TERMINATOR: DARK FATE: Settles For Mediocrity

Like its titular assassins, the Terminator series never stops. Relentlessly throwing sequels and reboots at us for the past 35 years, if one doesn’t take, then they regroup and send another, methodically and patiently waiting for one of them to get the job done. That hasn’t really happened since Terminator 2: Judgement Day way back in 1991, but the strength of it and the series’ original, The Terminator, created such a reputation for novel action and techno-paranoia that fans still hope these movies can find those heights again.

But the world has changed around the Terminator series, with the state of action films and our relationship to technology so fundamentally different now that its original ethos feels not just tired but redundant if evoked. How, then, should the series move forward if it hopes to survive? That’s the question before every new Terminator film, and it’s one that Dark Fate is aware it must answer.

Unfortunately, what it comes up with is a weird mixture of revamping and rehashing, proving unable to fully let go of everything it needs to leave behind. It’s a step in the right direction, though, so while Dark Fate isn’t the savior the series needs, it is an adequate life raft.

Who Did What Now?

Perhaps Dark Fate’s smartest move is to erase everything after T2. It’s easy enough for a time travel series to do, and Dark Fate wastes little time getting the disappointing entries out of the way. There’s really only about five minutes devoted to it: a conversation between the still kicking ass Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and enhanced human soldier from the future, Grace (Mackenzie Davis). Connor explains that the events of T2 did stop Skynet, but her son/humanity’s savior was eventually killed anyway. Grace says that’s a great story, but a different AI rose, Legion, and judgement day is still on the calendar. So she’s come back to save Dani (Natalia Reyes), the new key figure in humanity’s resistance and hence target of a new Terminator.

Boom, a little rename and you’ve basically set up the exact same plot as the first movie, but this time with a modern, slightly darker wrinkle. It’s not hard for us nowadays to imagine technology completely taking over our lives. It’s already happened; it just hasn’t killed us yet. An offhand joke in Dark Fate makes our comfort with this new timeline’s assumption pretty clear: it’s not a matter of if it’s coming, but when.

Since 1991, we’ve lived through a supposed judgement day (did anyone else’s house have extra water stored ‘just in case’ Y2K happened?). Now we’re years into vocal warnings about climate change, and our culture’s collective unease about our future is pretty self-evident. Now is a great time for Terminator to swoop in with reconfigured themes on facing the end of the world, and it keyed in on a pretty great approach.

Unfortunately, it fails to have much to say beyond that setup, with that thread taking a backseat to a feminist retcon so obvious that it’s laughable it’s not “revealed” until the third act. A winning story was right there, it was right in front of them, and they just didn’t follow through.

That’s basically an encapsulation of this movie’s mediocrity: good setup, lazy ending. It never goes completely off the rails, everything is wrapped up in one way or another, but it never fully commits to challenging the fundamental ideas of this series like it needs to.

The Decay Of Its Greatest Strength

While the story almost got the updates this series so desperately needed, it seems updates never even came into consideration for Dark Fate’s action sequences. A staple of the series and perhaps its greatest legacy, the effects of The Terminator and T2 were groundbreaking and allowed for action that audiences were stunned to see. We expect these films to deliver that sensation, but they’ve recently fallen into repetition and callbacks, and Dark Fate is no exception.

Let me posit this: the first two Terminator movies stood out because modern effects were in their infancy and those films were at the cutting edge. The effects those films gave birth to and the mind-bending action those effects allowed for is now commonplace. We see weird creatures morphing and melting and poking stabby things out of their body on a near weekly basis. Can a Terminator movie achieve the same jawdropping effect on audiences by sticking to action techniques that are now so widely replicated?

If Dark Fate is any example, that’s a big old no. It delivers plenty of Terminator action, but this new Terminator is basically up to the same tricks we’ve seen before. The familiarity means these sequences are pretty ho-hum and don’t come anywhere near the excitement the first two films elicited. Perhaps, instead of envisioning the next Terminator model as something that builds upon its known abilities, it’s time to envision a Terminator model that has new capabilities, ones that give rise to novel bits of action that we aren’t seeing every day.

It’s a big ask, I know, but that’s the standard the series set for itself. And I think, in the end, audiences would be okay with moving away from from seeing a Terminator’s eye shot out for the millionth time if what you give them instead is the excitement people felt in 1991 seeing a liquid Terminator for the first time.

Finding The Fun In Between

I know, I know, I’ve barely even mentioned Linda Hamilton. Well guess what, she’s back! Sarah Connor, the character who pushed women in action films to new territory is now the matriarch of a female-centric group of fighters, reinvigorating yet another familiar thread for the franchise.

And she’s not the only familiar face. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as another T-800, one that’s taken on the weirdly normal name Carl, which allows him to play up the deadpan humor he’s so brilliant at. One assumes that the film’s laughs are the influence of director Tim Miller (Deadpool), and honestly, they might be the movie’s saving grace.

Perfectly calibrated to not interrupt the movie’s flow, they’re often just a chuckle-worthy one-liner inserted here and there, but these moments allow the impressive assemblage of actors to build their characters into people you care about.

One of my biggest laughs of the year is Schwarzenegger lecturing about drapes. Hamilton and Davis’ bickering binds the group into a pseudo-family. Reyes, unfortunately, gets the short stick in this department, but she still manages to get across some endearing pluckiness. There’s attention here, from all involved, to make these rounded characters, and that means you care whether they make it through the incessant carnage. A lesser film, and lesser actors, may have presented some muscle-bound heroes and left it at that. Instead, Dark Fate makes sure they’re more than cogs in a feminist franchise redo, and that backs up the ultimate message it’s going for.

Terminator: Dark Fate: Conclusion

Dark Fate is a tentative move in the right direction for the series, acknowledging that the formula must be changed without fully pulling the rug out from under fans. This is a franchise that made its name on innovation, so familiarity is a death knell. Dark Fate does just enough top provide hope for the future, but there’s still a long way to go.

Do you think Dark Fate did enough to stand out in the franchise? Let us know in the comments!

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