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mgyukeri
Reviews
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Starts out fun and entertaining, then, uh...
Watching the first act I was ready to call this the most enjoyable film in the franchise since T2 - a breath of fresh air considering the mess that was Genisys and the deluge of dark and gritty digital set pieces of Salvation - but each half hour gets progressively worse and increasingly nonsensical, crescendoing into an absolute mess.
Reminds me of the Blumhouse Halloween reboot as far as the reintroduction of Sarah Connor is concerned, but it really didn't have the same understanding of what made its source material so compelling.
Despite the lead human character being a bit of a paint by numbers girlboss, and the fact that her motivations in the film depend on the two dimensional family characters the film parades around for all of five seconds before quickly becoming terminator fodder, Mackenzie Davis was fantastic in a supporting role. Best "good terminator" since Summer Glau and Shirley Manson in TSCC. It's a shame Dark Fate was such a misfire, because the "seeds" of the ideas presented here were great - they just absolutely fell apart during the execution.
Cloak & Dagger: Call/Response (2018)
Be careful what you wish for...
Tandy and Tyrone's second encounter is the through line of the fourth episode, which puts their relationship at the forefront of their respective personal dilemmas. There's finally payoff on multiple story arcs-Tandy's mom and her 'lawyer,' Tyrone's brother, and Tyrone maybe finally getting a cloak(?)-which are all teased out over the course of the episode. It's still heavy on the origin story tropes, but the storyline has fairly methodically built upon itself with each episode, and offers protagonists that are fairly atypical for superhero faire.
Cloak & Dagger: First Light (2018)
Familiar ground, but worth the lengthy intro
Given the central conceit of the superhero duo in the comics (that Tandy and Tyrone cannot survive without each other), it's frustrating to see the characters kept at arms length for the two-part pilot episode. It's a solid pilot, and the narrative beats make sense for an origin story, but it's superhero fatigue that makes getting through the exposition so cumbersome. It's a lot like Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man-totally serviceable and surprisingly well-produced, there are just a lot of narrative beats we've seen before. There's payoff in pretty much every following episode, so it's definitely worth sticking through.