Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) – Review

When a franchise deals heavily with time travel, each additional sequel can easily cause the wheels to wobble until they eventually fall off. Case in point, Terminator Genisys, but with Terminator: Dark Fate, producer James Cameron and director Tim Miller took a page out of Halloween (2018) by ignoring the existence of unwanted sequels and bringing back an iconic character. Does this work or do the wheels not only wobble off but explode into a fiery cataclysm?

In this film, our new protagonist is Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), an average working woman trying to make a living in Mexico City, that is until an advanced Terminator known as a Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna) arrives and attempts to kill her. Luckily for her, a cybernetically augmented human named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) has also been sent from the future, with her mission to protect Dani at all costs. So basically Cameron, Miller and screenwriter David Goyer have combined the plot of the first two Terminator films to make this entry — which, to be fair, worked really well for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, so I guess we can’t fault them too much — but here we have the added wrinkle of Dani and Grace being aided by a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who arrives in the nick of time to rescue them from the pursuing Rev-9.

Girl Power!

But how are Terminators being sent back to the present if Judgement Day had been successfully stopped way back in 1991? Well, it turns out mankind seems really hell-bent on causing a robot apocalypse, so even though Sarah and company had stopped the formation of Skynet, the military later created a cyberwarfare system called Legion, an artificial intelligence that one day decided to wipe humanity off the globe. Dani is considered a threat to Legion’s future and thus, she has been targeted for termination. But can these three strong women stand a chance against a Terminator that consists of the robotic endoskeleton of the T-800 as well as being covered in the mimetic alloy of the T-1000?  Maybe they could get a little hand.

He’s back!

Turns out that over the years, Sarah had been getting encrypted texts from a mysterious source, giving her the locations of arriving Terminators, allowing her to continue her “One-woman war” against the machines, but with the help of augmented Grace, they are able to track down her benefactor only to discover that it is a T-800 model Terminator, one that now lives under the name of Carl (Arnold Schwarzenegger). This Skynet retiree has taken up living with a woman and her kid and he hangs drapes for a living. Does this make any sense to anybody? Well, a time-stranded cyborg has to make a living somehow, so why not interior decorating? This leads to one of the film’s key problems: the Rev-9 doesn’t stand a chance against our heroes. We’ve got Grace, the super augmented human, the incredibly badass Sarah Connor, and now the classic T-800 to fight alongside them, which takes the threat level of the Rev-9 down a notch — even if it can separate its liquid metal self from its endoskeleton to fight as two separate Terminators — especially if you include Dani in the mix, as now it’s four-to-one in favour of our heroes, and two of them are almost a physical match to the Rev-9.

“Can I call for reinforcements?”

Stray Observations:

• For those of you who hated Newt being killed off at the beginning of Alien 3, you will most likely be pissed off with what happens in this movie.
• In The Terminator, Reese told Sarah, “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop … ever, until you are dead!” I guess he left out that part about once she’s dead it will most likely settle down to raise a family.
• We learn that Sarah has been spending her time between drinking binges by hunting down and killing Terminators, but how exactly was she doing this? Sarah Connor has proven herself to be a supreme badass, but the first two films clearly illustrated that taking out a Terminator is a group effort.
• And who exactly was sending these Terminators back for Sarah to fight? It can’t be Skynet because our heroes stopped it from existing back in 1991, so was the computer system known as Legion sending random Terminators after her for some reason, or were they after other  unexplained targets?
• Sarah shows up on the freeway to save Grace and Dani from the Rev-9, but how exactly did she know they’d be there? Carl was sending the information that gave her a heads up on where Terminators would arrive, but the freeway was nowhere near where the Rev-9 arrived in the present.
• Carl has a pet dog, but wasn’t it established that dogs didn’t like cyborgs?

Carl, a kinder, gentler killer robot from the future.

That all aside, if you go into Terminator: Dark Fate hoping to see some amazing action set-pieces, you will most likely leave happy, as the film certainly does supply a decent amount of them — though the big opening freeway chase is never really topped by what follows — and the scenes between Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger are excellent as they provide intense drama (what with her traumatic history with this particular T-800), and these two characters also give us some of the film’s funniest moments as well. I also quite enjoyed Mackenzie Davis as this augmented soldier; she managed to infuse a good amount of pathos into her character, as well as giving us great fight sequences that were particularly spectacular, but this, unfortunately, also highlighted just how uninteresting Dani was as a character. Script-wise, actress Natalia Reyes is not given much to work with here, so I don’t fault her for how bland Dani turned out — one need not look further than screenwriter David Goyer to find blame for this — and if one can look past such things, as well as the film’s nonsensical continuity and even dumber take on time travel, you could find yourself having a grand ole time watching Terminator: Dark Fate, just don’t expect there to be a next chapter in the Terminator saga.

“I doubt we’ll be back.”