There are many things to criticize about the Terminator Dark Fate. One thing that was unexpected and a pleasant surprise, however, was much more subtle than the clear fan-service callbacks to the original Terminator and Terminator 2: its philosophical depth.
A warning ahead for Terminator: Dark Fate spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet and are sensitive to spoilers, it’s advisable to stop reading here. For others, read on.
The movie opens with the Terminator succeeding in its mission to kill John Connor as a child as Sarah Connor watches in horror. The Terminator does its job and then leaves, anticlimactically as the scene shifts to the present. As the story unfolds, Sarah Connor explains that she has been getting texts from an unknown number that relay to her the time and location of terminators that are being sent back so she can destroy them as they come through. The texts always end with the phrase, “for John.” This has mobilized her to keep going and to actually do something about them. It’s eventually revealed that the Terminator who killed John is behind the texts to Sarah, and despite her suspicions and anger around this, the reason behind this is much deeper than the audience is prepared for.
The Terminator, now calling itself “Carl” and having a wife and adopted son of its own, explains that after fulfilling its purpose by killing John Conner, it didn’t have a purpose anymore. It found new purpose in protecting the woman who would become its wife, and her son who would also become its adopted son. The reason that it began and continued sending the texts to Sarah was that it wanted her to also have a purpose, realizing that she might feel, as it did, that she had no purpose.
This is an amazingly deep and fascinating concept to explore in an otherwise superficial action movie. The original Terminator movies did have a deep philosophical element to them, but one would be hard pressed to find that theme continue throughout the many sequels since T2. This movie reawakens that, though, and it’s done in a very interesting and unexpected way. The Terminator learns to care and to “love,” not by actually feeling those emotions (because it clearly is a machine), but by creating a purpose around protecting these people. This became its new purpose and its sole reason for existence.
It raises the deep questions delved into by Simon Sinek in his book, “Start with Why,” of what is the nature of purpose? The reason for our existence? How many of us can answer the question of what our purpose is? Have you taken the time to really figure out not just what you do, but really to examine why you do what you do? These questions all come down to the idea of identity and how you define yourself. How we choose to identify and define ourselves, what we choose to allow to define us, makes all of the difference in our existence. That is the difference between living a purposeful and meaningful life versus just existing and feeling lost or unfulfilled. If a machine can create a purpose for itself and essentially recreate its own identity, why can’t we?
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