Terminator: Dark Fate - The franchise calls a 'mulligan' and reclaims some of its original spirit

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

It’s not exactly clearing a high bar to say that Terminator: Dark Fate is the most effective and entertaining franchise instalment since 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

One should expect nothing less, given (a) the reunion of Arnold Schwarzenegger with James Cameron (as producer and story writer) and Linda Hamilton as the T-targeted Sarah Connor for the first time in those 28 years, and (b) the weak sequels that have been released in the interim (Terminator Genisys, anyone?).

The cyborg Grace (Mackenzie Davis) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), at odds over how to save the future

But don’t you love when a franchise calls for a mulligan? It’s like they’re saying, “forget all those crap sequels ever happened. This is the real T3”

Add Deadpool director Tim Miller’s stylistic violence (in those action moments when the screen isn’t simply overwhelmed by all the CGI) and archly-comic, profanity laced dialogue, and you have a decent, fast-moving nod to the spirit that originally made the Terminator movies a permanent part of pop culture. 

You also have one of the better approaches to the maddening issue of time travel and paradoxes the series has offered up. To wit: Yes, Sarah Connor, her son John and the “good” Terminator T-800 (played by Schwarzenegger) stopped SkyNet from being developed, thereby saving the future from that particular Armageddon.

But it makes sense that, even in a future-world without SkyNet, somebody was going to come up with an AI application for robotic war that would become sentient. Likewise, if the Manhattan Project hadn’t developed an atomic bomb, somebody would have done it. Bad science will find a way.

So it is that, in Terminator: Dark Fate, we end up with Terminators from two different timelines (one born of SkyNet and one from something called Legion) doing battle over the fate of a young woman who is somehow, again, key to the future. 

Which brings us to the nicely-drawn characters in the most female-centric movie in the series (with a last-act twist to match). In Mexico City, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), is an industrial worker who suddenly finds herself targeted by a Rev 9 (Gabriel Luna), with shape-shifting powers and the ability to split into two combatants. She’s rescued from imminent termination by an “augment,” a future woman named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) who’s been cybernetically enhanced with super senses and strength.

Their flight is aided by the now-much-older, war-weary Sarah Connor, who has spent the years since T2 as a sort of “Terminator terminator,” following mysterious texts that alert her to time anomalies and the delivery of more mechanical assassins.

A meet-up with the last existing T-800 from the SkyNet timeline (Schwarzenegger), and the fellowship is complete.

Arnold has some fun with this latest portrayal (at 72 and bulkier, he still has the moves of an action star), and the movie takes a somewhat comical existential moment to consider whether a sentient killing machine that has fulfilled its mission with no further instructions from a nonexistent future would develop free will. (Never mind that the T-800s should cease to exist once the future that created them does likewise. It’s not like the script is paradox-free).

There is also a nod to current events as the flight from the Rev 9 takes our fugitives across the Mexican border where they are detained along with the rest of the folks who, in another Trumpian timeline, would be stopped by a wall. Needless to say, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security proves ill-equipped to handle homicidal androids.

With all these interesting left turns, chases and close-calls, the CG meltdown in the last act is a bit much, with planes crashing into each other, power plants exploding and robots falling from the sky and dusting themselves off. It all seems a little commonplace these days, a digital fireworks display that is practically an action film trope. 

The tense last acts of the first two Terminator movies had no such crutch to fall back on, and remain the among the most thrilling climaxes in the sci-fi/action genre. It may be the one area where the original films are ill-served by this otherwise successful call-back.

Terminator: Dark Fate. Directed by Tim Miller. Starring Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton. Opens wide, Thursday, October 31.