6 Major Ideas ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Copied From Previous ‘Terminator’ Movies
“Terminator: Dark Fate” may try to forget most of the “Terminator” franchise, but that didn’t stop it from borrowing elements from every previous movie
(Major spoilers ahead for “Terminator: Dark Fate”)
“Terminator: Dark Fate” is a strange situation. It’s a franchise movie that wants to pretend most of the franchise didn’t actually happen. It wants to pick up directly from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” and just ignore “Terminator 3,” “Salvation” and “Genisys.”
But for a movie that wants to write off several of its predecessors, it’s interesting that it it seems to so liberally borrow from them. When I watched “Dark Fate” I couldn’t help but notice how much of the film is taken from the previous five movies. So while James Cameron and producer Tim Miller might be trying to make you forget half the franchise, it actually did a much better job of reminding me of those movies.
So let’s get into the nitty gritty. I’m going to largely focus here on the big things, because I’ve only seen the movie once and I’m sure there’s even more stuff I missed or have forgotten. But the big things are enough. Trust me. So let’s take a look at the biggest things that “Terminator: Dark Fate” from each of the other five “Terminator” movies.
“Dark Fate” is really just a rehash of the first movie, with exactly the same plot. In the future an evil AI blows up the world and then fights a protracted war against the human survivors, which it loses. At the end of the war, that AI sends a Terminator back in time to prevent the leader of the resistance from ever becoming the leader of the resistance, and the resistance sends somebody back to fight that Terminator. The whole thing is a closed time loop with a predestination paradox — the resistance leader chooses the person who they remember from the past to try to maintain the continuity.
That would be normal and fine if this were a reboot, but it’s not — “Dark Fate” is a sequel, taking place in the continuity established by the first two movies, and it has Sarah Connor in it. So it’s a little bit odd for it to so specifically rehash the first movie.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day”
The main bit that “Dark Fate” takes from “T2” is that Sarah basically goes through the same relationship arc with the T-800 all over again. She hates him and wants to kill him at the beginning, but then by the end they’re bros. This is a pretty frustrating thing to rehash.
So the bad guy in “Dark Fate” is a Terminator Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna) who has a liquid metal skin over a regular hard metal endoskeleton, which allows it to shapeshift. Back in “Rise of the Machines,” the villainous T-X (Kristanna Loken) also had a liquid metal skin over a hard metal endoskeleton which allowed it to shapeshift. The only difference between the two is that the new Rev-9 can separate the skin from its body and act as two units at once.
We’ve actually got a second major item from “T3.” It and “Dark Fate” both include an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator who teams up with the good guys after murdering John Connor. In “Dark Fate,” it’s a Terminator who killed John in the ’90s after “T2.” In “T3” the Terminator had killed him in 2032 before being captured by the resistance and sent back in time.
“Terminator Salvation”
In “Dark Fate” we have Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a woman from the human resistance in the future who volunteers to become an “augment” — a human who is implanted with Terminator tech. We have, of course, seen this exact thing before, in “Salvation.” Marcus (Sam Worthington), the main character in that movie, is a human who was turned into a Terminator-like thing by Skynet. Both Grace and Marcus are still the same people they were before, just now with machine parts inside them. Which is to say they aren’t computer people who can be controlled by the bad guys or whatever. John Connor in “Genisys” is a similar situation, but he lost his free will and was all nano parts after so it’s really a different thing.
The entire central conceit of “Dark Fate” is more or less lifted directly from “Genisys.” The parallels are so obvious that I was honestly kind of amazed sitting in the theater.
So the best thing about “Genisys” is that it embraces the jumbled continuity of the franchise by running with the idea that every time Skynet sends a Terminator back in time and the human resistance sends somebody back after them it creates an alternate timeline. Skynet would seem to be learning from this endless sequence of time loops, and it rebrands as Genisys and goes online much later than it had in the previous movies.
“Dark Fate,” meanwhile, runs in directly from “T2,” in which Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlong) blew up Cyberdyne HQ and allegedly ended the Skynet threat permanently. But it turns out that Judgment Day happened anyway decades later, thanks to a supposedly different military AI called Legion. Nobody in this movie really gets into the details or even seems to care about the similarities. Everybody’s just like, “Well, that’s unlucky.”
So we don’t know if Legion is just another rebranded version of Skynet. But the similarities are stark. In both movies, “Judgment Day” didn’t happen in 1997, and then decades later an AI with a different name just did the Skynet thing again. It’s hard not to think that Legion is just another iteration of Skynet.
All 6 'Terminator' Movies, Ranked Worst to Best (Photos)
James Cameron’s breakout film “The Terminator” may not have been a hit in theaters, but it was such a cult favorite on home video that it spawned one of the biggest and most lucrative movie franchises in history. With “Terminator: Dark Fate” in theaters, let’s look back at all six feature films in the saga, and see how they stack up against each other.
6. "Terminator Salvation" (2009)
The fourth “Terminator” movie has a great cast -- Christian Bale, Anton Yelchin, Bryce Dallas Howard and Helena Bonham Carter -- and a smart idea, to give all the time-travel a rest and actually set one of these postapocalyptic thrillers after the apocalypse for a change. Unfortunately, director McG is more interested in chaotic action than story, the new revelations about the universe are groan-inducing and Sam Worthington’s forgettable protagonist, a survivor with a secret, takes away valuable screen time.“Terminator Salvation” is the movie fans were waiting for, a film finally set in the future starring John Connor, and it failed to deliver in almost every way.
5. "Terminator Genisys" (2015)
Alan Taylor’s failed attempt to reboot the “Terminator” franchise plays like a whole bunch of fan theories thrown into a blender. Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) goes back in time to rescue Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), only to discover that she teamed up with a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) years ago and is also capable of protecting herself. The timeline is a mess, on purpose, and it’s up to them to fix it. There are some interesting ideas in “Terminator Genisys,” but that only gets the film so far, and only if you’re addicted to the franchise's minutiae. The actual story falls apart quickly, thanks to Courtney and Clarke failing to capture the magic of the original characters, and a plot that’s all set-up for future sequels and very, very little payoff.
4. "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" (2003)
Jonathan Mostow’s entry in the “Terminator” franchise is better than its reputation suggests, following the classic formula in an unexpected way and building up to a gut-punch finale that finally solves the paradox underlying the franchise: if Skynet was only built because Skynet sent a Terminator back in time, then how did Skynet get built in the first place? Nick Stahl takes over as John Connor, Claire Danes plays the woman who will one day become his second-in-command and Arnold Schwarzenegger has to protect them from a new breed of Terminator, the T-X, played with menace and unusual physicality by Kristanna Loken. The action sequences are phenomenal -- the truck chase is one of the highlights of the series -- but the humor falls flat, and the frenetic pace gives little time to connect to the characters. “Terminator 3” is not a bad film, and yet, compared to the first two, it can’t help but look subpar.
3. Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
The latest attempt to reboot the franchise, ignoring all but the first two films, is an absolute winner. Tim Miller (“Deadpool”) takes over, in a story about a new Terminator coming back in time to kill a young woman named Dani (Natalia Reyes), who is protected by a new kind of cyborg (Mackenzie Davis) and Sarah Connor herself (Linda Hamilton). The story hits familiar beats, but the characters are rich and distinct, and the film treats its contemporary backdrop like the sort of sci-fi dystopia that movies like the first “Terminator” warned us about. Fantastic action, memorable characters, surprising humor and impressive relevance. “Terminator: Dark Fate” doesn’t play like a cash-in sequel, or fan fiction, or even a mixed bag. It’s a legitimately great “Terminator” movie.
2. "The Terminator" (1984)
James Cameron’s original film, inspired by the works of Harlan Ellison, plays as much like a horror movie as a sci-fi action flick. Linda Hamilton plays Sarah Connor, a mild-mannered waitress who doesn’t realized she’s been targeted for extermination by a high-tech robot from the future, played by a terrifyingly cold Arnold Schwarzenegger. Only Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a fiercely dedicated soldier from the future, can save her before the Terminator ends her life and prevents her son from saving the future from the tyranny of the machines. Bold, violent, idea-driven filmmaking, with practical effects so impressive you’d hardly know it was a low-budget production. Everything about “The Terminator” feels epic. Or at least it did, until the sequel came along and redefined what “epic” could be.
1. "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1990)
Cameron’s sequel raised the bar for action filmmaking and visual effects, revisiting much of the original’s plot (even some of the dialogue is the same) but pushing it as far as moviemaking could go. Sarah Connor spent years training her son, John (Eddie Furlong), to be the hero of the revolution, before she was institutionalized for her paranoid fantasies and paramilitary acts of terrorism. But when John is targeted by a new liquid metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick), and rescued by a heroic older model (Schwarzenegger), John realizes she was right all along. Together they try to change the future, kill an unkillable machine and make seemingly impossible images and action sequences look plausible. They succeeded. “Terminator 2” may be a bit of a retread, but it’s a singular, ambitious entity; not just one of the best sci-fi movies, but also one of the best action movies, and one of the greatest spectacles in movie history.
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Where does “Terminator: Dark Fate” stand among its predecessors?
James Cameron’s breakout film “The Terminator” may not have been a hit in theaters, but it was such a cult favorite on home video that it spawned one of the biggest and most lucrative movie franchises in history. With “Terminator: Dark Fate” in theaters, let’s look back at all six feature films in the saga, and see how they stack up against each other.