Control Review: Terminator: Dark Something

Daniel Trump
Nov 5 · 2 min read

I, Dalton Lewis, love John Connor. He’s a cool kid everyman chosen to save the planet. He’s amazing. He’s unstoppable. He’s brilliant, a smart kid who can fight. And he’s mostly missing from the new Terminator movie. They didn’t have time for everyone, apparently, and John had to be shoved aside. This is the second Terminator movie in a row without John Connor as a good guy fighting bad guys. I’m pissed.

Why create such a wonderful Jesus-like figure and then ignore him for two movies in a row? I don’t understand. The movie has a lot of action sequences, and they are well-filmed, with a lot of violence. They have people on one side fighting people on another side with no reason to like one side over the other. There’s a ton of screaming when they aren’t fighting, telling each other how important they are and how important this is. They also scream at each other because a lot of the main characters want to kill or hurt each other.

Terminator without a young man confuses me. I don’t understand. I get it — Sarah Connor is great and badass, but her story arc bothers me. Also, I don’t understand Arnold’s character. He is somehow an innocent person who regrets his life, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe in his character being such a saint. I don’t get it.

The characters we do have? They are smart and hardworking and well-meaning and pretty much without flaws. That makes it hard to create dramatic conflict between the characters. It’s mostly melodrama in this movie, folks. There isn’t a lot of back-and-forth except for the aforementioned shouting fits.

I don’t know what else to say. There’s a bad guy, and he’s impressive technically, and he can fight really, really well, but I don’t know. Time has passed. One robot isn’t necessarily as scary as in the previous century. Maybe the whole thing has been done, over and over, for many years since then. I just think that this franchise has become very difficult to create and produce additional content for, and I don’t know why.

This film got mostly positive reviews from critics, but I don’t know why. I’m mad. It’s a lot of shouting and screaming and saving reality and I don’t know — maybe we should have had some normal conversations and real people interacting and stuff like that. Maybe we should have had some sort of reality in this movie, not just machines shooting at humans. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I didn’t like about the movie. I just know that I didn’t like it.

Oh well. That’s probably the end of the Terminator franchise for a long time. It had a great first two movies and a marvelous television show. That’s not bad. Now it’s dead — the terminators were finally stopped, by diminishing box office results and a changing audience. I say goodbye to what was, not what is.

Thanks, and take care, friends.

Daniel Trump

Written by

Daniel Trump wrote the slasher/horror epic Impressions of Suburbia. Buying it is the way he makes money for his writing. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RPXPQPC

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