The good news is that Dark Fate is the best Terminator movie since Terminator 2. The bad news is that that’s like saying your sixth root canal went better than the previous three. The Terminator story logically concluded with T2 and the series has been lumbering along in a death march ever since, trying to justify additional films due to the name recognition of the brand. The new film brings back original star Linda Hamilton and original director James Cameron (as a producer) and pulls a Halloween by ignoring all other sequels since T2, but just ends up being a pointless rehash of the first two movies. In retrospect, that probably shouldn’t have been a surprising outcome. There will be no spoilers until I put a spoiler alert, which is needed because I have some serious problems with the story here.
An evil robot is sent from the future to assassinate the future leader of the human race, while a good robot is sent back in time to stop the evil robot. No, I’m not talking about the plot of Terminator 2, I’m actually talking about this fucking thing. This is pretty goddamn close to being a remake of T2 (and T3 also had the same plot) and I started losing interest once I realized that I was watching the same fucking thing again. How many times can this exact same scenario happen? When will someone in the future get the idea to send an army instead of just sending one machine at a time? For fuck’s sake, your plan isn’t working, try something different. Even the robots in this are odd combinations of the characters in the first two movies. The bad guy in the first movie was a solid metal machine and the second one was liquid metal. The bad guy in this one? Liquid metal on top of solid metal. The good guy in the first one was human and the second one was a machine. The good guy in this one? A human augmented with machine parts. Did you like the ending of the second one in the factory? What to see it again, except not as good? Well, you’re fucking going to. I feel like the filmmakers are mocking me with the lack of effort here.
The big attraction for longtime fans is the return of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and, in that regard, the film delivers. In my opinion, Sarah should have remained the focal point of this series over the years and having Hamilton back as a badass, grizzled Terminator hunter makes this feel like the first real Terminator movie since the second one. I actually care about this character and having Hamilton back gives the film an emotional anchor that the last few movies lacked. I’m a huge Arnold fan and its always good to see the guy, but he really didn’t need to be in this for any reason other than familiarity. The new characters are fine and well-performed, but I just don’t really care about them. They are all just clones of characters from the first two movies (John Connor is now a Mexican girl that fills the exact same function) and, despite the best efforts of the actors, I just don’t give a shit.
I will also say that the film’s action sequences and special effects are fairly solid. Thankfully, this entry returns the series to its R-rated roots and the villain is consequently more threatening than in recent films. The visuals involved with the villain shifting from solid to liquid form are often pretty damn cool and the film’s chase scenes are well-done. The action scenes often go on for too long (the movie should be about 20 minutes shorter) and it is overly-reliant on computer effects, but the action is overall pretty solid by 2019 standards.
SPOILER ALERT….If you are a fan of the series, you may be wondering a couple of things, such as: Where is John Connor? or How is Arnold still around after melting in T2? Well, let me tell you about some things that pissed me the fuck off. John is killed during the opening credit scene. The opening fucking credit scene. One of the main characters of the second film, the focal point of the series’ entire goddamn plot, is killed in the motherfucking opening credit scene. As a huge fan of T2, the filmmakers might as well have brought a donkey into the theater and had it kick me in the balls. Why the fuck would you kill off John to replace him with some new character that fulfills the exact same goddamn purpose? Was Edward Furlong too fucking busy? How did John die, you ask? Well, a few years after the events of T2 (so we’re still in the 1990s), another terminator (also looking like Arnold) shows up to kill him. Since Skynet was stopped at the end of T2, that terminator ends up stuck in the 1990s, hence how Arnold is in this movie. And what the hell has he been doing for the last 20+ years? Well, that mindless killing machine developed a conscience and got himself a family in the form of a woman and her son. He acts like a husband, but their relationship is purely platonic because, you know, he’s a mindless killing machine. In 20 years, the woman has apparently never wanted sex, nor has she even noticed that he is a 400-pound cyborg. How the fuck does she not have questions? This is so stupid that the movie even makes fun of it. You know what, movie? If you know it’s stupid, then don’t fucking do it. You don’t need to include such asinine bullshit just so you can put Arnold on the poster for the movie.
END SPOILERS. It’s time for this series to end. This movie isn’t even bad compared to the last few sequels and it still annoyed the shit out of me. I love the first movie and have fond memories of watching it repeatedly in my friend’s basement when we were little kids. Terminator 2 was the highest-grossing movie of 1991 and it was the perfect movie for the time. It had Arnold at the peak of his popularity, it had special effects that we had never seen before, it had that Guns N’ Roses tie-in at their peak….. Terminator 2 is basically a perfect time capsule of 1991. But to paraphrase the great Billy Joel: Arnold and Linda went back to the green, but you can never go back there again. Now I’m going to go listen to Use Your Illusion 2 and pretend the last 28 years never happened, which is pretty much how I spend my time anyway.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator:_Dark_Fate#/media/File:Terminator_Dark_Fate_poster.jpg