Category: REVIEWS

Terminator: Dark Fate – The BRWC Review

In 1991 after the success of Aliens, the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day once again proved that there can be such a thing as a successful sequel. No doubt due to having James Cameron at the helm. Since then, much like the titular character, The Terminator kept coming back over and over and the results were not a patch on the release of The Terminator and its blockbuster sequel.

Cut to 28 years later and finally James Cameron has decided to come back to the franchise to executive produce Tim Miller’s new take on The Terminator series. Terminator: Dark Fate proves that perhaps Cameron should never have let anybody else get their hands on his creation in the first place.

Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) works with her brother, Diego (Diego Boneta) living a simple life in Mexico City. However, little does she know but a new terminator – a rev 9 (Gabriel Luna) has been sent from the future to kill her because her very existence holds the key to the future of the human race.

However, the human resistance has also sent someone back to protect Dani, an augmented human named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) who will stop at nothing to ensure Dani’s safety. The trouble is, ever since Judgment Day was averted, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) has been fighting to keep the peace all on her own and her dislike of those who are less than human hasn’t softened over the years.

Terminator: Dark Fate picks up in the modern day and thankfully ignores all the previous sequels that came after Judgment Day. There are no more red leather clad blondes hunting down an adult John Connor, no post-apocalyptic stories of a hard and embittered Christian Bale… uh, I mean John Connor trying to save humanity.

Nor are there any plots revolving around a tablet computer being the thing that destroys all of mankind (I think that was the plot of Genysis anyway). Instead, Terminator: Dark Fate stays with the tone and the themes of the original and its sequel, giving its audience just what they wanted. However, it does have its flaws.

For those familiar with the franchise and a particular love for the first two films, Dark Fate will feel familiar to them as the story unfolds. Very familiar. So, as the beats of the story play out there may be very little surprises. The movie also seems to think that a particular twist in the plot is very important and is hammered out in great detail.

However, besides a certain subset of men on the internet, this twist will not surprise or outrage anybody. Although somebody among the people who made the film clearly thought that it might. A minor issue but one that I’m sure the audience would have figured out and accepted long before it’s addressed in the movie.

The success of Judgment Day was partly due to the movie flipping the script, turning The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) into a hero on a road to redemption. As the movie plays out, the audience warms to him as do Sarah and her son John (Edward Furlong) and it gave the film not only a thrill ride of explosive set pieces but also a beating heart under the cybernetic exoskeleton. Unfortunately, however much Dark Fate reminds its audience of the franchise’s better days, the emotional connection between the characters is nowhere near as strong.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie does indeed play out as a worthy third episode in the series, but the times where the script wants the characters to feel anything for each other come across as more mechanical than the T-800, thus missing out that important ingredient that made Judgment Day so special.

All in all, there have been far worse Terminator films done in the past twenty years and perhaps Dark Fate should have been the closing episode of a trilogy that ended before the 21^st century began. The movie has large set pieces which will impress action fans and Sarah Connor probably has the best entrance of any character I’ve seen this year.

However, with nostalgia comes retrospect and Dark Fate undoubtedly shows that the franchise will never be as good as it was all those years ago.

Gemini Man: The BRWC Review. There is a moment in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man where the two main characters, both of whom are portrayed by Will Smith, fall into a pool of water towards the end of one of their fights. The younger clone of the two, known as Junior, has just found out he was an experiment created in a lab to be a super soldier and doesn’t have it in him to keep fighting. Junior rebukes the older man, who is claiming to be genetically identical to him, he shouts at him as he floats away down an undisclosed tunnel. This is the best moment of Gemini Man; the only time the film has any heart and soul is right here in the water that merely existed in the script to stop either of the leads from dying halfway through the film.

Everything before and after this one moment is an illogical mess filled to the brim with needless characters and unnecessary cinematic experiments. The main character out of the two Will Smiths is Henry Brogan, an aging government hitman entering retirement as the demons that come with his line of work begin to haunt him. Alongside Henry is his accomplice of circumstance Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who is roped into the conflict when the government believes her to be helping Henry who has become a fugitive after finding out his final hit was on someone who didn’t deserve killing. The final member of the key trio is a totally needless character called Baron (Benedict Wong) who serves only to fill in the gap in Henry’s giant list of talents; he can fly, Henry can’t. They go up against the other Will Smith character Junior in an attempt to inform him that the leader of the Gemini Project Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who poses as a father to Junior, is manipulating him.

The film as a whole amounts to two things; talented actors with nothing to work with and a born storyteller director with no story to tell. It all comes down to David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke’s impossibly thin script. Full of plot holes and an incredibly weak antagonist in Verris nothing here works. The strongest aspect is Junior coming to terms with what he is, it draws out some glimpses of powerful work from Smith, but it doesn’t last. Before you know it, Junior moves on from his mental turmoil and goes about his business for the final portion of the film. Henry’s side of the narrative is no better with both Danny and Baron adding nothing to the experience. They exist only to ensure the cast wasn’t made up solely of two Will Smiths and Clive Owen.

Why paramount thought this was something worth making we may never know, but the best guess is the abundance of talent that became attached to the project. Will Smith is a box office draw; he has been for the best part of two decades and continues to be. Ang Lee is a two-time Oscar winner for achievement in directing. Mary Elizabeth Winstead showed the world she was to be taken seriously in 10 Cloverfield Lane and has grown as a star ever since. And earlier this year Benedict Wong played a role in the highest-grossing film of all time. None of them produces memorable work here, and excluding Lee, it isn’t their fault.

I wish I couldn’t lay blame at the feet of the great cinematic genius of Ang Lee, but alas his recent films have been a drop in form and Gemini Man sees him sink lower. You cannot blame the lack of depth on the writers alone; some must go to the head of the project behind the camera. Lee is all too focused on seeing how well he can capture the gimmicks of the film like the higher frame rate and the, admittedly spectacular, CGI recreation of Smith. In all the slow-motion shots and over the top overstimulating action sequences, there is none of the heart that Lee’s best movies generate, worst of all, there are no characters even to care about throughout.

As I touched on, everything does look great. The special effects work on Smith as Junior is breath-taking at times and the cinematography insights more interest in the action sequences than the choreography itself inspires. Lorne Balfe’s score is also impressive if underutilised. The work in these aspects is so isolated in their success that I shudder to think what the final product would look like if it hadn’t been.

Gemini Man is no more and no less than a failed experiment. Generally, something like this would be easy to ignore, but the sheer amount of talented people involved in the project leads to one inescapable thought; this was a missed opportunity, and it should have been a whole lot better.

Eli (Charlie Shotwell) is living with autoimmune disease. His mother, Rose (Kelly Reilly) and his father, Paul (Max Martini) do everything they can to keep him safe, they sterilise everything in the house, keep Eli in a controlled environment and do their very best to make sure that the outside world doesn’t get in, making his condition worse.

Then one day Paul hears about a clinic led by a Dr. Horn (Lili Taylor) who claims that she can cure his condition. Overjoyed with the prospect of having a normal son, Eli’s parents drive him to the clinic immediately so they can start giving him the treatment that will make give him a better quality of life. However, once the treatment starts working, Eli starts seeing ghostly apparitions and the more treatments he has, the stronger the visions of the supernatural become. Also, Eli soon starts to believe that the doctors and his parents aren’t telling him the whole truth.

Eli is the second feature from director Cirian Foy who had the unenviable task of directing the sequel to atmospheric horror hit, Sinister. Keeping up with the creepy, atmospheric tone of his previous work, Eli sets the tone straight away as Foy shows Eli’s experiences living with his condition right from the word go – and they aren’t pretty.

Also, the setting for the clinic couldn’t be better suited, with its foggy surroundings and ominous, towering trees the movie tells the audience just what they’re getting from the start and there are plenty of scares to follow. The movie plays well as it guides the audience through Eli’s experiences, often relying on the tropes of what a protagonist in a horror movie usually shouldn’t do and Shotwell puts in a great performance.

From being jump scared by ghosts, frustrated by being ignored by those around him and leading up to a final twist that the audience may never see coming, Shotwell manages to carry the movie and his performance makes the audience feel the right things for him when he thinks all hope is lost.

The ending of the movie may divide some people, but I can safely say that it isn’t something the audience was expecting. For horror fans, the way the final scenes revel in its madness is something of a pleasure by how much the movie decides to build to a crescendo of unapologetic hyperbole.

Many may tire of the clichés and predictable jump scares that litter the movie, but for those who know exactly what they want from a horror movie and are not expecting to be blown away, Eli is enough fun to entertain its audience on a dark and stormy Halloween night.