Tag: terminator dark fate

Oh, hmm, this one?

I don’t see any potato chips, that’s a phone, isn’t it? One of those old landline ones? I think it might have been before Sarah returned with the ice? So like this moment of peace between just her and Grace without terminators or pharmacists or Sarah or even Grace’s own very focused active energy when she’s awake. Once the ice had melted and Grace had cooled down, Dani was already locked out.

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.

I know! Well, I’d also like to see the full scene from the detention center where Dani grabs her face and then whatever happened on the pickup ride where Grace put her hand on Dani’s shoulder and she woke up, so near?? I want those!

But yes, also, they had Dani administering to Grace like THAT five minutes after they met and…they cut it? 

That degaying pass really pisses me off. :<

Honestlyyyy! I’ve been making my friend watch T1 and T2 because she was thinking about watching TDF and I was like, uh, you need context, and again, all I can see are the parallels, the intentional ones! How Grace and Kyle arrive, the cops stumble on them, the hidden shotgun, and that’s just the beginning.

And okay, even T2 has some parallels/homages to T1, in the effectively father-son bond between that protector and John and one could reasonably say TDF is a mix of T1 and T2, where you have Dani as a resourceful but very normal young woman suddenly pulled into this world, i.e., Sarah from T1, but then also a future leader like John from T2, so the protector could go either way, a love interest or family member kinda figure, but then when you bring Sarah back into it, immediately the context does indeed jump back to her sleeping against Kyle? There’s just no other interpretation, at this point she isn’t aware of the “you raised me” exposition, so all she’s seeing are two people–Grace being a person like Kyle and not a cyborg–of similar age in the same situation as her and Kyle, she’s not like, this truly reminds me of the 101 and my son. :))

And to actually shoot that scene to highlight it, I…I tend to be pretty conservative in these assumptions, so I don’t know if a romance itself was ever on the cards, but real, strong subtext surely was. I mean, to have to go through and remove and re-edit scenes from a trailer because they were too shippy? That signals knowledge and intent to tone it down, it couldn’t have been accidental because then they’d have been like, whatever. 

I wonder if we’ll ever see all those original scenes… 

Ugh, right?? It’s such a story built to be a romance, it truly is! Like, it’s how the whole arc worked best, it’s just what you naturally expect it to be and the impression you take away from it, these two standing against time because of love, and like, this isn’t freaking Dark, we’re not reading maternal vibes into it?? There’s loyalty and devotion but not motherhood? And especially because of the Kyle/Sarah parallels, we see it as a romance. It’s just meant to be, like, if homophobia weren’t a thing, it WOULD be. That’s all there is to it.

Awww, she does! I love when actresses support even subtext ships. Thanks for letting me know, I wouldn’t have checked until Thursday, lol.