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Nov. 17th, 2019 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretTerminator: Dark Fate
(As usual, there will be spoilers here. Because trying to talk about movies without talking about what happens in them is silly, and because I'm an asshole.)
I... really enjoyed that movie!
Let me tell you how I wanted to read the movie, and why I think my reading is successful except for one line at the end, and how maybe we can make my reading work in spite of that one line.
The movie opens with John being killed by a Terminator in front of Sarah, right? And as soon as that happens I start thinking about how it's titled "Dark Fate" and what that means, particularly in reference to the last movie (now, semi-retconned out of existence) being called Genisys. Genisys was a nonsensical name but it seemed to be trying to tie the movie as hard as possible to the strain of messianism in the first movie. Sarah as Mary intended to give birth to the savior who will save mankind from the machines. But fate and fatalism are not generally characteristic of either Christology or Meshichism. Dark Fate as a title, and the execution of the supposed Messianic figure in the opening shot, seems to be opening us up to a take on the Terminator franchise as Greek tragedy.
It is not the tragedy of a royal house doomed to fall because of the personal failings of one ambitious leader. Dark Fate as a movie seems to see the trajectory of the Terminator franchise as being the doom of mankind because of the personal failings of the entire human race. In an expository moment, Arnold!Terminator quips that even if the team succeeds in destroying Luna!Terminator, he still calculates a thirty percent probability of humanity descending into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and this seems to me to be the first half of the basic philosophical thesis of the movie.
The other half of the thesis, though, is the motion of individuals against the storm. There's a number of incidental moments that the movie didn't need to show, but that it repeatedly does anyway, of background characters stepping up to do the decent thing. When Grace falls from a bridge upon arriving in the Present, a couple of random punks help her up and try to get her medical attention. When Grace robs a pharmacy to get life-saving medicine, the pharmacist overcomes his fear and his anger and helps carry her back to her car. When Dani and her team climb a freight train heading toward the US border, others give them a hand lifting them onto the top of the freight car. Again and again, people chose to help other people, not because they are part of some great plot to save the world, but because helping other people is the basic mission of humanity.
These tensions echo down from the primary quartet: Sarah, Dani, Grace, and "Carl". Sarah is fighting for the memory of John, but she is just as importantly fighting because she was once in the position Dani is in now, and she wants to do Dani a basic kindness as the only person in the world who understands what it's like. Grace will sacrifice her own body again and again to repay the help that has put here where she is now. And where does it put them all? In one of the linchpin setpieces of the film, it puts them in a US immigration detention center, the most vulnerable in a population of the most vulnerable, simply because they were seeking a way to survive a bad situation. Humans are great, humanity is terrible, and the tragedy of the movie will happen if humanity wins out over humans.
The big 'twist' in a movie that is just about as dead ahead straightforward as an action movie can be is that Sarah Connor is wrong about Dani. She's not to become Mother Mary, she is to become Jesus Risen (except not). It was a twist that was obvious to me from even before Sarah drops her Mother Mary line, because from the moment John was shot it seemed to me we had to be in a new paradigm altogether (There are other metatheatric reasons why it was obvious. You can't make a woke movie in 2019 about a woman who is a mere incubator for the messiah). But Dani is not Messiah John Connor, the one man who will save the world from the machines. In the speech we see future!Dani give to her soldiers, she preaches teamwork. She stops the infighting among survivors and turns their desperation against the Legion instead of against each other. Dani might be the leader of the movement, but her survival does not need to be essential the way John's is. Someone else can step up in her place if need be. Humans are great.
But there's one line... before Arnold!Terminator sacrifices himself to ensure Luna!Terminator dies, he declares "For John!". And it's awfully hard not to read that as a reaffirmation of John Connor's narrative function as the Savior of Mankind, a return to the Christian themes that Dark Fate has otherwise been trying to reject.
So that's funky. But I think we can save it because this version of Arnold!Terminator is a remnant of a previous timeline, sent by Skynet before Sarah Connor and crew eliminated Skynet from the timeline in T2. So the Connor soteriology has been wiped out but Arnold!Terminator still has a memory of it, and Sarah Connor is fighting to reject it. This feels a little like I'm reading against the express intent of the movie, which still sort of wants John and Dani to have individual significance as saviors of the future, but I don't care.
Also, it's great how this movie writes female characters. In spite of rejecting Dani as the Mother of Messiah, there is something maternal about Future!Dani, and (and to a lesser extent Present!Dani)... except that Future!Dani is presenting her maternal elements as leadership tools over her soldiers. This might sit awkwardly and regressive in its approach to gender stereotypes, except it doesn't because Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor presents an alternative dimension of motherhood that by contrast affords Dani's motherhood a needed depth and complexity. (Meanwhile, in immigration detention Grace is tied to a gurney and scanned with invasive probes that reveal her technologically augmented state... when she regains power over the situation, she tells them that she never gave them permission to study her private internal organs... a line with all sorts of resonances about female bodily autonomy and motherhood.)
As to Dark Fate as action movie, I thought it worked well... all the big set pieces were big enough to suit a Terminator movie, especially the chase sequence in the sky, which was luminous and tense on the big screen. The plot kept moving, not bogging down for exposition more than once or twice, and the expository scenes had enough humor and drama to keep them moving. And all of the principals were convincing both in their power and skill, and in their physical limitations. A Terminator movie, as I've ranted tosanguinity a time or two about, is dependent more than any other visual effect on the villain Terminator being undestroyable, taking bullets and continuing to move forward without any effect. Dark Fate did an amazing job of visualizing that, and of visualizing in contrast both the human and augmented heroes as having both strengths and weaknesses.
(As usual, there will be spoilers here. Because trying to talk about movies without talking about what happens in them is silly, and because I'm an asshole.)
I... really enjoyed that movie!
Let me tell you how I wanted to read the movie, and why I think my reading is successful except for one line at the end, and how maybe we can make my reading work in spite of that one line.
The movie opens with John being killed by a Terminator in front of Sarah, right? And as soon as that happens I start thinking about how it's titled "Dark Fate" and what that means, particularly in reference to the last movie (now, semi-retconned out of existence) being called Genisys. Genisys was a nonsensical name but it seemed to be trying to tie the movie as hard as possible to the strain of messianism in the first movie. Sarah as Mary intended to give birth to the savior who will save mankind from the machines. But fate and fatalism are not generally characteristic of either Christology or Meshichism. Dark Fate as a title, and the execution of the supposed Messianic figure in the opening shot, seems to be opening us up to a take on the Terminator franchise as Greek tragedy.
It is not the tragedy of a royal house doomed to fall because of the personal failings of one ambitious leader. Dark Fate as a movie seems to see the trajectory of the Terminator franchise as being the doom of mankind because of the personal failings of the entire human race. In an expository moment, Arnold!Terminator quips that even if the team succeeds in destroying Luna!Terminator, he still calculates a thirty percent probability of humanity descending into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and this seems to me to be the first half of the basic philosophical thesis of the movie.
The other half of the thesis, though, is the motion of individuals against the storm. There's a number of incidental moments that the movie didn't need to show, but that it repeatedly does anyway, of background characters stepping up to do the decent thing. When Grace falls from a bridge upon arriving in the Present, a couple of random punks help her up and try to get her medical attention. When Grace robs a pharmacy to get life-saving medicine, the pharmacist overcomes his fear and his anger and helps carry her back to her car. When Dani and her team climb a freight train heading toward the US border, others give them a hand lifting them onto the top of the freight car. Again and again, people chose to help other people, not because they are part of some great plot to save the world, but because helping other people is the basic mission of humanity.
These tensions echo down from the primary quartet: Sarah, Dani, Grace, and "Carl". Sarah is fighting for the memory of John, but she is just as importantly fighting because she was once in the position Dani is in now, and she wants to do Dani a basic kindness as the only person in the world who understands what it's like. Grace will sacrifice her own body again and again to repay the help that has put here where she is now. And where does it put them all? In one of the linchpin setpieces of the film, it puts them in a US immigration detention center, the most vulnerable in a population of the most vulnerable, simply because they were seeking a way to survive a bad situation. Humans are great, humanity is terrible, and the tragedy of the movie will happen if humanity wins out over humans.
The big 'twist' in a movie that is just about as dead ahead straightforward as an action movie can be is that Sarah Connor is wrong about Dani. She's not to become Mother Mary, she is to become Jesus Risen (except not). It was a twist that was obvious to me from even before Sarah drops her Mother Mary line, because from the moment John was shot it seemed to me we had to be in a new paradigm altogether (There are other metatheatric reasons why it was obvious. You can't make a woke movie in 2019 about a woman who is a mere incubator for the messiah). But Dani is not Messiah John Connor, the one man who will save the world from the machines. In the speech we see future!Dani give to her soldiers, she preaches teamwork. She stops the infighting among survivors and turns their desperation against the Legion instead of against each other. Dani might be the leader of the movement, but her survival does not need to be essential the way John's is. Someone else can step up in her place if need be. Humans are great.
But there's one line... before Arnold!Terminator sacrifices himself to ensure Luna!Terminator dies, he declares "For John!". And it's awfully hard not to read that as a reaffirmation of John Connor's narrative function as the Savior of Mankind, a return to the Christian themes that Dark Fate has otherwise been trying to reject.
So that's funky. But I think we can save it because this version of Arnold!Terminator is a remnant of a previous timeline, sent by Skynet before Sarah Connor and crew eliminated Skynet from the timeline in T2. So the Connor soteriology has been wiped out but Arnold!Terminator still has a memory of it, and Sarah Connor is fighting to reject it. This feels a little like I'm reading against the express intent of the movie, which still sort of wants John and Dani to have individual significance as saviors of the future, but I don't care.
Also, it's great how this movie writes female characters. In spite of rejecting Dani as the Mother of Messiah, there is something maternal about Future!Dani, and (and to a lesser extent Present!Dani)... except that Future!Dani is presenting her maternal elements as leadership tools over her soldiers. This might sit awkwardly and regressive in its approach to gender stereotypes, except it doesn't because Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor presents an alternative dimension of motherhood that by contrast affords Dani's motherhood a needed depth and complexity. (Meanwhile, in immigration detention Grace is tied to a gurney and scanned with invasive probes that reveal her technologically augmented state... when she regains power over the situation, she tells them that she never gave them permission to study her private internal organs... a line with all sorts of resonances about female bodily autonomy and motherhood.)
As to Dark Fate as action movie, I thought it worked well... all the big set pieces were big enough to suit a Terminator movie, especially the chase sequence in the sky, which was luminous and tense on the big screen. The plot kept moving, not bogging down for exposition more than once or twice, and the expository scenes had enough humor and drama to keep them moving. And all of the principals were convincing both in their power and skill, and in their physical limitations. A Terminator movie, as I've ranted to
sanguinity a time or two about, is dependent more than any other visual effect on the villain Terminator being undestroyable, taking bullets and continuing to move forward without any effect. Dark Fate did an amazing job of visualizing that, and of visualizing in contrast both the human and augmented heroes as having both strengths and weaknesses.