‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ by Tim Miller
Review by Peter Belsito
This is a sequel to a long-running franchise.
There’ve been — what? — five versions before this?
With much time travel in these Terminator movies, which have always trafficked in alternate futures and pasts — there’s a temptation to include a recapitulation of where things stand before getting started and what’s happened before.
We’ll skip that.
We’ll let Terminator: Dark Fate, a satisfyingly solid sixth installment in the sci-fi series about various Terminators (i.e., cyborg super-assassins from the future), stand on its own virtues. It works or at least I enjoyed and followed it. I saw but did not reflect nor was I bothered by recalling any of the previous 5 films. This one worked.
Dark Fate is only a sequel to the first two films, both of which were directed by James Cameron. Cameron is again involved here, as a producer and story consultant, but he didn’t have anything to do with the third, fourth or fifth films.
In other words, you can pretty much ignore all previous films and storylines, including the ever-shifting date of the so-called Judgment Day event, around which so much of the series pivots. Director Tim Miller (Deadpool) has hit a reset button, and he finds just the right mix of action, suspense and, when needed, old-school comic relief.
Dark Fate picks up in the current day, more than 20 years after the events of T2.
The actions of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) — assisted by a “good” Terminator in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger — have averted the dystopian future that once loomed: a world of murderous man-hunting machines, controlled by a self-aware artificial intelligence called Skynet.
Another good guy, or gal, in this case, is a bionically augmented human named Grace (Mackenzie Davis of Tully) who also comes from the future to protect and save the girl.
The plot of the new film closely parallels the plots of the first two, and involves the appearance of two rival warriors from the future: one sent to kill a human character, a girl (Natalia Reyes) — who, naturally, holds the fate of the world in her hands — and the other to protect her. The girl innocent here is destined to be a great heroine and only the two future visitors (one good, one bad) know that.
Here, the bad guy, played by Gabriel Luna, is an ever changing bad guy / monster version of what we’ve seen before: a shape-shifting, liquid-metal automaton called the Rev-9, a Terminator who can split apart into two separate heavies.
The first is a flesh-like robot, and the second its skeletal innards.
Dark Fate wastes no time getting right down to business. Mere minutes into the film, the two battle bots, as it were, are going at each other.
Throughout the movie, some of the CGI special effects are pretty cool, as when Grace slices a housefly neatly in two, in slow motion, with a knife.
Dark Fate soon settles into a familiar groove, with the arrival of two pivotal characters from the first two films: Sarah, even more tough and badass than her appearance in 1991’s T2.
There’s also, to great dramatic effect, a new, surprisingly domesticated version of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model Terminator, who is calling himself Carl. He has been living, enjoying a countrified domestic life. No monster here but he quickly realizes his domestic bliss life is now over.
Sarah and Arnold together generate sparks and even some humor. By way of explaining his vast arsenal of weapons, Carl notes the likelihood of social anarchy, even without the catalyst of Doomsday.
Also,” he adds, in an Austrian-accented deadpan, “this is Texas.”
True to its title, there’s a subtext of fatalism to Dark Fate that lends the film, however much of it may repeat the first two, a new tone — one that is even more at war between optimism and cynicism.
Sarah Connor may have averted one dark version of the future, but another even darker destiny may be inevitable. But the film also strongly suggests, hope can spring eternal. In this version, it is leads there.
