl or Ad Infinitum? The series has had more reboots than any other for such a short expanse of existence, and for all of that, the future still looks the same in all the movies—it's only the present that keeps changing.

Except, of course, for Arnold. It seems you can't make a "Terminator" movie without him, even though it's becoming increasingly clear and inevitable—like sand through the hour-glass—that maybe they should...IF they're going to keep making them. And unless they start doing something fresh with the concept besides merely a rock'em-sock'em robots display, there is no reason to.

Dark Fate starts with a reprise of a video of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, this time) from Judgement Day recounting her vision of the nuclear holocaust that will destroy humanity, ending with her freaking out about "anybody not wearing two million sunblock is going to have a bad day." Cut to 1998. It's three years after the events of Judgement Day, Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems have been eliminated and the future is safe (despite what the other three films say). Sarah Connor and her son John are living a peaceful life in Guatamala...when suddenly a T-800 (Schwarzenegger model) appears and shoots John, killing him. Guess there were some left-over T's hanging around. Well, if the other three movies weren't irrelevant before, they certainly are at this point.

Cut forward and a new terminator shows up from the future—this is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced soldier, who seeks out Daniella Ramos (Natalia Reyes) because...plot. Grace is teleported to protect "Dani" who will become a resistance fighter against the new future threat to humanity—LEGION—which will be a part of an AI defense system that has gone out of control. At the same time, another terminator (Diego Luna) has been sent to kill her, and this terminator, the REV-9, is a hybrid construct made of a liquid metal metal body supported by cyber-endoskeleton, allowing it to separate and attack from two fronts. Not sure why they didn't start out with those, instead of with the T2 T-1000's.

The REV manages to wipe out Dani's family (as is the norm for terminator movies, it seems), oozing himself into the form of Dani's father in order to invade her work-place in Mexico City, where the security must be a little lax. Why? Because Grace manages to get there, too—NO METAL DETECTORS✅—to stop the evil cyborg from taking the kid out and making it a 30 minute movie.  Just one more reason to hate terminators.

Grace and Dani escape from the Rev and there ensues a chase across one of Mexico's more empty highways where enough mayhem happens that you'd think there'd be some sort of traffic-jam that would halt travel for miles. I mean, that's how it usually happens. But, instead, there are long expanses of open asphalt for there to be a lot of kineticism with relatively little impedance to momentum or contained property damage.

And, just when things look bad for our heroes, they unleash the deus ex machina, with the exception that she's not a machine, it's Sarah Connor—who's about as anti-machine as one could get—bad-assing her way out of an Land Rover and packing a lot of heavy heat. Ratta-tatta-BOOM. Bye-bye, terminator. Hasta la vista, ba-bies.

Ratta

Tatta

Uh-huh...

How the hell does Sarah Connor show up just in the nick of time-travel? Well, since the death of her son and the inevitable nervous breakdown (I assume if we want to inject some reality into this movie), Sarah has been a one-woman terminator-terminator, tracking down T's that have been teleported in the interim (although with John dead one wonders...why?), directed by mysterious text messages with the coordinates of each arrival and a haunting signature—"For John".

In their brief down-time (while the Rev repairs itself—and a brief aside here, how do they expect to kill them?), Grace and Sarah compare futures—between the deposed Skynet and the up-coming LEGION—and Grace does some finagling with Sarah's text messages, tracing them to a location in Laredo, Texas. They go off the grid, and hop a freight-train carrying a large number of immigre's crossing the border to Laredo to the source of the texts.

There, they find Carl (played by Schwarzenegger), who is a drapery and interior specialist with a wife and son and a whole lot of of weaponry stashed in the shed. Carl turns out to be the T-800 who killed John Connor.

Let's take a moment to look at some distracting pictures while you ponder that concept.

Still with us? Okay. Carl's a terminator. He's also kinda crusty-looking, losing his hair, has a gray beard and a bit of a gut. Bear in mind, he's a robot, kids. Is the T-800 artificially aging him/itself to fit in and to not draw suspicion (he's Schwarzenegger, so, of course, he's always going to draw suspicion). Then, why is he out in the public as an interior designer? Does his wife wonder about his lack of expression and modulated emotional range—not to mention the occasional clanking, grinding sounds he makes? Does this make any sense whatsoever, except as comic relief?

I guess Cameron insisted Schwarzenegger be in this, but...wow...there's a lot of lame explanations piling up to explain his presence, and a serious lack of owning up to his appearance. Replacing the real guy with a CGI replica would have been more expensive—although one is used in the earlier sequence—but it might have spared a lot of stupidity that would need to be explained away or, as this movie does, just ignores.

And for me, this is where Terminator: Dark Fate goes completely off the metal rails on multiple levels. We are expected to believe that the well-armed Sarah Connor would work alongside the very terminator that assassinated her son in the coldest blood without being constantly tempted to direct it to the nearest compactor. We are also expected to believe that one of these future killing machines would be capable of developing a conscience—don't talk to me about T2, as that model was programmed to PROTECT John Connor. On top of the issues of a terminator leading a quiet life of retirement after completing its mission, these issues make the story just too difficult to digest. 

Add to this, Tim Miller's directing style. One would think, after his work on Deadpool, that the man was a natural for action movies. But, the work he did on Deadpool 2 was pretty clunky. Still, one would think that given good material under the auspices of James Cameron, you could expect a bit more expertise. After all, Robert Rodriguez, who is no slouch in the action department, did some good work with Cameron on Alita: Battle Angel. But, Terminator: Dark Fate looks sloppy and slap-dash, especially in comparison to Cameron's films. Cameron is an engineer, as well as a director, and he has a way of putting together set-pieces that are large and operatic, and by that I mean, his presentation is to piece together big moments, setting them up and paying them off in spectacular, memorable fashion. You remember key moments in Cameron's movies because you were prepared for them by the director, that support buttressing the pay-off moments, making them for more satisfying when they occurred. 

The action is bombastic and over-the-top in Terminator: Dark Fate, designed to occur at regular intervals over the course of the movie, but they hammer away with no sense of rhythm and no sense of relationship or place; what should have been an amazing donnybrook in the hold of a transport-plane has you trying to keep track of the characters while they're being thrown around a fairly simple cylindrical structure. The trouble is it's staged, shot and edited in such a way that you don't know who's doing what in what sequence and you lose track of individual characters and what they might be doing in the situation to get out of it. There's no suspense and there's no integration—there's no story-telling, just effects, and ultimately, it's that constant thrumming of consequence without the modulation of character that makes this entry feel less like what Cameron intended—a continuation of his work from T2—and more like the weaker entries in between that he was trying to erase.

There's a terminator-like lesson in there somewhere amidst all the twisted metal and drone-like hammering. Something about repeating history...even if it comes from the future.

Tully (2018)

Fight Club for Mommy's
or
"One Life For Yourself/And One for Your Dreams"

Tully is probably several years too late to rescue all the girls who decided to have babies after seeing Juno. If that first Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman film was a Hallmark Card to the wonders and romance of bringing a child into the world (without consequences), then Tully is the follow-up that dashes cold water on the idea—motherhood is work. Hard work. And when it comes down to it, the one person who will be running the biological mill will be the woman who bore it and will continue bearing it.

When we meet Marlo (Charlize Theron), she is in her last week of pregnancy and "densely populated"—a "natural hug-buffer," as she describes it. It's the third for Marlo and her husband Drew (Ron Livingston), not planned, but welcome, and Marlo is a bit tense about it: she's worried about her other two kids, Sarah (Lia Frankland), very reserved for a child, and Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica), who might be autistic, but the best officials at school can label it as is "quirky." The constant care of new baby might squeeze out attention needed for the old ones.

Marlo used to be in the human resources department for a company that makes protein bars. His job is a bit more vague—"I audit organizational paths"—and is swamped with work; he's barely around with just enough time to do homework with the kids, eat dinner, and pass out after blasting zombies on the game console. her job is to negotiate the school system for Emma and her special-needs child.

An uncomfortable dinner with Marlo's brother (Mark Duplass) oroduces an idea for Marlo in the form of a gift—after their third child, brother bought his wife a "night-nurse," a nanny who comes at night, takes care of the baby and lets the parents get some much needed sleep. Marlo is horrified at at the idea—nobody's going to invade her house and take care of the most vulnerable family member. She's sure it's going to turn badly—like a "Lifetime" movie where her family turns against her and she ends up walking with a cane.

But, once daughter Mia is born, life turns into a steady stream of changing, feeding, pumping, and collapsing that director Reitman collects in a savage edited sequence that should be known as "The Monotony of Motherhood Montage." She's burning out...fast.

She decides to try the night-nanny idea, and, one night, Tully arrives. And she is something. 26, rail-thin, educated and positive, she immediately bonds with baby Mia and, after some initial reluctance ("She's...weird") with Marlo. "I'm here to take care of you," says Tully, Marlo's confused: "I thought you were going to take care of the baby." "You're the baby," counters Tully.

Tully's a whiz—so much energy ("You're like Saudi Arabia," says Marlo. "You have an energy surplus."). In the morning, the house is spotlessly clean. a couple days later, cupcakes are made for Jonah's class.

And there are the late-night talks. While Marlo talks about what she's lost, Tully re-inforces what she has—a family, great kids, no matter how hectic—her life is good. Tully, so young, gives Marlo some much-needed perspective in the whirling monotony. And things are fine—until Tully come sin one night and wants to give Marlo a night out...and announces that she has to leave. This devastates Marlo. "I'm just here to bridge a gap," Tully explains. "It's time to move on."

Tully is a bit of a wonder and a welcome return to Reitman's gifts as a director, taking Cody's scenario and making it relatable and just a bit foreign (and Theron's fearless, shame-less performance is another in her impressive ability to fling off her glamour-puss image for the sake of the role). It is a much-needed antidote to the beatific view of Motherhood as something saintly and more down to Earth in showing just how tough a job it is to be the life-support system to an infant that, frankly, can't do anything for itself without the slavishly unwavering care and maintenance imparted by the parent, in a complete 24 hour cycle. A friend summed it up perfectly—"Having kids is the most miraculous thing...that ever sucked."

That suckage makes up a big part of Tully and the extreme mental and physical demands—the survival of which is its own life-miracle—form the spine of the thing. That it tackles the subject clear-eyed, if kaleidoscopically, and delves into the too-often looked-down-upon subject of post-partum depression, makes it a valuable little manual on children and inner-children and the care of both. If sometimes the narrative logic veers off-kilter a bit once or twice (which will elicit some post-showing kvetching, I'm sure), that's okay; like child-raising, The Big Picture is more important than the occasional lapse, and Tully keeps nurturing the more one thinks about it.