Review: Terminator: Dark Fate

As a rule, the less time a Terminator movie gives you to think about what’s going on, the better a Terminator movie it is. The first one has enough going on for half a dozen regular movies (why we never got a buddy cop series with cops Traxler and Vukovich is a mystery); every one since then has left something out and has suffered for it.

The good news is, Dark Fate is the first installment since Terminator 2: Judgment Day to fully embrace the series’ origins as an all-out chase movie, which also makes it the best installment since T2. Yes, that's a low bar to hurdle (and most of the other sequels have their good points); perhaps it's better to say it's the most cohesive Terminator film since the second one.

This story begins with John Connor (back briefly in CGI form) gunned down as a teenager so now the post-T2 sequels never happened and a distraught Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is still killing Terminators in her early-60s. So you know, win-win for everyone but John Connor.

Otherwise it’s the same deal as usual as Mexico City resident Dani (Natalia Reyes) has been targeted for termination by a Rev-9 model (Gabriel Luna) from the future, with only the mostly human time-traveller Grace (Mackenzie Davis) to protect her. Which is exactly the same dynamic from the first two films and honestly, how much you'll enjoy this depends in large part on how played out you think that dynamic is.

Fortunately director Tim Miller (Deadpool) does a good job with the lengthy action sequences - which you'd think would be the first thing a Terminator movie would get right, but there's a couple of sequels out there that prove that theory wrong - the performances are strong across the board (cranky old Sarah Connor is fun), and while the story isn’t remotely original it still works. 

As does the T-800 model Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger); he’s now a plaid-clad robot dad but his one-liners still kill. It's slightly surprising that a franchise originally built around the awesome spectacle of the human body jacked up to almost ridiculous extremes has become perhaps the foremost cinematic chronicle of one body's age-related decline and decay, but if you're a fan of increasingly complicated explanations for why a Terminator would get old and change his ways this one has a doozy.

- Anthony Morris