I asked my Friend what movie she was most excited about next and she said this one, so I told her to wait a week and a half and I’d see it with her. She is the only person I know who accidentally watched every Terminator movie, including “the weird one with Claire Danes,” as well as the young Sarah Connor television show, so I knew this was doing her a solid. Other Friend came because he’s seen Mackenzie Davis of Tully and Bladerunner 2020 fame in some obscure television show and wanted to share the love. We’ve all felt that the trailer for this film has gone from being kind of impenetrable with the quiet, slow cover song to the overshare version that shows the main villain killed in a variety of different ways, including gun to the head on the loading dock of an open military plane and chopped in half several ways by a spinning chain.
The trailer does, in fact, give away every significant action sequence in the film, which is not to say they are any less badass when seen for the thirtieth time with linking dialogue scenes, it just means that their stakes are that much lower. There are a few gems like the deadpan humor of the former governor of California. For a film that lost its studio 100 million dollars, it feels like it has a pretty good grasp of its own ridiculousness. When the enhanced human Grace hacks Sarah Connor’s phone to figure out the origin of a series of mysterious texts, she responds to questions of process by saying she’s doing, “Future Shit.” Sarah Connor’s rough-and-tumble technophobic paranoia is undermined by a gag involving potato chips, which she continues to eat–Oceans 11 style–even while escaping on an illegal immigrant train headed for the US-Mexican border.
Which, by the way, is at the crux of my (and I think, generally everyone’s) confusion with the tone of the film and its intended audience. It’s unclear to me who this film was marketed for: all those die-hard Terminator fans who liked the blown up cars and robot apocalypse but wished there had been more female voices in the narrative? or the fans of Mackenzie Davis who had yet to see a film where she’d battle cops while naked? the Spanish-speaking audience who wanted the film to mostly follow the shape of the first film in the series, but maybe take place in Mexico City (Wolverine-style)? It definitely feels like the creators of this film had their sights set on an update, a critique that engages with the source material. And it’s clear that some of early the risks they took, which were dramatic, paid off. It’s just not clear to me why we’re so insistent on seeing the same Terminator stories that recycle similar time travel plots concerning the same characters–but when asked by my Friend while we were driving home who they would be about, I’m sort of hard-pressed to answer. It feels like the series has always been buttressed by the charisma of its lead actors. Maybe it’s time to move on instead of making incremental changes to plot and story.
