Paramount Pictures
It’s quite an achievement for a first time director to be handed the reigns to a film that has huge potential and Tim Miller proved himself to the world when his first feature, Deadpool, took the world by storm and ushered in an era where R-rated superhero movies could actually be a thing. It’s even more impressive that based on the success of that 2016 hit, James Cameron, Paramount Pictures and company (including 20th Century Fox which produced Deadpool pre-Disney ownership) entrusted Miller with bringing the Terminator franchise back from the dead after the disaster that was Terminator Genisys in 2015 (that film seemed to be the final nail in the Terminator’s coffin with Paramount cancelling the already scheduled two follow-ups after it tanked at the box office).
But Miller got the job, and more importantly, Cameron was on board as a producer, Schwarzenegger was back and, even more importantly, Linda Hamilton also agreed to return as Sarah Connor. Technically, Terminator: Dark Fate is the sixth film in the franchise, but chronologically it’s the third, picking up 21 years after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. For all intents and purposes, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009) and Terminator Genisys (2015) do not exist (and the world is probably a better place). But can fans of the first two films who have been burned by the following three trust that this won’t be another sad chapter to the franchise?
I guess that depends what you’re looking for. T2 is an undisputed classic as far as advancing the story from the original (as well as the art of special effects), raising the stakes for the characters and giving some closure to the story of Skynet taking over the world. Dark Fate takes us back to 1998, a year after Skynet would have gained control but didn’t, and reveals a tragic new chapter for Sarah Connor (and let me tell you, the digital de-aging in this scene is nothing short of astonishing) that sets her on a new path of Terminator destruction. After a wildly exciting opening action scene, we settle into the story.
Grace (Mackenzie Davis) appears from the future, not a Terminator but an augmented human, to protect Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) at all costs. Unfortunately, a new breed of Terminator, the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), is not far behind, its mission to kill Dani. But Sarah Connor shows up, having been getting coordinates from a mysterious source all these years as to where the next Terminator was going to show up. After some tense moments of the women bonding to save Dani — and they assume she is the new Sarah Connor who will give birth to a new John Connor who will stop the new Skynet, which is called Legion — Grace reveals a tattoo of coordinates on her stomach … the same coordinates from where Sarah’s texts are coming. Going to the source, they find the texter is none other than the original T-800 (Schwarzenegger) who has assimilated into human life and lives as a drapery installer named Carl. They must all now band together to fight the Rev-9 and face the future … and see who Dani really is. (One little bone of contention here — when people/Terminators arrive from the future they are buck naked. Schwarzenegger and Michael Biehn both bared their bums in the first two movies but for some reason only Davis is shown from the back but not Luna, which seems a bit sexist on the part of whomever made the decision, especially when it takes the Rev-9 about two seconds to find some clothes. An odd choice in the #MeToo era.)
Now, one of the biggest potential continuity goofs here is the appearance of the T-800. Didn’t he melt himself down at the end of T2? He did, but like automobiles, Skynet didn’t just build one model. And after this T-800 completed his mission, he got no further instructions from Skynet (or was it Legion?) so he went about his business, learned how to be human — to a point — and even had a ‘family’, or at least a battered woman and her son whom he took in a protected. But he always told them that one day his past would catch up to him, and it did so they all had to say goodbye before he ran off with Sarah, Grace and Dani.
It all makes for an interesting story, but it still feels a bit light and there seems to be a bit more humorous one-liners and asides here than one would expect from a Terminator movie. I don’t know if that was coming from Miller or the scriptwriters but there were times when it felt out of place. Regardless, it was still cool to see Hamilton back as the same bad-ass — or maybe even more so — Sarah Connor. I mean, she’s really the main reason to see the movie, and she does have some good banter with Schwarzenegger, and she gets to utter that famous line of dialog. But despite the cast and action set-pieces (and they’ve used all the digital tools at their disposal) the story really is just a rehash of T2. But that’s still miles better than anything else that came after that classic. It’s still worth a trip to the cinema if you’re big on action, effects and nostalgia.
Terminator: Dark Fate has a run time of 2 hours 8 minutes and is rated R for violence throughout, language and brief nudity.
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