Movie Review: Revisiting 'Terminator Dark Fate'

Terminator is Frankenstein's Monster of movie franchises. Every few years, a new Dr Frankenstein emerges to attempt to reanimate the rotting corpse of this franchise and ends up creating yet another diminished, desperate copy of something that was once great. Terminator Dark Fate is the latest attempt to resurrect this moribund, hard luck franchise, and like the sequels and failures that came before it, it is yet another fading, rotten, copy of what was once great.

Terminator Dark Fate stars Natalie Reyes as Dani Ramos, the new version of John Connor, a woman who will grow up to play a major role in the fate of humanity and who must be protected by someone from the future sent to the past. In this case, our time traveling hero is Grace (Mackenzie Davis, a major step down from her brilliant role in Tully in 2018), a human who has been enhanced by technology in a way that makes her nearly the equal of the new style of Terminator.

That new style of Terminator, sent back in time to kill Dani, is Terminator Rev 9, silently and quite flatly portrayed by Gabriel Luna. Where previous Terminator models were either just robots with human skin, ala the T-800, or moldable metallic goo, ala Robert Patrick's T-1000, the Rev-9 is both Robot and Goo. The Rev-9 can split itself into robot form and goo form for 2 on 1 attacks against their target. The filmmakers have now created a version of the Terminator that has any power it needs to have in order to move the plot along. Rather than call him Rev-9, we should just call him plot convenience.

With the Rev-9 being anything it needs to be at any given moment, the filmmakers attempt to even the odds by bringing back the legendary Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Sarah had once prevented the robot led Armageddon but history corrected itself and a new, future, robot Armageddon, has taken its place as if the Terminator franchise actually existed within the Final Destination franchise universe. Sarah now spends her time trying to anticipate where she can intervene again to prevent the new Armageddon.

Sarah has been helped by a mysterious person who sends her text messages just before new Terminator's arrive from the future so that she can be there to stop them. Though she is dubious about the source of her help, it comes in handy when the Rev-9 attacks and nearly kills Grace and Dani. Sarah appears out of the smoking ruins with a rocket launcher that slows the Rev-9 down long enough for the three to escape.

I will stop my plot description there. You know that Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as a T-800 but how that happens and his other relevance to the story as it plays, I will leave you to discover if you decide to spend your hard earned dollars on this once great, now desperately listless franchise. The going through the motions quality of Dark Fate stinks the most here. Schwarzenegger, Hamilton and even Executive Producer James Cameron are marketing based window dressing intended to tap those nostalgia dollars that drive far too much of Hollywood film-making.

The stinking, rotting, corpse of the Terminator franchise keeps coming back to life solely to poke us all in the side and say 'hey, remember this thing you used to enjoy, it's still sort of here and it needs your money.' No, they aren't going to give you anything for that money other than rehashing your nostalgia, but that's often enough for most audiences who prefer having their memories microwaved and served to them as musty leftovers.

The microwave chef cooking up this latest Terminator stew is director Tim Miller who made the first Deadpool movie. Miller became a hot property after Deadpool briefly became the highest grossing R-Rated movie of all time but since then it's become clear how much Ryan Reynolds meant to that franchise and it appears to be far more than Mr Miller. Since leaving Deadpool before the hit sequel, Miller has acted as Producer of the widely Sonic the Hedgehog movie to middling success, and he's directed this lifeless marketing corpse of a Terminator movie, Dark Fate.

In fairness, the direction of Terminator Dark Fate isn't all that bad. The movie looks fine and the action is solid and well-produced. The CGI creations in Terminator Dark Fate live up to the technology and have a seamless quality to them that many modern, mass appeal, monster action movies might envy. There are plenty of good things about Terminator Dark Fate except the fact that it exists at all.

The story of Terminator Dark Fate stinks, it's rotten. The story of Dark Fate exists only as a cynical marketing ploy to extract money from the public that still holds fond memories of the past Terminator movies. The Terminator franchise is akin to the arena rock tours of bands like REO Speedwagon and Styx, familiar songs from once loved bands played at an extensive volume. Some of the band members are different but we still have the lead singers. Terminator is an aging nostalgia act just interminably playing the hits.

Terminator Dark Fate recycles the tropes of Terminator 2 but this time, John Connor is a girl. That's the level of innovation we get here. Mix in a female version of Kyle Reese in Mackenzie Davis's Grace and we have what the owners of the Terminator intellectual property consider innovative storytelling. The reality is that the screenplay simply performs a not so sly mashup of the first two Terminator movies and calls it Dark Fate.

I'm perhaps being to hard on the Terminator franchise. It's far from the only zombied franchise in Hollywood, one that gets rolled out to capitalize on our nostalgia with no further artistic ambition. It's just that Terminator 2: Judgment Day means more to me than most other cannibalized I.P. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the first time I ever had a favorite movie. T2 taught me what was possible in the world of movies. It showed me a vision of the technological future that my 16 year old mind could never have imagined.

People forget what a massive leap forward T2 was in terms of being a technological marvel and a monster blockbuster. T2 was game changing, it was for a moment, a flash point for the technological future of film. T2 told a strong story that transcended the original to expand on beloved characters and turn them into mainstream icons. It was a wonder of marketing but it was also genuinely innovative and entertaining.

All of the Terminator nonsense that has come since T2 has been a cynical cash grab. Any time Terminator has been revived since T2 it has been like a poor photocopy sold to us as something new and different. Terminator is now merely a marketing catchphrase and not a movie. The lack of effort that goes into innovating within this franchise is staggering with different filmmakers imposing ever more ludicrous twists on the original that are united only in bad ideas and that familiar title.

Terminator Dark Fate is probably the best movie that could have been made from the cynical attempts to continue to profit from the nostalgia of the Terminator Intellectual Property, but that's not saying much. It's not enough for me to recommend it. Terminator Dark Fate is simply too much of a warmed over leftover of a Terminator movie for me to recommend that you see it. The very existence of Dark Fate is an indictment of the Hollywood machine that keeps composting our nostalgia and serving it back to us