Haha, I knowwww. God, I’m really upset about what it could have been, when so many ingredients for true greatness were already there. It absolutely was a queen/knight dynamic, like, literally it was soldier/general but imbued with a whole lot of extra emotion on both sides that just…weren’t maternal! At all???
But really, like…these movies are about the resilience of humans, right, grounding that love and concern for everyone in the love between individuals specifically. Kyle and Sarah and the John they both carried in their minds, a commander and an unborn son, then John and Sarah and the 101 even, so like, you need that love in TDF too. And faux-parental bonds are difficult to create! Especially over the length of a few days. T2 used the whole movie to build it up with a literal child, lonely and with no father at all and who had conflicted feelings about his seemingly unreliable mother, now able to trust entirely in this “adult”.
Was TDF trying to tell us that when the end of the movie happened, that the younger person, Dani, had MATERNAL feelings for Grace? That’s what we were supposed to buy to make it more emotionally effective? No! In what world would that work? And surely not the reverse, that this adult–a new adult, but an adult to be sure, with a nice father two days ago was like, Grace is my mom? Please. So then, at most, Dani is grieving for Grace as her protector, someone she realizes she sent back and who selflessly died for her. Nice, but hardly comparable to what they did in the first two.
Apparently the excuse is that they didn’t want the audience to guess that Grace knew Dani before? But like…why the hell not? Why on earth would they actually want to keep that a surprise, how did it add anything at all to the movie? Oh, you thought this was just an ordinary soldier, but it was…a soldier she knew. Wowww. Because nobody’s buying “oh, it was actually her daughter”, neither acted like that at any other point in the movie, including after, lmao. *sigh*
Instead, they could have leaned into it and had these two women, falling in love in different timelines and loops again and again, both fighting to shift time and history the smallest bit a time to keep the other safe. They coulda done that!!! They could have made the end that much stronger, that it was Dani’s love Grace dying, and gone to the next step from T1 and T2 in the way that this was BOTH of them shifting time again and again, knowing the results and working to get to an apocalypse-free timeline. It would have made for a much tighter, more focused movie that justified returning to the franchise after all these years.