But that can’t entirely justify a Terminator sequel that equates “fixing the franchise” with “retelling T2, but with the original heroes now acting as village elders.” Beyond concerns with this in-vogue template for franchise revival, and I expect Matrix 4 movie to follow a similar formula, Terminator: Dark Fate is a disappointment in the sense that it runs on autopilot for the first and third acts.ĭark Fate is quite a bit better than the last two Terminator sequels, but that’s partially because it follows a set-in-stone formula almost to a tee. Yes, it’s great that the new savior is a young Hispanic woman and that the movie is primarily anchored by three action heroines. There’s nothing to match the bleakness of Rise of the Machine’s astonishing climax, the heartbreaking fate of Miles Dyson in Judgment Day, or initial horror of Terminator’s first hour. Lost in all of this ret-conning and table-setting is the sense that we’re getting a new story.
Legion is to Skynet as Blackbriar is to Treadstone as the First Order is to the Empire and, by golly, there’s even a subplot where the heroic Grace (a human from the future who got Robocop-ed into a cyborg) needs her “totally not chems(!)” to help her perform superheroic feats. The updates will remind you of Force Awakens and the Bourne movies, in that we get new names and new backstories for what essentially is the same evil organization. I appreciated that it was R-rated mostly just because it was an R-rated movie, even if the profanity felt a bit forced. They have more heroes to juggle this time around, so the pursuer is just there to be a punching bag and occasionally slice and dice random victims. Luna just isn’t a very compelling baddie. The confrontation results in collateral damage and a last-second rescue by the “protector” leads to a huge-scale vehicle chase as the first act comes to an end. We meet a young woman (Natalia Reyes) and her immediate family, and it’s minutes later before she is being stalked by a seemingly un-killable robot.
A new “bad” Terminator (Gabriel Luna) shows up, and we know they are bad because they kill with almost every step they take. A new “good” futuristic protector (Mackenzie Davis) shows up, and we know they are good because they go out of their way not to kill anyone. As polished and well-acted as these sequences are, there’s a painful and almost dull Mad Libs familiarity to the proceedings. In this case, Dark Fate gives the Terminator franchise back to Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.Īfter a jolting prologue, we go through the motions of a Terminator movie.
Like Halloween and Pirates 5, it remembers who the real star of the franchise is/was and who was always meant to just be a supporting player. It uses the safety of the franchise formula to give new demographics a chance to play out theses iconic journeys. To be fair, the Tim Miller-directed and James Cameron-produced sequel, which retcons everything after Judgment Day, also mimics the best parts of Creed and The Force Awakens. Like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Halloween, Terminator: Dark Fate solves the problem of franchise fatigue by indulging in obsessive nostalgia under the notion that “getting it right” merely means giving the oldest fans something that looks, feels and plays like the first installment(s).
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