Richard and “Terminator: Dark Fate” director Tim Miller discuss working with icons Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger and bringing the franchise back to life.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
There may be six “Terminator” films but James Cameron would like you to ignore half of them. Cameron, who returns to the producer’s chair after a twenty-eight year gap from the franchise, designed the new movie, “Terminator: Dark Fate,” to be a direct sequel to 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” So, forget about “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” Christian Bale’s meltdown on the set of “Terminator: Salvation,” and “Terminator: Genisys,” they have been relegated to the delete bin.
The time-shifting reset, directed by “Deadpool’s” Tim Miller, dials the way-back machine to the end of “T2.” The tough-as-tacks Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), her teenage son John (a mix of actor Jude Collie and CGI to recreate original actor Edward Furlong) and a T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) have saved the world from a take-over by the artificial neural network Skynet.
Cut to 2022 and a familiar set-up. Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) and brother Diego (Diego Boneta) are living quiet, unassuming lives in Mexico City when—wait for it—a shape-shifting Rev-9 “My whole body’s a weapon” Terminator (Gabriel Luna), is sent from the future to eliminate Dani before she can become a threat to the Legion Machine Network. “Two days ago, I had this nice, simple life,” Dani says. “And now it’s a nightmare.”
Her survival depends on two warriors, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a time-traveling augmented soldier and Connors, the original Terminator butt kicker. “I hunt Terminators and I drink till I pass out,” she says.
Along the way they meet Carl (a salt-and-pepper Schwarzenegger), a retired T-800 “Model 101” who left Skynet behind to integrate into human society. He found his humanity, married a human, raised a stepchild but is brought back into the fold to battle against the new Terminator, even though he is a Commodore 64 compared to Rev-9’s quantum computer.
“Terminator: Dark Fate” feels familiar. The basic plot holds true to the classic original. The time travel, the protective force, the relentless evil, are time-honoured tropes that date back thirty-five years. Grace is even a cinematic echo of Kyle Reese and there are not one but two riffs on the famous, “I’ll be back” line. Director Miller and a long list of screenwriters including David S. Goyer and Billy Ray keep things current with references to undocumented immigration between Mexico and the United States and diverse and gender-blind casting but by the time the end credits roll it feels like we’ve been down this road before.
The main difference between then and now are the special effects. The original “Terminator” was a low-budget beauty that focused on story telling over wild effects. “T2” was more advanced but now our eye is accustomed to the kind of superhero CGI that allows Rev-9 to liquify and reconstitute. It doesn’t shock or charm, it just is. The Terminator characters must have remarkable capabilities but his gooey reformations don’t have the impact of the cool T-1000 liquid metal sequences.
Miller provides the kind of big set pieces we expect, wild car chases, and helicopter stunts but the interesting stuff lies in the characters. It’s fun to have Hamilton back as Connors, equal parts badass and wise ass. She’s snaps off one liners with ease and re-establishes her place as an action icon one bazooka shot at a time.
Schwarzenegger returns with a new twist on his famous cyborg character. He still weighs four hundred pounds and can punch his way through metal doors, but he’s discovered his human side. He gets a few laughs, provides some old-school heavy metal action but there’s a twinkle in his LED eye that hasn’t been there in past Terminator movies.
By not straying far from the roots of the franchise “Terminator: Dark Fate” is the best “Terminator” movie since “T2” but feels more like a chance at setting up a new batch of sequels than a rebirth of the story.
Richard interviews “Terminator: Dark Fate” director Tim Miller. They talk about Miller’s love of the Terminator franchise, what it was like having Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger on board for this sequel.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
More than two decades have passed since Sarah Connor prevented Judgment Day, changed the future, and re-wrote the fate of the human race. Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) is living a simple life in Mexico City with her brother (Diego Boneta) and father when a highly advanced and deadly new Terminator – a Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna) – travels back through time to hunt and kill her. Dani’s survival depends on her joining forces with two warriors: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an enhanced super-soldier from the future, and a battle-hardened Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). As the Rev-9 ruthlessly destroys everything and everyone in its path on the hunt for Dani, the three are led to a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from Sarah’s past that may be their last best hope.
At the beginning of the “Wonders of the Sea 3D,” a new documentary featuring underwater adventurers Jean Michel Cousteau and his children Celine and Fabien, narrator Arnold Schwarzenegger says the reason he signed on was because this “is an important film with an important message.” The message is actually twofold. First he cites the aesthetic, calling the doc a “declaration of love for the beauty of the ocean.” Later the movie’s secondary, but more serious message of how the future of humanity is inextricably connected to the health of the ocean.
From Fiji to the Bahamas, with a pit stop in California “Wonders of the Sea 3D” takes us to the final frontier. More people have walked on the moon than on the bottom of the deep ocean, and indeed many of the creatures we are introduced to look ripped from the pages of a sci fi comic book. From the familiar—like the octopus; “We may never get closer to alien intelligence than this,” says Jean Michel.—to more exotic undersea life like the bizarre Christmas Tree Worm and a flatworm that looks like it could be a multi-coloured scarf in a Fashion Week runway show, the images are striking and surreal. There’s even a fish who looks like Steve Buscemi.
The photography is beautiful, the 3D effective but as eye-catching as these images are they rarely provide a sense of scale. Life on the documented reefs reveals “nature’s masterful design” but it’s hard to tell if these creatures are ten feet tall or microscopic.
“Wonders of the Sea 3D” is aimed at kids whose imaginations may be sparked by the unusual watery beasts on display. The narration, courtesy of the Cousteau family and Schwarzenegger, is simple and direct, often with the feel of an educational classroom film. The narration may not be nearly as compelling as the images but the messages are memorable. “The ocean survives without us. We don’t survive without the ocean.”
Where would Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career be without these three simple words: “I’ll be back”? Taken from The Terminator it’s as simple a phrase as was ever uttered in the movies, but became a pop culture catchphrase, and came to define Arnold’s career on screen and off.
He’s used the line—or a slight variation on it—in three other Terminator movies and eight other films. In 1993’s Last Action Hero he says it three times! He utters it one more time as he jumps from one helicopter to another in this weekend’s Terminator Genisys.
Few actors have done so much with so little. But the perfectly crafted saying almost didn’t happen.
“In the treatment it was ‘I’ll come back,’” The Terminator director and co-writer James Cameron told me. “In the script it was ‘I’ll be back.’ I don’t remember why I changed it. It just sounded better.”
The line certainly played no small part in establishing Schwarzenegger larger-than-life action hero image even though Arnold had problems with it when they were shooting the film.
In his autobiography, Total Recall, Schwarzenegger recalls, “Our biggest disagreement was about ‘I’ll be back’. I was arguing for ‘I will be back’. I felt that the line would sound more machine-like and menacing without the contraction.
“[But] we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions.”
“There is something about the way the line plays,” says Cameron, “not just Arnold’s delivery, but the fact that you’ve seen enough of him in action up to that point to know that when he says ‘I’ll be back’ something really bad is going to happen. There is a counterpoint between the innocence of the words and the threat that is a wink to the audience. And the audience likes to be in the position of knowing what is going to happen next. They may not know the details but they know something bad is going to happen and then it pays off. He just comes flying through the window in a car and takes out the whole place. So there is something kind of delicious about the anticipation that it produces.”
The line’s popularity wasn’t planned. Cameron, who has three quips on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes list—“I’ll be back,” “Hasta la vista, baby” from T2 and Titanic’s “I’m king of the world!—says it is a bad idea to try and write catchphrases.
“I think it is a very hard thing to try and do that,” he says. “I think I was somewhat self conscious about it when I did Terminator 2 and he says ‘Hasta le vista baby.’ That I knew I was doing a line, an Arnold line. I think it is a very dangerous area because it can so easily blow up on you and I tend not to do that.”
Schwarzenegger has been associated with dozens of one-liners. So many, in fact that a youtube video titled 160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes has over twenty million hits, but as widely imitated as “Hasta la vista, baby” was—even Chilean president Michelle Bachelet aped Arnold’s famous delivery of the line—“I’ll be back” remains his most iconic line.
After 31 years, four movies, two classics, one almost ran and one Rotten Tomatoes reject, it was only a matter of time until Hollywood had pushed the “Terminator” franchise too far and had to cannibalize itself and reinvent the story.
In “Terminator: Genisys” after time travel has landed Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to her future but his past (Huh?) Detective O’Brien (J.K. Simmons) tries to wrap his head around the situation.
“I know whatever’s going on here must be really, really complicated,” he says.
“We’re here to stop the end of the world,” says Sarah.
“I can work with that.”
Hopefully so can the audience. The fourth “Terminator” movie warns us time and time again not to pay too much attention to the plot, which is a confounding mess of time travel that completely rewrites the Connor mythology.
“Everything has changed,” says Sarah, “the 1984 John sent you to no longer exists,” which is essentially sci fi screenwriter lingo for, We’ve changed most everything you thought you knew about the “Terminator” folklore. Reese put it in simpler terms, “Time travel makes my head hurt.”
The action begins in 2029, years after Judgement Day when artificial intelligence system Skynet became sentient and tried to destroy humanity. Resistance hero John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends his right hand man (and son) Reese back in time to protect Sarah Connor, make sure she survives and in turn will live to give birth to John who will save humanity. It’s a bit of a Möbius strip, but at least it is a familiar one.
Once Reese transports back in time there’s a glitch and the past has changed. Lethal T-1000 Terminators are waiting for him and Sarah is already a warrior aided by her man-machine companion, the T-800 model Terminator (Arnold “I’m old but not obsolete” Schwarzenegger). “There’s a new mission,” says Sarah, “if the past can change so can the future.” The plan is to destroy Genisys, a computer operating system that will link everything—phones to tablets, tablets to cars… it will run the whole shebang—and will enable Skynet. And you thought having to change your Apple passwords all the time was a pain. Throwing a wrench into the job is (ALMOST A SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY) an unwelcome and unexpected family reunion.
There’s enough time travel here for three regular movies, but “Terminator: Genisys” is no regular movie. It’s a summer blockbuster meant to breathe life back into the silvery skeletoned franchise. It bigger, louder and dumber than ever before with a big action sequence every ten minutes and an ending that guarantees a sequel. The heretical meddling with the story aside, “Terminator” fans will likely enjoy watching the relentless T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) scenes, old Arnold going mano a mano with a younger version of himself or the relationship between Sarah and the T-800 (although she calls him “Pops” too many times for my taste) but endless exposition—this is a story that needs some explaining—drags the middle part of the movie down.
“Terminator Genisys” is robotic in its presentation of the story. In an effort to make something new out of the pieces of the past, the movie relies on twists and time travel theatrics to push the plot instead of an actual coherent story. Reese’s past may be O’Brien’s present and Connor’s future, but the time spent watching this movie is two hours of our time spent in almost total confusion.
I’ll save some of you from having to read this whole review. If the idea of Arnold Schwarzenegger and zombies turns your crank, read on. If not click through to the next review.
It’s a bit disingenuous to call “Maggie” a zombie movie. The word is never used in the film—instead they’re called necroambulists and “the infected”—and the body count is low. In fact, “The Walking Dead” usually features more carnage before the opening credits than in the whole of “Maggie,” but at its diseased heart it is a zombie movie, but one that takes a different tact than most others.
Here director Henry Hobson, who designed the title credit sequence for “The Walking Dead,” concentrates on one Midwestern family dealing with the stark reality that their daughter Magie (Abigail Breslin) is infected and soon some difficult choices will have to be made. The family’s doctor (Jodie Moore) presents father Wade (Schwarzenegger) with three viable options: send her to quarantine to die, administer a painful cocktail of drugs or… make it quick. Wade, who rescued his daughter from a medical facility, doesn’t want her to be taken to quarantine but can’t bring himself to do what must be done.
“Maggie” shatters several preconceptions. First it reconsiders what a zombie film can be. The gore happens off screen leaving time to concentrate on the psychological aspects of seeing friends and family change into something beyond their control. It’s a metaphor for disease or perhaps a comment on assisted suicide, or both. What it isn’t, exactly, is a horror film.
Those expecting Schwarzenegger to make “Total Recall with Zombies” are also in for a surprise. Here the larger than life actor tones it down, embracing the character actor phase of his career with an understated performance that relies more on his expressive face than his physicality to get the point across.
Breslin is also interesting as a young woman whose body is changing into something she can’t control. Stoic and sullen, occasionally she allows a hint of the pre-infected teenager she was show through and those moments are heartbreaking.
For all its angels, however, glacial pacing and Hobson’s love of intense close-ups bedevil the movie. This is an intimate story, so to a point the up-close-and-personal photography makes sense, but the director never met a close-up he didn’t love and over uses them throughout.
“Maggie” is a dark and gloomy piece of work with revelatory performances but plodding pacing that make Romero’s zombies look like speed demons.
More people die in the first five minutes “The Expendables 3” movie than in any other two war movies combined. There is death by bullet, bazooka and bomb. It’s a wild but oddly bloodless beginning to the movie. Perhaps its because they have scaled back the rating to PG1the from the hard Rs the last two Expendables enjoyed, but removing most of the over-the-top violence leaves an absence of the over-the-top fun of the originals. Why arm Stallone and Company up the wazoo and then skimp on the fake blood and faux carnage?
A mission to stop a shipment of bombs brings grizzled mercenaries Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Caesar (Terry Crews) face to face with their toughest adversary yet, arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). Determined to bring down Stonebanks, Ross retires the oldtimers—“We aren’t the future anymore,” says Ross, “we’re part of the past.”— and recruits a fresh group of soldiers—Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell—but just may find that his old dogs have some new tricks.
“Great plan,” says Luna (MMA fighter Rousey) of Ross’s old-fashioned bulldozer approach to mercenary work, “if it was 1985,” and this might have been a great movie if it was 1985. Despite the lack of overly gratuitous blood and guts, it feels like one of those direct-to-video action movies from the Reagan years. With no sense of nuance and clichés aplenty, it ploughs ahead, relentlessly reveling in its own stupidity. Kind of the like everything, but especially the action movies, in the 1980s.
But for much of the movie, that’s OK. How could you not love Wesley Snipes saying that his character was put in jail for tax evasion? It’s art imitating life! Or something.
Most of the other performances aren’t so much performances as they are action star posturing. Kelsey Grammar, as a recruiter for a new batch of Expendables, stands out because he does some actual acting. So do many of the obvious stunt doubles. The rest are all bulked-up chunks of machismo floating in a sea of testosterone.
Still, as an old-school action movie, it works well enough, despite the lack of gallons of fake plasma. I liked the attempts of creating new catchphrases—which are a must in these kinds of films—like Crews yelling, “It’s time to mow the lawn,” before spraying thousands of bullets into a dock packed with baddies. Also, the action scenes are shot clearly and effectively, and unlike last week’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you can actually see who is shooting-punching-blowing up-kicking-garroting-etc who. It makes it easier to cheer for the good guys when you can tell who the bad guys are.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
For the most The Expendables movies have been met part with critical disdain. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane christened the first film, “breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination,” while reviewer James Kendrick said the second installment, was “a better concept than it is a movie.”
Both films star a who’s who of 1980s actions movies—Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more—and have exterminated the competition, collecting an average of $289.9 million at the worldwide box office.
The new movie, inventively titled The Expendables 3, adds vintage action stars Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford to the mix and doubtless will add big bucks to the franchise’s overall gross, whether the critics embrace it or not.
The Expendables movies appear to be bulletproof to critical missiles but they aren’t the first films to be lambasted by reviewers and then clean up at the box office.
Meet the Spartans, a parody of sword and sandal epics from the creators of Scary Movie, currently sits at a 2% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t stop it from taking the top spot at the box office, narrowly edging out Stallone’s Rambo reboot, on its 2008 opening weekend. In the end it made $84,646,831 worldwide despite being called “one of the most painfully bad comedies I’ve ever had to endure,” by Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons.
Finally, Adam Sandler is a fan favorite, but finds little love from the critics. Jack and Jill, a 2011 comedy that saw him play twin brother and sister, earned a whopping $149,673,788 worldwide, but was dubbed “relentlessly witless” by the Daily Star while New Zealand critic Liam Maguren wrote, “Burn this. This cannot be seen. By anyone.”
