Film Review — Terminator: Dark Fate
Dark Fate once again proves that it’s time to put Terminator to rest
Despite the return of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and director James Cameron as producer, Terminator: Dark Fate once again proves that the killer cyborg franchise is running on fumes. Touted as a return to form for the series and a long-awaited followup to Cameron’s first two sci-fi classics, the film is positioned as redemption for a series that has long been floundering and misguided. Unfortunately, however, Dark Fate serves up neither the nail-biting terror of The Terminator nor the white-knuckle action of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, all the while shedding the emotional throughlines that made them great. Mild spoilers ahead…
Like an insidious Skynet plot, the Terminator franchise rears its robotic head every couple of years to reconfigure the mythos and recapture the groundbreaking sci-fi magic of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It rarely ever works. As evidenced by the forgettable Rise of the Machines, the muddled Salvation, and the just plain embarrassing Genisys, the franchise is now officially more clunk than quality. The sixth installment of the series, director Tim Miller’s Terminator: Dark Fate, is the latest attempt at course-correcting the flagging property. A hard reboot that ignores all of the films following Judgment Day, Dark Fate looks to inject life by bringing back both Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and original superstar director James Cameron as producer. Unfortunately, what is supposed to be a reinvigoration of the Terminator franchise is once again a tired retread of cyborg-on-cyborg violence with little semblance of the emotional heft that carried the first two films.
Last year, I wrote a love letter to the only worthy successor, in my opinion, to the James Cameron entries of the Terminator canon: the short-lived The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a canceled-too-soon television series that starred Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey as Sarah Connor and Thomas Dekker as John Connor. A show that fundamentally understood the emotional core of what made Cameron’s films great, The Sarah Connor Chronicles preserved the beating heart and throughline that the movie sequels so often neglected: a mother’s love for her son. In my piece, I wrote:
“I didn’t really understand it at the time, being only ten years old, but what made the first two Terminator films so special wasn’t the revolutionary special effects, breakneck set-pieces, or cyborg-on-cyborg action, but its depiction of a mother’s love for her son. Although you can’t possibly ignore the iconic sci-fi moments - the first time you see Arnold’s T-800 rampage through the police station, or the first time the liquid metal T-1000 reels from a shotgun blast only to reform itself - none of it would work as well without its emotional throughline: that Sarah Connor would do anything to protect her son. John Connor may be the future leader of the resistance and the savior of mankind, but to Sarah, he’s just her boy. And the more the series deviated from this simple emotional core, the worse it got. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was a merely competent teen thriller that just happened to have Skynet and robots in it, Terminator: Salvation was so far up its own ass that all sensibility went out the window, and the less that’s said about the lazy Terminator: Genisys, the better.”
Terminator: Dark Fate, while marginally better than its poor sequel brethren, is once again a misguided attempt to “fix” the franchise. For a film that often offers up breathtaking spectacle and action, it ultimately still feels hollow and inconsequential. As a direct sequel to Judgment Day, Tim Miller’s entry occassionally threatens to do some interesting things with the foundation laid out for him, but there’s seldom any followthrough - in the end, Dark Fate feels like a relic from the mid-aughts, an empty blockbuster dictated by neat effects and “cool” moments rather than effective storytelling.
“What was supposed to be a reinvigoration…is once again a tired retread of cyborg-on-cyborg violence with little of the emotional heft that carried the first two films.”
In Dark Fate, Linda Hamilton makes a welcome return as the battle-worn Sarah Connor, supplying a grittily familiar face that adds a dose of much-needed gravitas to this enervated series. Unfortunately, however, without delving too much into spoiler territory, the narrative legs of her story are unceremoniously cut out from under her no sooner than the opening scene. In Dark Fate, the best part of the Terminator mythos is wholly missing; where the James Cameron films explored a heady interplay of mothers, sons, and fateful inevitabilities, this latest installment instead settles for yet another reductive and surface-level exploration of grief and trauma. A film that really should have revolved completely around the return of Hamilton’s Connor, Dark Fate prefers to spend its time justifying the existence of two brand new characters, supported by Sarah Connor in a thankless mentor role.
The story this time centers around Mexican factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who is hunted by a new breed of Terminator, the eye-rollingly monikered Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna). A slapdash remix of cyborgs past, the Rev-9 is nothing more than a walking gimmick: lacking both the hulking terror of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and the serpentine malevolence of Robert Patrick’s T-1000, this new cybernetic villain is as generic as it comes despite having a new and mysterious origin. Like many of the past films, our protagonist Dani is accompanied by her own cyborg guardian, this time a human/machine hybrid that goes by the name of Grace (Mackenzie Davis). Dark Fate puts three strong women as leads, and it’s quite admirable in that regard, but there’s not much substance there - this unique cast is largely saddled by exposition dumps rather than believable dialogue, making it exceptionally hard to connect to this trio of heroines. Surprisingly, the best part of the film comes from the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing an aimless and decommissioned T-800 that shares a complicated history with Sarah Connor. Caught in a purgatory between man and machine, this particular T-800 brings forth one of Arnold’s better and more subtle performances in recent memory.
Every time a new lackluster Terminator film is released, there are cries to put cinema’s resident franchise of diminishing returns out of its misery. Dark Fate, even with the return of Linda Hamilton and James Cameron, doesn't do much to buck that trend. The new paths that the film supposedly forges are nothing more than false trails, and despite some competent action and inventive set pieces, Dark Fate’s attempts at recapturing the series’ glory days are largely misguided. For those of us keeping score, we are now 0-4 for modern Terminator sequels - maybe it really is time to say goodbye.
