With six films, a TV series, and countless video games, books, and comics under its belt, the Terminator franchise is one of the most prolific and recognizable action franchises in media. While the series has yet to have another entry as groundbreaking and universally loved as the first two films, that didn’t stop Deadpool director Tim Miller from trying.
His product, Terminator: Dark Fate, is a film that goes back to the basics of why everyone loved the Terminator franchise in the first place. While it isn’t perfect, the film still resembles what we have come to know and love of the Terminator franchise. This might be because James Cameron, the original Terminator director, had a hand in production.
The film is set twenty-seven years after the events of Terminator 2, where a new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) is sent from the future by evil tech masterminds Skynet. His mission is to “terminate” a young woman named Dani (Natalia Reyes) and her friends. Luckily, we have the Human Resistance formed from previous films to come to their aid in this fight for the future. The resistance is led by classic Terminator heroine Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Carl, a man revealed to be a redeemed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Compared to the rest of the films, this one aligns itself more closely with the original two in terms of quality and enjoyment. As a fan of the first two, I believe it is safe to say that this is the third Terminator movie that I have always wanted to see. Unlike the last three, this film tweaked the originals’ formula only by a little bit, unlike the large-scale changes made by Terminator 3, Salvation and Genisys, and it works phenomenally. While there are some shaky moments in the rather forced jokes in the dialogue and some of the unrealistic and incredibly over-the-top action, the movie manages to keep all of the interesting aspects of the disappointing sequels and make them work better than they did back then.
One of the best parts about this film is the introduction of the new female characters. Tim Miller isn’t one to shy away from making strong female characters in his previous cinematic ventures, and here they’re even better than Negasonic Teenage Warhead was in Deadpool. While Natalia Reyes’ Dani fits the trope of the “reluctant action hero” to a T, she is much more developed and complex than your typical female action protagonists – her story has nothing to do with romance, and she behaves more like a human than a plot device. Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cyborg soldier from the 2040s sent to the past to protect Dani and her younger self, is just like her in that sense, and the their exchanges make up some of the movie’s best moments. It’s like the film took what was great about Sarah Connor and added more characters like her to complement.
While I had extremely low expectations due to Terminator: Genisys being, well, Terminator: Genisys, I am genuinely happy that there’s finally a good Terminator film after a bunch of poor sequels. Even with the altered timeline, fans of the Terminator franchise can still enjoy this film with its back-to-basics nature. It’s making me hope that the Terminator will be back, because this film was much improved compared to the last two.
3/5 STARS