Reviews

'Dark Fate' sets off to replace 'Rise of the Machines' as the franchise's new third movie and direct sequel to James Cameron's masterpiece 'T2: Judgement Day'. It avoids some of the mistakes of the previous three installments, most notably by sticking to the original cast for the established characters, including Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. It also returns to a darker, more serious tone than the previous movie. But that's where the good aspects end. It's an uninspired, poorly written film that mostly recycles ideas from all the other terminator movies. First of all, you never really feel emotionally invested in the characters, as they don't get much depth or personality. All characters in this movie are just plot tools: There's Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) who's your typical damsel in distress. Her brother Diego (Boneta), who's just cannon fodder for the antagonist. Dani's protector from the future, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), is basically Kyle Reese from the first Terminator film, but without the tragic expressiveness and devotion of Micheal Biehn's character. And now that we already have a protector for Dani, you might wonder why we need two more protectors in the form of Sarah Connor and Arnold's character. Well, they act as nothing more than fan service, providing pithy one liners and comic relief. Even though it's always fun to watch Arnold and Linda on screen - ultimately, they're irrelevant to this story. Diego Luna as the antagonist robot model Rev-9 is worlds apart from the menacing aura of Robert Patrick's T-1000 in T2. Even Kristanna Loken as TX in 'Rise of the Machines' had a more threatening appearance. The Rev-9's "super power" is that in can split into two. But instead of splitting into two liquid metal terminators, it splits into a liquid metal figure and a solid metal endoskeleton for some reason (probably just because endoskeletons look cool in the trailers). Narratively, the movie goes along a predictable path, leaving a lot of dramatic potential unused. It hardly creates any thrilling or suspenseful moments. Just like the previous three sequels, Tim Miller and his team of writers seem to have forgotten that the original Terminator movies were not just mere action flicks, but essentially also horror thrillers. 'Dark Fate' doesn't satisfy in the sci-fi department either. As the plot moves on, it becomes clear that the time travel "logic" in this movie is a complete mess and doesn't even try to make any sense. Also be warned about what hilariocity the writers came up with to justify the role of Arnold's character. So is it at least a good action flick? Not really. The action sequences lack the craftmanship not only of James Cameron's works, as a matter of fact, nothing in 'Dark Fate' even comes close to the crane chase sequence in 'Rise of the Machines'. Miller's action is choreographed and edited mostly too fast and confusing (and furthermore suffers from the picture's murkiness, especially in the third act, which is set at night). With the exception of a truly stunning de-aging fx scene in the beginning of the movie, the VFX are poorly executed - some of the CGI can't even withstand today's TV standards. There are no surprising visual moments apart from what you've already seen in the trailers. Junkie XL's score is unobtrusive and serviceable, but also a bit generic, relying too much on conventional orchestra sounds, thus leaving you lingering after the intensity and gritty sound textures of Brad Fiedel's masterful score for T2. In the end, 'Dark Fate' also tries hard to push a gender equality message (Zeitgeist, you know?), but the way it is presented here, feels so forced and unbelievable that even feminists may raise their eyebrows.

France has brought us horror favorites such as 'High Tension', 'Martyrs' and 'Inside'. From Netflix, on the other hand, we got last year's excellent horror offering "The Haunting of Hill House". So I got really excited, when this French horror show hit Netflix and early reviewers seemed to be stoked. Unfortunately, 'Marianne' turned out to be very different from the examples above. It's mostly reminiscent of Sam Raimi's dark horror comedy 'Drag Me To Hell', including a gross out old lady, a lot of quirkiness and body horror. But the problem here is, that 'Marianne' also wants to be a drama. That doesn't work at all, as neither the story nor the characters can ever really be taken seriously. It's a tonally incoherent mess, jumping back and forth from scares to comic relief moments. The characters are either unlikable (such as the rather pretentious lead) or bland, or both. On the plus side, there's the nice scenery and cinematography. The scare scenes are mostly effective (albeit nothing we haven't seen before). So this could have been a great show, if the characters were more compelling, the narrative more straightforward and above all, void of the unecessary comic relief.

This might easily be one of the most nihilistic flicks i've ever seen. Despite IMDb currently labelling it as 'horror thriller', it seems it was supposed to be more like a mixture of slasher/thriller, drama/romance and a bit of comedy. However, it fails at each: It's thriller without suspense, a slasher without on-screen killings, a drama/romance without any tangible emotions, a comedy without one laugh.

Bland story made of generic thriller tropes, while the writers constantly deny the number one rule in screen writing - "SHOW, DON'T TELL!" - in a way that basically all information (characterizations, their relationships, motivations, background story) are merely given in form of dialogue. If you can't SHOW a story, but only TELL it via dialogue, you should rather release it as a book or radio play, instead of shooting an audio-visually dull movie like that.

Oh yes, since the movie takes place on a luxury liner, i was at least expecting a rather fancy set - but no, most of it are just boring medium shots of talking characters...

Bottom line: The only positive things about this movie are its shorter-than-usual runtime and the actors still trying to make a professional job, while anything else appears to be carried out on amateur level.

By the way, note the "mirror scare"! You will probably not get a more nihilistic variation of this horror trope anywhere - which is very exemplary for the entire movie.