Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

[Enrico_sw]

On 12/9/2019 at 9:28 PM, Michael* said:

It's no secret that each of the four follow-ups left a lot to be desired, but they were never going to be met with anything beyond tepid enthusiasm. T2 as an action movie and as a conclusion was something approaching perfect, and I have a very hard time imagining any potential third story, let alone a sixth, that wouldn't have seemed superfluous and hollow by comparison.

 

That's a good point. I agree with it.

 

On 12/9/2019 at 9:28 PM, Michael* said:

In the case of this particular franchise, I don't even think it's an issue of fatigue. The built-in audience isn't there any more because longstanding fans of the original films have failed to pass down their love of the series to the next generation.

 

I don't think it's a question of generation. Many people who didn't see these movies (T1 and T2)  when they were released (including me - I watched them in the 2000s) enjoyed them anyway.

[jkjk]

What should be learned from this franchise is fairly simple (to me anyway): don't keep making the same movie over and over.

 

Generally, successful franchises work because of variety.

[Michael*]

On 12/11/2019 at 9:46 PM, Enrico_sw said:

I don't think it's a question of generation. Many people who didn't see these movies (T1 and T2)  when they were released (including me - I watched them in the 2000s) enjoyed them anyway.

 

Not so much in the sense that one couldn't watch T1 or T2 today and still enjoy them, I just can't help picturing how the series must look to people in, say, their early twenties. Audiences have been saying "no thank you" to new Terminator films for longer than they've been alive, and there's no ongoing storyline to follow at this point, with each installment basically rewriting everything to fit the latest attempt at cashing in on the original concept.

 

The studios are using old ideas to chase a new audience, but what possible investment could that audience have in the continuation of the franchise.

[Michael*]

On 12/11/2019 at 10:05 PM, jkjk said:

What should be learned from this franchise is fairly simple (to me anyway): don't keep making the same movie over and over.

 

Generally, successful franchises work because of variety.

 

Of all the Terminator follow-ups, I would say Salvation was probably the only one that offered something a little different, although that turned out to be a failure of execution too of course. Christian Bale's verbal attack on the lighting guy aside, I'm struggling to recall a thing about it.

 

Even broadly speaking, I really can't think of many direct sequels that are genuinely innovative or take the original storyline in a fresh or risky direction. Aliens and Empire Strikes Back are perhaps two of the few examples, then again, look what happens online when someone dares try something different with those franchises now.

[jkjk]

3 hours ago, Michael* said:

Aliens and Empire Strikes Back are perhaps two of the few examples, then again, look what happens online when someone dares try something different with those franchises now.

 

True, I hadn't thought about how people react badly when something new is tried.

[Michael*]

8 hours ago, jkjk said:

True, I hadn't thought about how people react badly when something new is tried.

 

Not to say that it's strictly a modern phenomenon and that people didn't boot off about those films at the time. In the case of Empire, they most certainly did, they just didn't have the internet to magnify their gripes out of proportion.

 

Aliens perhaps had a little more in common with T2, essentially a continuation with a twist and on a much bigger scale. But again, as with Terminator, the subsequent sequels have just been endless, increasingly tired retreads of the same plot.

[Enrico_sw]

On 12/13/2019 at 12:46 PM, Michael* said:

Even broadly speaking, I really can't think of many direct sequels that are genuinely innovative or take the original storyline in a fresh or risky direction. Aliens and Empire Strikes Back are perhaps two of the few examples, then again, look what happens online when someone dares try something different with those franchises now.

 

There are many sequels that were good. Aliens and Empire are great examples, but many others too. Here's a non exhaustive list: the Dark Knight,  Kill Bill vol. 2, Indiana Jones and the temple of doom, Harry Potter movies, Mission Impossible series, James Bond series, LOTR series (it's based on epic books, so it helps I guess), the Godfather II, etc. (I could go on for a long list)

 

Making a sequel is not good or bad per se. It depends on how talented the director and the team are.

 

The problem with recent sequels (like Terminator) is that the teams lack creativity, originality, and they bascially forget that characters need complexity (that's why Mary Sues/Gary Stues never work). Then, when their movie fail, they say it's not their fault and they use politics to make up for their lack of talent.

[Enrico_sw]

On 12/11/2019 at 11:05 PM, jkjk said:

What should be learned from this franchise is fairly simple (to me anyway): don't keep making the same movie over and over.

 

Generally, successful franchises work because of variety.

 

 

Variety is one of the key aspects, you're right, but they also have to keep in mind the basics of good story telling: a robust scenario, complex characters and story consistency.

[Enrico_sw]

On 12/13/2019 at 12:46 PM, Michael* said:

Even broadly speaking, I really can't think of many direct sequels that are genuinely innovative or take the original storyline in a fresh or risky direction. Aliens and Empire Strikes Back are perhaps two of the few examples, then again, look what happens online when someone dares try something different with those franchises now.

 

If you talk about The Last Jedi, it's not the "originality" that made peopke angry. They could've made original choices without making key mistakes:

- they should've respected certain tropes (that's the basics - and they broke the tropes, which they didn't need to do). Tropes aren't big constraints, they are just small beacons to remind you that you are in a certain universe.

- the scenario is not consistent (not just with the franchise but within the same story)

- some story arcs are useless (like Rose Tico's mission - which brought nothing to the main story)

- characters aren't well built at all (like Rose Tico, who basically does an adolescence crisis in the movie, or Holdo who doesn't make any logical choice)

- they sacrifice old characters for new ones (like Finn, who is a great character, is demeaned by Rose, or Luke who's a completely different character in the ST - you don't change a charcter this much without credible explanations)

[Enrico_sw]

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is the perfect example of what you shouldn't do with tropes: you can't bring space aliens (and Roswell) in an Indiana Jones movie, that's just an impossible mixture. I'm surprised that nobody saw it coming.

[Enrico_sw]

This Scotsman nailed it, once again.

 

 

[Enrico_sw]

On 12/14/2019 at 12:30 AM, Michael* said:

In the case of Empire, they most certainly did, they just didn't have the internet to magnify their gripes out of proportion.

 

It's true that the Internet can be a bad place, but given what official movie critics have become, the Internet is salutary.

 

Official critics have become shills who basically promote movies from the big studios. Hence, the said studios can't understand their failures, because their shoeshiners told everybody that their movies were perfect.

 

That's why you have talented guys (like the Critical Drinker) that emerges out of the Internet.

[Michael*]

21 hours ago, Enrico_sw said:

There are many sequels that were good. Aliens and Empire are great examples, but many others too. Here's a non exhaustive list: the Dark Knight,  Kill Bill vol. 2, Indiana Jones and the temple of doom, Harry Potter movies, Mission Impossible series, James Bond series, LOTR series (it's based on epic books, so it helps I guess), the Godfather II, etc. (I could go on for a long list)

 

Making a sequel is not good or bad per se. It depends on how talented the director and the team are.

 

The problem with recent sequels (like Terminator) is that the teams lack creativity, originality, and they bascially forget that characters need complexity (that's why Mary Sues/Gary Stues never work). Then, when their movie fail, they say it's not their fault and they use politics to make up for their lack of talent.

 

Yeah, I mean, while there are a lot of high quality sequels out there (the ones you mention are among the very best), I would still consider the vast majority to be direct extensions of their predecessors, always on a bigger scale and sometimes with a little twist or a change of emphasis, but essentially the same plot.

 

Where Terminator falls down is that the core idea of the story is a self-contained thing that begins and ends with a closed-loop time paradox. Unless they show you the future war referenced by T1 and T2 (in fairness Salvation attempts to do exactly that, albeit not very well) there's really nowhere left to go. Which is fine in itself, narratively speaking some things just naturally lend themselves to one or two shot deals. Instead of accepting that however, the filmmakers kept trying to answer questions that nobody asked, recycling the same basic storyline with undeniably diminishing returns.

[Michael*]

21 hours ago, Enrico_sw said:

If you talk about The Last Jedi, it's not the "originality" that made peopke angry. They could've made original choices without making key mistakes:

- they should've respected certain tropes (that's the basics - and they broke the tropes, which they didn't need to do). Tropes aren't big constraints, they are just small beacons to remind you that you are in a certain universe.

- the scenario is not consistent (not just with the franchise but within the same story)

- some story arcs are useless (like Rose Tico's mission - which brought nothing to the main story)

- characters aren't well built at all (like Rose Tico, who basically does an adolescence crisis in the movie, or Holdo who doesn't make any logical choice)

- they sacrifice old characters for new ones (like Finn, who is a great character, is demeaned by Rose, or Luke who's a completely different character in the ST - you don't change a charcter this much without credible explanations)

 

The hardcore would have been just as angry and vocal about Empire had it been released today. The episodic plotting is all over the place, the characters are split up. The climactic battle takes place at the beginning. People reveal force powers they didn't have before. Yoda is a Muppet with a voice like Fozzy Bear. The bad guys win. Darth Vader simply can't be Luke's father. There's no ending. Luke is mutilated, Han is written off. The whole thing's "a betrayal of everything Star Wars stands for" and a massive downer.

 

As to whether Last Jedi could have been executed better or not, well obviously everybody's mileage varies, which is fair enough. There are things in it that objectively, even I wouldn't consider brilliant, but I would still maintain that it's far from the worst writing the series has ever seen. And that's precisely my point, the only difference with regard to fan reaction is that backlash in 1980 would have been confined to angry letters in movie magazines, presumably written in green ink.

Even taking a wider viewpoint, the biggest criticisms of the Lucas prequels could also have been levelled at the original trilogy. They all have unwieldy dialogue and slightly stilted acting straight out of an old Republic serial, seemingly deliberately so. All of which is also conveniently missing from the "Disney ruined Star Wars" narrative, many of the same fans were probably part of the "George Lucas ruined my childhood" brigade too, but now appear to have collective amnesia about despising the prequels just as much.

[Michael*]

On 12/15/2019 at 3:16 PM, Enrico_sw said:

It's true that the Internet can be a bad place, but given what official movie critics have become, the Internet is salutary.

 

Official critics have become shills who basically promote movies from the big studios. Hence, the said studios can't understand their failures, because their shoeshiners told everybody that their movies were perfect.

 

That's why you have talented guys (like the Critical Drinker) that emerges out of the Internet.

 

As divisive as Last Jedi may seem online, we're still talking about a very small percentage of the population. No matter how much hate I see for it on the internet, I don't see it out there in the real world. It's honestly one of the biggest and strangest disconnects I’ve ever seen between opinions online and opinions on the street, and that covers casual fans and hardcore fans.

 

Ghostbusters '16 is probably the only other thing that comes close, everyone online either loved it or hated it, while everyone I know in real life seemed content to simply go "meh, it was alright. Thor had a few funny lines" and move on. Taken on its own merits, it's a thoroughly mediocre film and in no way worth all the fuss.

 

As to online reviewers, YouTube reaction videos and the like, the decent and objective ones can be very hard to find. The vast majority position themselves as having real knowledge of film, when they mainly just cater to and share the opinions of their built-in audiences.

[jkjk]

8 hours ago, Michael* said:

As divisive as Last Jedi may seem online, we're still talking about a very small percentage of the population. No matter how much hate I see for it on the internet, I don't see it out there in the real world.

 

No one in the real world hate movies as much as people hate movies online.  

 

As for audience/user scores on different sites, there have been multiple looks into how easy it is for a small group (or a small number of bots) to significantly move a score up or down.

[Enrico_sw]

9 hours ago, Michael* said:

 

The hardcore would have been just as angry and vocal about Empire had it been released today.

 

Honestly, I'm not sure. Empire stood the test of time. TLJ didn't, it's too divisive and it's too ideologically marked.

 

9 hours ago, Michael* said:

As to whether Last Jedi could have been executed better or not, well obviously everybody's mileage varies, which is fair enough.

 

There are good things in the movie : the visuals are great, the score is not bad, the creativity is pretty decent. Trying to bring more tension/disruption in the movie was a good idea, but they should've done it better (creating a narrative structure is not easy, but there are a couple of rules that you can't avoid). Some characters are good, but mostly the character writing is garbage. It's not easy to make a character likeable, but there's an easy trick: creating empathy. They didn't do that at all.

 

Anyway, you're right, to each their own.

 

9 hours ago, Michael* said:

Even taking a wider viewpoint, the biggest criticisms of the Lucas prequels could also have been levelled at the original trilogy. They all have unwieldy dialogue and slightly stilted acting straight out of an old Republic serial, seemingly deliberately so. All of which is also conveniently missing from the "Disney ruined Star Wars" narrative, many of the same fans were probably part of the "George Lucas ruined my childhood" brigade too, but now appear to have collective amnesia about despising the prequels just as much.

 

I don't remember people bringin the "ruined childhood" argument. Rian Johnson and the media shills brought this arugment, but it's mostly a strawman.

 

The prequels aren't perfect. Far from it. The OT isn't perfect either. Nothing is perfect, but ranking is possible and SW sequels are in the bottom of the pit.

 

Anyway, let's not forget the key element: identity politics is a franchise killer. I don't want to bring politics in this debate, but the studios did, and it's present in many critiques. TLJ got backlash mostly because of it (just read the critiques on RT). Same for Dark Fate. Bringing today's politics in a movie is a sure recipe to spawn both unreasonable lovers/haters. It's a risky bet for studios and they would've known it if there hadn't been shills in the media (it was easy to see it coming).

[Enrico_sw]

10 hours ago, Michael* said:

Where Terminator falls down is that the core idea of the story is a self-contained thing that begins and ends with a closed-loop time paradox. Unless they show you the future war referenced by T1 and T2 (in fairness Salvation attempts to do exactly that, albeit not very well) there's really nowhere left to go. Which is fine in itself, narratively speaking some things just naturally lend themselves to one or two shot deals. Instead of accepting that however, the filmmakers kept trying to answer questions that nobody asked, recycling the same basic storyline with undeniably diminishing returns.

 

Sure, I agree with that.

[Enrico_sw]

1 hour ago, jkjk said:

 

No one in the real world hate movies as much as people hate movies online.  

 

As for audience/user scores on different sites, there have been multiple looks into how easy it is for a small group (or a small number of bots) to significantly move a score up or down.

 

The Internet is a catalyst. People say things that they wouldn't say  in real life, which is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that there is more honesty. It's bad in the sense that people can be disrespectful and they can try to caricture their own viewpoint to make it more visible (because Internet hates nuances)

 

As you say, it magnifies both love/hate (it's on both sides - for TLJ, there were two opposite activist groups)

[Enrico_sw]

10 hours ago, Michael* said:

 

As divisive as Last Jedi may seem online, we're still talking about a very small percentage of the population. No matter how much hate I see for it on the internet, I don't see it out there in the real world. It's honestly one of the biggest and strangest disconnects I’ve ever seen between opinions online and opinions on the street, and that covers casual fans and hardcore fans.

 

People are too shy in real life. People are too caricatural on the internet. The same person can be introvert in real life and unleashed online.

 

10 hours ago, Michael* said:

 

As to online reviewers, YouTube reaction videos and the like, the decent and objective ones can be very hard to find. The vast majority position themselves as having real knowledge of film, when they mainly just cater to and share the opinions of their built-in audiences.

 

True. It's the same for newspapers/media though: they know their audience and they try to cater to their preferences (though there's more and more disconnect between them and even their most faithful readers/viewers)

 

Some youtubers are really talented, not just because of the content of their analyses, but because of their wit/creativity. The Critical Drinker's reviews are good, because he has a dark sarcastic kind of humour (and as a narrator, he built himself a funny/likeable character).