Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Another new future, another antagonistic AI, another protector sent to the past, another terminator popping up a few minutes later. The specifics this time around: Grace (Mackenzie Davis) is an “augmented” soldier from the future, sent back to protect Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who will become humanity’s savior. Out to assassinate Dani is the Rev-9 (Gabrel Luna), which is more or less the T2, but he’s black liquid instead of silver and he can separate out a skeleton. When the initial fight starts going wrong for the good guys, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) shows up to keep everyone fighting for another day. Our heroes run. The Rev-9 chases, and eventually they run into a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), so they can fight some more.

Terminator movies have never gone wildly off the path. Terminators 1, 2, and 3 were essentially the same movie. They were all “chosen one + protector(s) run from unstoppable killing machine until they run into a way to stop it. Terminator 4 & 5 swapped things up a bit—not much, but a bit—and that didn’t go well, so Terminator 6 returns to that the center of the path. How much you enjoy it will be based on how keen you are on seeing the same thing again. If you like that structure, and have watched Judgment Day so often that you’d like to see it with different actors (as well as the same ones), then Dark Fate will be fine. If you want something new, you are out of luck.

There’s a lot of gun fire, a lot of explosions, a lot of crashes, and a lot of heavy objects smashing into faces. It all looks good, and it looks familiar. But then most car chases look familiar. There’s a few adrenaline-rush moments, though I wasn’t sitting on the edge of my seat. I expected the action to be good, and it is. It’s isn’t special or revolutionary, or memorable, at least for anyone who’s seen T1–T3, but it’s professional. Likewise the FX do their job. Again, nothing special, but professional.

There’s a few rough spots with a script, leaving a few too-visible plot holes, but it isn’t as if Judgment Day could stand up to substantial scrutiny (it was just less likely you’d go looking). And things slow down for too long in the middle, but then they had to put some character development in somewhere.

As for those characters, Machenzie Davis’s amped up warrior is the high point. I can’t say I cared about her backstory, but Davis had a way of projecting both toughness and vulnerability simultaneously that makes Grace sympathetic without a lot of talk. Dani isn’t terribly interesting, but she’s less annoying than several of the past saviors-needing-saving in the franchise, so grading on a curve, she’s pretty good. I was distracted by her age. At 32, she’s at least a decade too old for the innocent target, and unless Dani invents some anti-aging drugs, the new judgment day has to be sometime in 2020. I liked the idea of bringing Sarah Connor back to the franchise, but the character has little to offer this story. I’m sure they thought they had a good emotional story for her, but it doesn’t resonate, and you could yank her out of the movie and change nothing. Hamilton’s performance is a little shaky too. She’s best when she’s shooting a gun, not when she’s talking. Arnold’s T-800 is better, and does bring some life to the proceedings, but I can’t help thinking that he too was unnecessary, and they’d have been better sticking with a new cast. On the other hand, none of the film was necessary, and if I’m asking for changes I’d be better off asking for a new story.

James Cameron has said that this is the true sequel to T2: Judgment Day. It certainly is a sequel, in the sense like so many sequels, it’s just doing it all again, and there’s an extra problem when you copy something twenty-seven years later: The world has changed. T2 was playing off of a particular set of societal fears: nuclear war and computerization. Those aren’t today’s fears, but Dark Fate pretends they are. Social media, the rise of fascism, racial unrest, and climate destruction are more pertinent today, and while a trip through a boarder crossing had the potential to mine current issues, Cameron and director Tim Miller don’t do anything with it. Well, if you watch T2 you aren’t going to dig into our current national psychoses either.

Dark Fate is fine if you feel like an action film. I prefer T3: Rise of the Machines as the sequel to T2 and as a franchise finish if I’m allowed only one of them. But I’d put this above Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys, which few people will take as a ringing enforcement. To make it even less so, while I’m giving it 3-Reels, it’s a weak 3, and that just means that if you want to see it, the bigger the screen, the better.