OnScreen Review: "Terminator: Dark Fate"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Recently, I had a rip-roaring, knock-down, drag out fight with OnStage Blog founder Chris Peterson on the merits of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which will be available on the site in podcast form under the Movie Court feed. One of Chris’ (incorrect and woefully misguided) assertions was that outside of a few great visual moments there was no reason for The Last Jedi to exist. He also wondered whether critics (who praised the movie) cared about whether it fit into the larger mythology of the franchise. Ironically, these were the thoughts floating through my highly conflicted mind as I left the theater having seen Terminator: Dark Fate. It also left me thinking of another Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.
There was a considerable mending of fences that needed to be done by 20th Century Fox in the wake of two truly awful entries in the Terminator franchise. Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys essentially served as Judgment Day for Terminator IP, destroying what little goodwill was left among the fans of this franchise and leaving dwindling numbers of survivors in its aftermath who cared about its survival. Rather than read the writing on the wall, the plan was hatched to do a sequel that was a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, ignoring the last three movies (funny how they didn’t want audiences to ignore them at the time…). This is a tactic that has been employed more frequently in the last few years, but this started as far back as 2006 with Superman Returns, and perhaps there are even older examples.
Returning once again to the role he can’t seem to leave is Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800 Terminator, and also returning to the franchise is Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. Not to be outdone, James Cameron, writer and director of the first two entries of this franchise, is back in a production and story-related role. The old guard here is entrusted with shepherding the franchise into something of a smooth transition of power to a younger generation. Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) is a young woman being hunted by a new terminator, the REV-9 (Gabriel Luna), and an enhanced human being, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), is sent back in time to try to protect her and keep her alive. Also, Deadpool director Tim Miller is brought in to direct.
It is a good thing that the last three movies have essentially been thrown out. While Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was not as bad as the Salvation and Genisys, rebooting the timeline of events from after Judgment Day is the best move to make. It gives the film a chance to go in any direction it wants and make some bold choices, and it certainly does that in the first few minutes of the film (which includes a cameo from Edward Furlong).
Rebooting the timeline and getting creative with a new direction leads to some good news: Sarah and John Connor were successful in averting Judgment Day; they changed the future and saved billions of lives. Skynet never happens because of what they did in the Terminator 2. However, an equivalent to Skynet named Legion comes into existence later on down the line and it’s basically the same outcome only with some slightly different details about how humanity almost gets wiped out by the machines. Why the Legion robots from this new future look like the Skynet terminators takes some mental gymnastics that the film never gets into, though could probably easily be explained away.
There is a lot here that echoes previous elements of the Terminator franchise. The REV-9 Terminator is an amalgam of the T-800 and the T-1000, where the liquid part can separate from the metal exoskeleton; essentially a 2-in-1 Terminator. Dani is a combination of Sarah and John Connor as the person targeted by the machine sent back in time. Even Grace can be seen as a mix of Kyle Reese and the T-800 sent back to protect John in T2. Similar to The Force Awakens, these new characters find some analog to previous characters. In this comparison, Sarah Connor is definitely in the Han Solo role from The Force Awakens, helping out the youngsters in this new battle against a familiar adversary. It is a welcome return for Linda Hamilton, who really was the lifeblood of the first two Terminator films because she was the central human in the story.
As for Arnold, they have incorporated ageing into the T-800’s appearance out of necessity. He is no spring chicken, but he still gets some nice moments to shine and has some enjoyable lines of dialogue. It’s interesting that in all of these movies he plays a different Terminator each time; in a way, he gets to put slight variations on each performance. I wouldn’t say he’s a thespian, but that we’re six movies into this and he is still able to give some variation on the character(s) is a testament to him.
Dark Fate is actually a pretty solid action movie. These Terminator movies have always been a chase movie in some capacity, and Miller and his crew have done a good job of executing that. There are plenty of nitpicks to be had with continuity, but the film doesn’t rest often enough to allow you to dwell too long on as the story pushes ahead at a steady pace.
And yet, here is where it all gets complicated. As good of a movie as Terminator: Dark Fate is, I walked out of the movie more convinced than ever that they never should have made another sequel after T2. Try as it might to paper over the last three films, it ultimately can’t undo that original sin of making any movie beyond T2. That movie had the perfect ending for the franchise, and they could not let it be. The draw to go back to the well was too strong. The toothpaste cannot go back into that bottle.
Whether it is Rise of the Machines/Salvation/Genisys or Dark Fate and whatever potential sequels they may have planned on the heels of this one, they cannot undo the fact that sequels exist where they really should not exist. Everyone involved, filmmakers and audiences, would have been better off if the last we saw of the Terminator was Arnold being lowered into that vat of molten metal.
The real problem is that the first two films are so much a product of their time. They were created in a pre-internet world where they could not have envisioned the interconnectedness of the modern world or how AI and other technological advances would be looked at in 30 years. They are artifacts of their time and place, and practically all attempts to update them to make them more relevant to the technology of today has never worked. And this movie is only marginally interested in even addressing those issues. It’s much more interested in making commentary on immigration and female empowerment, clearly it doesn’t have the capacity to do all three.
I went into Terminator: Dark Fate with low expectations from the previous two movies, but also slightly elevated from the early buzz around the movie. It exceeded my wildest expectations, easily clearing the very low bar of being better than the previous two movies in the franchise. But it also hardened my opinion that the franchise needs to die, and everyone needs to move on from this IP. Given the reluctant of studios to take risk and their insistence on bleeding every ounce of profit from an existing property, I suspect that will not be the case, even as the built-in audience for a Terminator movie dwindles.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars