Released: November 2019
Director: Tim Miller
Rated R
Run Time: 128 Minutes
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Genre: Action/Science Fiction
Cast:
Linda Hamilton: Sarah Connor
Arnold Schwarzenegger: T-800/Carl
Mackenzie Davis: Grace
Natalia Reyes: Dani Ramos
Gabriel Luna: Gabriel/Rev-9
For a movie buff, these are interesting times we live in. We’ve got franchises that date back over 40 years that are still seeing new entries. Star Wars is coming up on 11 movies with Episode IX being released next month. The Alien franchise has about 8 movies to its name, if you include the Alien Vs. Predator films(I do, by the way). Rambo just had a new film back in September, and Ghostbusters is getting an official sequel to the original two films. So, why are we now seeing sequels to certain franchises that have been around for decades? Hard to say, but I’m guessing that film-makers want to take these older franchises and hand them off to a new generation of film-goers and film-makers. Understandable, if sometimes ill-advised. The Terminator franchise is among my favorite franchises in science fiction. The original two films set a standard for the genre that is very difficult to beat. Terminator 2 itself set a high bar for what a sequel should and can be. Sadly, the franchise has been in a bit of a downward spiral over the past 20 years. Now, we have a new entry: Terminator: Dark Fate. Is this film a worthy follow-up, or is it just another generic action film in an ailing franchise?
Terminator: Dark Fate opens in 1998 as Sarah Connor and her son, John, are enjoying an afternoon at a beach in Mexico, when they come under attack from a T-800 model Terminator. 22 years later, a strange woman falls out of a mysterious blue orb of energy that appears over a free-way. The woman’s name is Grace, and she’s arrived to protect young Dani Ramos, who is supposed to be the new leader of the human resistance in the future. At the same time, another orb appears and out drops a new vicious breed of Terminator, the Rev-9. Dani Ramos and her brother are attacked at a factory by the new machine when Grace intervenes and tries to rescue Dani. Escaping the Rev-9, they encounter Sarah Connor, who has been hunting Terminators for the past two decades. Is any of this sounding familiar? If you’ve seen the original two films, then you know exactly where this is going. It’s the same kind of story that’s been told in previous films. Exact same kind of story with almost the exact same kind of resolution. I’m not saying that it’s bad, it’s just that they really didn’t take any risks outside of the opening sequence. Even then, it was kind of….eh. Instead of Skynet, they are fighting Legion. From a story-telling standpoint, Dark Fate is not quite the Terminator film that I was anticipating, and many hardcore fans of the franchise weren’t. This is a Terminator for the next generation. It really is, and I have no problems with it. It does skip over the previous three films, so that’s a plus. I’m curious as to where they are going to go with it.
One of the reasons why I was interested in seeing this movie was the fact that Linda Hamilton came back as Sarah Connor. She was absolutely fantastic. She owns the character and knows her better than anybody else. Her reactions to everything going on around her is exactly the kind of thing that would expect from the character. She’s still the bad-ass that she was in Terminator 2, even she is older. She’s still got it. Arnold Schwarzenegger puts in his best performance in a Terminator film. His character arc is actually VERY interesting. How his character of Carl has evolved since the beginning of the film is actually pretty nifty. The new characters are also fairly interesting. Mackenzie Davis plays Grace, an augmented human from 2042. Her character is super strong and fast, but it comes at a cost of her metabolism exhausting her after extreme bursts of energy. She’s great. Not only can she handle the action sequences extremely well, but her character has more depth to her than the film trailers would have you believe. Natalia Reyes plays Dani Ramos, the young girl that Grace was sent to protect. Dani is this film’s John Connor, or rather the role that John Connor was supposed to be. I think Natalia did pretty well with what she was given, but what she was given wasn’t that great. She can handle her own amongst the other characters in the film, but she feels kind of average as a character. Gabriel Luna plays the new Terminator, the Rev-9. He was fine, but when stacked up to somebody like Robert Patrick from T2, he just doesn’t feel as threatening. Overall, the acting is pretty good across the board with Linda and Arnold being the obvious standouts.
I have to admit, that I actually really like the new Rev-9 Terminator. I had my issues with Gabriel Luna not coming across as really threatening in his performance, but the character is definitely not something you want to tangle with. The Rev-9 is not just the endo-skeletion, but it also has this new liquid-metal covering that operates as a separate entity, which means double trouble for our characters. It borrows some elements from the first Terminator 3, but it’s still its own thing. It looks fantastic as far as the actual machine goes. Some of the CGI work is actually rather impressive, if not groundbreaking. In fact, there’s nothing truly groundbreaking about what this film is doing. It doesn’t really push new technology as far as visual effects are concerned, and in fact, a lot of the action sequences in the film are CGI-heavy. Honestly, I don’t think they could’ve done those scenes without CGI, at least not safely, but some of that CGI-work is pretty shoddy. The action sequences are very thrilling and you can see what’s going on, but some of the CGI feels unfinished. I also don’t think there’s an action sequence that comes across as iconic like in the original two films. In the second film, you had a lot of really cool action set-pieces that stood out from anything that you’ve seen before, such as Arnold shooting the frozen T-1000 into a million pieces. There’s nothing like that here, and that’s a shame.
Is Terminator: Dark Fate better than the previous three films? Yeah, but like a lot of people have said, the bar those films set was so low, that the only direction that Dark Fate could was up. The question you should be asking is this: Is Dark Fate a worthy sequel to Terminator 2? Hard to say. It’s going to be up to you, the audience, to figure that one out for yourself. A lot of people have compared this film to The Force Awakens, and I’m not really seeing the comparison. In fact, I don’t think that is a proper comparison. If you’re going to compare films, than you need to compare Dark Fate with Alien 3. It’s not a bad movie, far from it, but it does things that’s going to piss off a lot of fans. The opening sequence to Dark Fate is one of those things that people are not going to be happy about. I’m a very forgiving fan when it comes to movies, so it’s because of that quality that I can recommend people to check out Terminator: Dark Fate, but I can also understand people who prefer the original two films over everything else that’s been released. So do I, but I’m not dismissing any the previous films entirely, because each film has its own strengths. Dark Fate, I think, is absolutely worth watching, if only for Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everything else is icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned. I like the new female characters. They are mostly well-written and strongly performed, and we have a vicious Terminator that really does seem indestructible. So, yeah, Dark Fate was a lot better than I was expecting it to be, but it’s far from great. It’s definitely got some issues that bring it down a couple of notches, but I would say definitely check it out in theaters.
My Final Recommendation: There is no fate but what we make for ourselves, except when you’re making Terminator movies. 8/10.