Before he became a Kubrickian technophile exclusively—and slavishly—devoted for years at a time to his own long-gestating projects, James Cameron established his name, in part, as a filmmaker uniquely gifted at crafting sequels that harnessed the appeal of the original film while launching the series as a whole in a new direction. Aliens is as perfect a follow-up to Alien as it is different from its predecessor, while Judgment Day levels up as much on the ideas behind the first Terminator as it does the thrills. Unfortunately, that absence of directorial clarity—a true sense of ownership not of a franchise, but its mythology—has plagued every Terminator sequel since then, even if some of the films touched on intriguing possibilities or mounted some exciting sequences.

Paramount Pictures

But even if Tim Miller isn’t quite as far along in terms of voice and maturity as Cameron was when he tackled Terminator and Aliens back to back, Terminator: Dark Fate showcases his considerable skill even as it marks Cameron’s proper return to the world he created. Thoughtful and thrilling if slightly overstuffed with physics-defying set pieces, Dark Fate feels like a mostly-graceful passing of the torch from Cameron to Miller with an adventure that crucially breaks the repetitive wheel of canon elements featured in subsequent sequels while acknowledging that the franchise’s loop of fate and causality is both an inevitability and an untapped opportunity to break new ground in narrative and character development.

Like Cameron, original star Linda Hamilton returns to the Terminator timeline for the first time in decades to once again play Sarah Connor, the mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Edward Furlong) who has spent decades chasing down T-800 robots and destroying them to repeatedly prevent Judgment Day. When a young woman named Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) is targeted by the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), a new Terminator prototype that combines the robotic frame of the T-800 and the liquid metal exoskeleton of the T-1000, she attempts to intervene, but discovers that Dani already has a protector: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a woman augmented with cyborg technology and sent back through time to keep her safe.

Paramount Pictures

Sarah and Grace immediately clash, but as the Rev-9 pursues her from Mexico to the United States, both soldiers understand the danger Dani faces, and uneasily strike a truce to acclimate her to a life spent on the run. But when a series of mysterious transmissions leads the trio to “Carl” (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a T-800 who has unexpectedly settled into a life of secluded domesticity after being sent back through time decades prior, Dani decides that she will not spend the rest of her life on the run. With the Rev-9 and the authorities closing in on their whereabouts, Dani, Sarah and Grace decide to mount a last stand to destroy their seemingly unstoppable pursuer and determine their own fate—not one defined by Sarah’s past or inherited from Grace’s future, but driven forward by the choices they make in the present.

However inadvertently, one of the most important ideas that Dark Fate touches on is the way that many or most of the events in the Terminator timeline are repeating, and inevitable—that each victory over one killing machine only paves the way for another battle, likely tougher than the last, a few years later. It’s effectively reduced the franchise to a series of chase films that, good as they are, all ring immediately familiar, and after 35 years, has grown slightly too familiar for its own good. Miller’s installment is similar in that regard, but with Cameron shepherding its cabal of screenwriters (including Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray) through his compelling but cyclical mythology, the aim is less to recreate previous thrills than strike out into new territory. Moreover, the film recognizes that the cultural and visual touchpoints of the series are less relevant than reckoning with the legacy and impact of the story; in that regard, Dark Fate is more Halloween ’18 than The Force Awakens, and not simply because both films feature extraordinary, zero-fuck bad ass women who are 60 years old and still effortlessly commanding the screen.

Paramount Pictures

To that end, Sarah Connor is older and wiser but still living with the vigilance, anxiety and resentment of not just being the only person who knows and believes in an apocalyptic future yet to come, but who has carried that burden—and the losses that come with it—for decades. Hamilton—not Sarah Connor, but her in that role, today—is the key missing ingredient (among a handful of others) that the last three films have lacked as storytellers have awkwardly attempted to shoehorn Schwarzenegger into each of them whether he was needed or not, and she elevates this story without, again, simply making it a retread of the version of the character she played before. Her ease on screen, and her authority, is automatic, and it deepens not just the story of this new young woman running for her life, but the emotional substance of someone bitterly fighting to protect a future that keeps reminding her it’s coming.

As Carl, meanwhile, Schwarzenegger finally gets an opportunity to explore the T-800 in a substantive way that challenges him as an actor and doesn’t merely play the same notes we’ve heard before from the “learning computer.” The character anchors so much of what happens in the franchise’s past, but the way Carl evolves touches delicately and provocatively on what themes may (and probably should) be explored going forward. If this is the final outing for that character, it’s a fitting and graceful conclusion to what between the original Terminator and this one as the canonical “third” feels like a real journey.

Paramount Pictures

After Hamilton in The Terminator and Sigourney Weaver in the first two Alien films, it’s hard to watch young actresses evolve from would-be victim to bad ass and declare the transition a foregone success, but Reyes is certainly possessed of the versatility and determination to make Dani’s future role in the human resistance feel believable. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Davis is working on another level as Grace, a young woman-turned-soldier raised in the era of a robot apocalypse but still possessed of identifiable, irrepressible vulnerability. Her initial indifference or hostility to Sarah is a frequently hilarious thing of beauty, but Davis taps directly into what makes Grace’s drive so fierce, and it’s sort of delightfully different than Sarah’s without simply absorbing the one-dimensional clichés of a female character chiefly defined by traditionally masculine ideas of “toughness.”

Miller is still finding his footing as a director, and it’s too soon to call him an auteur in the mold of Cameron (or anybody else, for that matter). That’s less a dig at him than an observation of his relative inexperience; he’s very skilled technically, and handles both the action scenes and dramatic moments with verve and confidence. But the end of the movie gets away from him as it grows increasingly overpowered by action sequences and set pieces where not only does the physics seem wonky, but his sense of space, distance and momentum becomes jumbled. The unfair comparison notwithstanding, Cameron’s clean, carefully-mapped staging of action would have served some of Miller’s ideas better than his own visceral but frequently too-close camerawork. Nevertheless, I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise to call Terminator: Dark Fate the best Terminator film since Judgment Day. Not only is it the most consistently smart and exciting film bearing that name in decades, it’s the first that feels less like a retread than a step into a new, ambitious future that, like Cameron’s exceptional sequels, builds from a foundation—but isn’t beholden—to the series’ past.

4 out of 5

Header Image: Paramount Pictures

The post TERMINATOR: DARK FATE Reckons With The Franchise’s Past, But Looks To The Future (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.

Finally, after weeks of anticipation — and one half of terrible football (unless you were a New England Patriots fan) — the world finally got to see the final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and ultimately, the final trailer of the Skywalker Saga. And it did not disappoint! Here are nine (or […]

Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey will set aside $28 million in scholarships and doctoral fellowships for the descendants of chattel slavery and “underrepresented” groups, as a means of providing reparations for the institution’s role in profiting on the backs, labor, and pain of enslaved people, according to the Associated Press.

In addition to designating five doctoral fellowships for descendants of enslaved Africans, the payments will include 30 scholarships, valued at the cost of tuition plus $15,000, NJ.com reports. The seminary will also hire a full-time director for the Center for Black Church Studies.

Princeton Theological Seminary profited from the slavery economy by investing in Southern banks and had donors who benefited from slavery. Founding teachers and leaders exploited the labor of enslaved people and some advocated to send free Black men and women to Liberia.

In a statement Friday, President M. Craig Barnes called the payments an “act of repentance.”

“The Seminary’s ties to slavery are a part of our story,” Barnes said. “It is important to acknowledge that our founders were entangled with slavery and could not envision a fully integrated society… We did not want to shy away from the uncomfortable part of our history and the difficult conversations that revealing the truth would produce.”

This is not the first “reparations” package from an institution of higher learning.

As ESSENCE previously reported in April, students at Georgetown University overwhelmingly voted in favor of setting up a fund that would go to the descendants of the 272 enslaved Africans that were sold to pay off Georgetown Jesuits’ debts. 

The post Princeton Theological Seminary Approves $28M Scholarship Fund As Reparations For Slavery appeared first on Essence.

It’s true that if Black voters come out in record numbers we can change our entire legislature and finally have representation that works for us.

According to an NBC report written by Janell Ross:

Longtime political organizer, LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter, was in Flint to mobilize Black voters — one stop on an 11-state tour. Brown and her organization, the Black Voters Matter Fund, which she co-founded with political strategist Cliff Albright in November 2016, are doing this work in an unusual way. In the first 20 minutes or so in Flint, before a group of about 20 people, the words “vote,” “voting” and “election” never left Brown’s mouth. Not once.

Democrats should no longer be the antithesis to the Republican party or the lesser of two evils. In 2016, many Black voters and people of color decided to sit the general election out because they felt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, did not speak to issues that impact them. Clinton made the mistake of being the anti-Trump candidate and that simply if you don’t vote for her, you could do a lot worse.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to help Black Americans with student loan debt, criminal justice reform or decreasing the rising costs of their healthcare.

The strategy should be more than just Black voters to come out to vote. Who wants to vote for a candidate who shares little to no concern about your community? It’s time candidates speak directly to issues that adversely impact the lives of Black voters and if a candidate is not doing that, then they’re not going to get that vote.

According to the NBC report about Black Voters Matter’s theory:

Those who gain meaningful influence in their own communities develop a faith in democracy itself. They can become enthusiastic, or at least frequent, participants at every level and create social pressure for others to do the same. It’s an approach that banks on the fact that black citizens’ concerns are often ignored, treated like the fallout of character flaws rather than policy failures.

For more read the full story on NBCNews.com

The post Focusing on the Issues and Not Just Voting Will Advance the Black Vote in 2020 appeared first on Black Girl Nerds.