Review: Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

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Terminator: Dark Fate is a course correction for a franchise that has grown increasingly muddled over the years. Not that the Terminator franchise was ever focused on presenting a clear account of its time travel mechanics; even James Cameron’s original The Terminator (1984) had a time travel plotline rife with paradox. But the sequels, post-Judgment Day, grew increasingly more incoherent, until 2015’s amiable but baffling sequel/reboot Terminator Genisys made the franchise’s timeline completely incomprehensible. Understandably, the producers behind the franchise saw the need to repair it, and instead of trying to untangle Genisys’ threads, they brought back James Cameron and tried to set the franchise back on course.

The result is Dark Fate, which ignores all the films post-Judgment Day in order to reestablish the core appeal of the franchise and avoid the increasingly-convoluted timeline. It mostly works. While all of the non-James Cameron sequels have their moments—yes, even the much-maligned Terminator Salvation is a decent post-apocalyptic actioner—none of them draw on the terror of the Terminator itself as the original two films did. The later films got too distracted with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconography as an action star, the worldbuilding of the future, and the paradoxes at the centre of the film’s time travel conceit. 

Dark Fate, directed by Deadpool’s Tim Miller from a story by Cameron himself, narrows the focus by going back to the chase-movie structure of the original two films. Much as Star Wars: The Force Awakens repeats story beats from A New Hope, Dark Fate repeats the broad strokes of the original Terminator. It has, for example, a future protector, Mackenzie Davis’s human super-soldier, Grace, sent back in time to save a young woman, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), from a Terminator (Gabriel Luna) sent back to kill her. Like Sarah Conner before her, Dani is vital to the future resistance against the machines. The wrinkle here is that Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) shows up to help Grace fight the new, upgraded T-1000-like shapeshifting Terminator known as a Rev-9, and she eventually recruits a T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to help in the fight.

Miller and the film’s writers, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, lean into the female focus of Cameron’s original films. Not only does the film relish Linda Hamilton’s return as Sarah Conner, but the new characters that serve the functions that Kyle Reese and John Conner did in the originals are women here as well. The filmmakers have elevated Cameron’s championing of action heroines and essentially jettisoned any male presence from the franchise, aside from Schwarzenegger’s aging Terminator.

The filmmakers also waste no time getting to the action, which is a big part of the film’s appeal. No sooner do Grace and the Rev-9 appear in the past than they’re doing battle in the factory where Dani works in Mexico City. Soon enough Grace and Dani are on the run with Sarah Conner and the T-800, crossing the US-Mexico border, and trying to figure out a way to kill the Rev-9, which is seemingly capable of perpetually healing itself.

The story is structured around a series of set-pieces that escalate the action and showcase the Rev-9’s extensive abilities, much like Cameron’s originals or Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films. There’s a factory fight at the beginning, a chase on a freeway, an assault in a border detention centre, and even a fight aboard an airplane. None of them are as memorable as the chase through the flood control channels of the San Fernando Valley in T2, but they’re inventive and solid action sequences, especially when considering that most blockbuster action in 2019 is indiscriminate, murky, and dull. Miller uses occasional slow-motion like he did in Deadpool to convey the strength and speed of Grace and the Rev-9. It’s effective in small doses and shows how powerful these characters are. 

But more effective than any individual formal approach is the sheer intensity and frequency of the action. One of the remarkable aspects of the original film is that the Terminator is hunting Sarah from the moment he arrives in 1984. And once he finds her in the nightclub, every ensuing scene alternates between a chase scene and a tense reprieve until he reappears. Miller treats the Rev-9 much the same way. It is relentless from the moment it appears and Miller doesn’t allow any scene to lose the tension created by his constant hunting of Dani. He’s always coming to get her.

It also helps that the Rev-9 is very much an update to Robert Patrick’s T-1000, the most terrifying Terminator in the franchise. Like the T-1000, the Rev-9 is slim, calm, and seemingly friendly. And even more than Patrick, Luna’s soft eyes and boyish smile hit home how the Rev-9 is a true facsimile of a human being: an appealing shell meant to lull you into letting your guard down. As well, the Rev-9 has some terrifying upgrades, most notably its ability to split its shape-shifting nanobot form from its endoskeleton, creating two figures in the process. This means double the danger in any encounter with the Rev-9.

It’s not innovative to have a sequel simply amplify the stakes of the original, but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective. Dark Fate operates in this way. It takes the elements of The Terminator that made it a successful science-fiction chase film and replicates them on a bigger scale. It also plays into the primal power of the Terminator at every turn. Since the franchise has become one of the icons of Hollywood science-fiction, it’s easy to forget that the Terminator is a horror movie monster transported into a science-fiction thriller. It’s as emotionless, ruthless, and unstoppable as Michael Myers, but the science-fiction setting also adds the wrinkle of it being a creature of the future: a portent of the unstoppable apocalypse that is to come.

Thus, the terror of the individual Terminator is amplified by it representing an existential terror: the certainty of humanity’s doom at its own hands. That’s the “Dark Fate” of the film’s title: the idea that regardless of the fact that Sarah and John Conner were able to stop Judgment Day in T2, humanity is inevitably doomed to destroy the world through technological advancement and scientific hubris. Terminator: Dark Fate returns this existential gloom to the franchise and once again makes the Terminator an avatar of death. It doesn’t reinvent the franchise or elevate the material beyond its genre appeal. It simply boils it down to its essential emotions and once again makes it a story of a young woman on the run from a world that will inevitably kill her.

7 out of 10

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019, USA)

Directed by Tim Miller; written by David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, based on a story by James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee, Josh Freidman, David Goyer, and Justin Rhodes, based on characters created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd; starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta.