‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ – Let’s Talk About What Happened With John Connor
(Spoilers ahead for “Terminator: Dark Fate”)
We hear the word “reboot” used a lot when it comes to Hollywood movies, and often its use can be confusing because it isn’t consistent — sometimes it means one things, and other times it seems to mean something else entirely. That’s because there’s two very main varieties of reboot — the “hard” reboot and the “soft” reboot — and folks in the media don’t often draw a distinction between the two ideas. A hard reboot is like “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” which is just a complete restart of a franchise from scratch — none of the previous movies happened. A soft reboot, on the other hand, is a continuation of the franchise’s existing story that does a sort of in-universe reset. “Terminator: Dark Fate” is doing that, taking place after the original two “Terminator” movies but kicking off a new, separate story that could take the series in a new direction and break out of the mold that has defined it for so long.
Part of this film’s attempt at slate-wiping involves getting rid of some of the franchise’s existing x-factors. One of those casualties is John Connor, the hero fated to lead the remnants of humanity in a successful uprising against Skynet after Skynet nukes the world on Judgment Day.
John has been a key figure in all five of the previous “Terminator” movies — including the first one, even though he didn’t actually appear in that movie. But in “Dark Fate,” he’s killed off at the very beginning of the movie, the victim of yet another Arnold Schwarzenegger terminator, as his mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), looks on.
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It’s a pretty surprising turn of events for those of us who have followed this franchise for so long, but not as catastrophic as it may initially seem. Let’s break down John Connor’s murder within the context of the new direction that “Dark Fate” is trying to take us.
The big picture of this new film is that Skynet really was defeated back in “T2,” but a different AI rose up, caused a Judgment Day of its own at some point in the future, and the same time loop from the first movie happens again but with different people.
The symmetry between the whole time loop in “The Terminator” and “T2” is thorough. Not only will a different AI rise up to destroy the world, but a different hero — Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), in this case — will rise up to save it. See, no worries.
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While the creatives behind “Dark Fate” apparently intended for the film to maintain continuity with only the first two movies and disregard the other films, novels, the TV show and everything else, this approach is spiritually in line with the many other stories that fleshed out the “Terminator” universe and granted at least semi-coherence to its cycle of time. It’s as if, as the T-800 declares in “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” that “Judgment Day is inevitable.” Or, as Skynet itself declares in the novel “T2: Rising Storm”: “It seems there is a certain elasticity to history; time travel can bend the fabric, but it seeks to spring back.”
The idea there is that all this time travel may change the past, but history will eventually correct itself. So machines will always destroy civilization, and people will always win in the end. I don’t know that “Dark Fate” is really pushing this idea in the same terms as those other stories, but it certainly works out the same as presented in the movie. In that sense, it probably didn’t ever actually matter if John Conner survived in the past — no matter what, somebody would have led humanity to victory in the end.
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