I’m a fan of the original 1984 Terminator, the movie that started the franchise. It was unique in being the first (although the late science fiction author Harlan Jay Ellison would beg to differ, as he did in all things). It was raw, efficient, relentless, violent, and bloody, perfect for 1984. I watched the second movie, Judgement Day, when it was first  released. While it was more refined than the first, especially with regards to special effects, it lacked the sharp edge of originality of the first movie. None-the-less I was entertained and came away with good feelings about the movie.

Everything afterwards, not so much.

I’ve spent the past few days watching, in bits and pieces, Terminator: Dark Fate. The creators of this film might claim it’s the true heir to the second movie Judgement Day, but it’s not. There have been too many releases between Judgement and Fate to ignore. Furthermore consider that Judgement Day was released in 1991 and Dark Fate was released in 2019, a nearly 30 year span. Whatever good feelings I might have had towards the franchise have long since been washed away by the various releases (which I skipped) as well as the march of time. The two key actors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, are 74 and 65 respectively. I’m not an ageist, but come on. Those two aren’t going to hoof it across the landscape like they did 30 years ago. I’m in between those two age-wise, and I can assure you I’m not hoofing it across the landscape like I did 30 years ago. If anything I’m a smidgen cyborg-ish/Terminator-ish, what with my having had both of my knees replaced with beautifully machined surgical metals and plastic. But I digress…

I’m suffering from Terminator Fatigue. There’s only so many ways you can tell this limited story with a different cast in each movie before you decide to get off the Terminator Rollercoaster. The exit point for me was Rise of the Machines and Kristanna Loken’s inflata-boobs. I would have been more impressed if the female terminator had changed her entire appearance, not just her bust size (the terminator got the boob idea looking at a female model’s photo on a billboard). The movie is one silly contrived situation after another, the end of which I can no longer remember. That movie should have killed the franchise right then and there, but it didn’t. Instead they’ve shoveled out one stinker after another until the franchise has evolved into a decaying mechanical zombie.

In my opinion the absolute biggest flaw with the Terminator franchise is how time travel is used as a story crutch. Ignoring the fact that there is no time travel (really), using time travel to send a Terminator far back in time to kill the mother of the human who leads the resistance in the future is a shaky premise at best. Instead, look at the movie Edge of Tomorrow, where the alien antagonist uses time travel to travel back to the last battle it lost with humans, making corrections in how it fought until it wins, then moves on to the next battle. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until all of Europe is overrun and the aliens are poised to invade England. This is how Terminator should have handled losing battles, by going back a very short distance in time to each battle with corrections until it wins, repeating until the war itself is won. Unfortunately for the original cast if this particular plot had been followed then there’d be nothing like what we saw in all those movies. Which, come to think of it, would have been a Good Thing.