"Charlie's Angels" and "Terminator" Post #Metoo

There's been a spike in female ensemble films lately, mostly due to the recent success of "Wonder Woman" and "Captain Marvel." Many of them are also being spun as projects addressing the criticisms of the #Metoo movement, putting more women onscreen in more empowering roles. What this has meant in practical terms is remaking a lot of older films that featured women originally, including titles as disparate as "Black Christmas" and "Little Woman," but with more modern, more feminist messaging. Two of the more prominent examples have been action franchise films "Terminator: Dark Fate" and a new "Charlie's Angels" reboot.

"Terminator: Dark Fate" has the distinction of being the best installment of the "Terminator" franchise since "Terminator 2: Judgement Day," with James Cameron finally returning as a producer, and "Deadpool's" Tim Miller directing. More importantly, Linda Hamilton is back as Sarah Connor, still a hard-living vigilante, and still hunting down killer androids from the future after all this time. Arnold Schwarzenegger's back too, though I won't say in what capacity to preserve the story surprises. Just the presence of these two actors goes a long way towards connecting "Dark Fate" directly to the early "Terminator" movies, and helping us to forget the lows, and very lows of the franchise's past few misfires.

Sarah Connor joins forces with a cyborg soldier from the future named Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who is trying to protect a young woman named Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) from a Terminator called the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna). We learn that Connor successfully defeated Skynet after the events of T2, but another AI called Legion ended up sparking the machine uprising instead. The new characters are solid, especially the enhanced human, Grace, who is central to most of the fight and action sequences in the early running. Hamilton gets a fantastic re-introduction here, but she's in her sixties and Arnold's in his seventies, and the special effects can only compensate for so much when it comes to the action. And boy, the "Dark Fate" action sequences are something to see, directly riffing off of famous sequences in "Terminator 2" with considerable success. Rev-9's big gimmick is that it's a liquid metal Terminator with a hard metal skeleton, and both components can act independently. This makes for some very cool visuals. "Dark Fate" is worth a watch for the spectacle alone.

As for the story, it's serviceable but not great. I expect some fans will be upset that the franchise abandons Skynet and much of the series' existing mythology. However, after so many convolutions of the timeline in previous movies, it's a relief to see them going in a new direction and bringing in some fresh blood. Sarah Conner was always central to the franchise - one of the few action heroines of her era - and it feels very fitting that "Dark Fate" gives us more female characters in the same vein. The girl power messaging is obvious, but I didn't find it overbearing. There's also a lot of evoking of present day social issues - we start off in Mexico with several Spanish-speaking characters, one major scene takes place in a border detention facility, and another on a factory floor that's automating parts of its workflow. There's no direct commentary about these elements, so "Dark Fate" couldn't be called remotely political, but the movie's sympathies are pretty clear.

More explicitly and self-consciously a product of the #Metoo era is the new "Charlie's Angels," which sees its central premise reworked to expand the operations of "Charlie" and his Townsend Agency, which employs the Angels as private investigators. Now there are multiple Bosleys, recruiting and managing multiple teams of Angels around the world, who have access to all kinds of high tech gadgets and weaponry and other resources. The Angels are now more or less secret agents, righting wrongs that nobody else can. The movie focuses on two Angels, wild child Sabina (Kristen Stewart) and no-nonsense Jane (Ella Balinska), helping an engineer named Elena (Naomi Scott) stop her shady corporate bosses from weaponizing her latest invention. Elizabeth Banks, Djimon Honsou, and Patrick Stewart play various Bosleys handling most of the exposition and plotty bits.

Like the previous "Angels" movie series, this is an action-comedy, heavy on the fantasy wish-fulfillment. The ladies quip, tease each other, and enjoy themselves as they're saving the world. So while the girl power elements are much more prominent here, including an opening title montage literally showing little girls doing cool stuff, the messaging is also very lighthearted and accentuates the positive. While Elena gets talked over and minimized by her awful bosses (Nat Faxon and Sam Claflin), she's quickly recruited to go on secret missions and hang out with much cooler people. Nobody dwells on the misogyny of the villains, or puts the Angels in the position of having to explain or justify themselves. They just go and kick ass, and have some fun along the way. There's less camp and silliness than there was in the previous installments, but still plenty of energy and verve and snazzy spycraft.

It helps that this is a very appealing set of characters. Kristen Stewart is clearly having a ball being the loose cannon, Naomi Scott's bloody adorable, and Elizabeth Banks has just the right amount of world weary cynicism and maternal toughness. I like that the viewers get their backstories in bits and pieces, and are left to connect many of the dots themselves. I like that the leads have real chemistry with each other, and the banter actually works. I can't remember the last time I saw one of these girl-power action movies where the banter actually works. And there's still room for a little sexiness and glamour too.

Elizabeth Banks wrote, produced, and directed the movie, and deserves the bulk of the credit for its successes. This is a big step up from her work on "Pitch Perfect 2," and I hope she makes more films like it.

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