Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

If you asked me to explain the multiple alternate and parallel timelines at play in The Terminator and its sequels, I’ll quickly change the subject. I don’t fully understand them myself, nor do I believe any of the filmmakers have tried to keep the continuity house in order. What’s more, though, all these disparate timelines are far and away the least interesting thing about any Terminator film, which are at their best when they mash up impressive action sequences with an unstoppable metallic killer whose immortality may as well be lifted from a slasher horror film’s antagonist. 

Case in point, Terminator: Dark Fate, which ignores most of the sequels and pretends – just like its predecessors, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys – that only the first two Terminator films “actually” happened. For a franchise that continually rewrites itself, Dark Fate is an oddball legacy sequel (or legacy-quel, if you will) that works much better when it’s not sidestepping its own prismatic past.

 

Years after Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) averted Judgment Day and the rise of Skynet, a new Terminator (Gabriel Luna) arrives in Mexico City to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Assuming Dani will be the mother of some new future messiah, Sarah rushes to her side, only to find the cybernetically-augmented Grace (Mackenzie Davis) has already time-travelled to save Dani from the forces of the future.

 

What separates Dark Fate from the other Terminator sequels is the return, supposedly triumphant, of franchise forefather James Cameron, who had no hand in the preceding three films. Here, Cameron is one of six credited writers, but one senses that his voice rings the loudest. Each of the trio of protagonists is that very specific Cameron brand of Strong Female Protagonist – tough and resilient with only enough emotional complexity to feel human; indeed, their heroic prowess seems measurable by the size of their firearms, a Freudian insight which feels almost retrograde for 2019. What felt innovative for the 1984 original (and Cameron’s Aliens two year later) now feels familiar and perhaps overdone. It’s as though Cameron has returned to the franchise both to save it and to insist upon reminding us (however spurious the claim) that he invented tough-as-nails heroines. 

 

In short, it’s the girlboss Terminator, even if it doesn’t quite explore that concept until very late in the film, when we finally learn why Dani is essential to the future (in a plot twist that is telegraphed either effectively or obviously, depending on where you’re sitting). Dark Fate asks, “What if, this time, a lady helped a lady save a lady?” Points for finding a new angle on an old favorite, I suppose, and kudos to the trio of women anchoring the film for all doing a credible and watchable job. Hamilton’s return is ostensibly the centerpiece of the film, even more so than Arnold Schwarzenegger reinventing his role as an aging Terminator, while Davis is a clever update on the Kyle Reese archetype. The film does her a disservice, though, to focus more on her physicality than her personality, given a brief flashback that only teases what she’s really like.

 

Then there’s Natalia Reyes, who has the closest thing to a character arc in the film, and it’s because of her emotional attunement as Dani that the film’s third-act twist lands at all. The film asks her to be John Connor and Sarah Conner and her own person all at once, and Reyes manages to take the film’s thin character sketch and finds a way to track Dani’s evolution from factory worker to future hero. I’d be just as happy to see any of these three come back for a future Terminator film, though I would recommend audiences not get too attached. We’ve been down this road before, with Terminator 3 and Salvation and Genisys each promising a new direction that never came to pass. 

 

We don’t, however, come to a Terminator film for internal logic or amazing new characters. After decades of fits and starts, we keep coming back for the bang-up action sequences, and on that count Dark Fate truly delivers. The film’s first act includes a freeway chase that’s very nearly as good as the one at the heart of The Matrix Reloaded (though I’m sure the proper antecedent is in Terminator 2, which I haven’t seen recently enough to recall with precision), and the pace never quite lets up. We’ve also got a claustrophobic sequence within an immigration detainment center, with a climax set amid an expansive pursuit over land, sea, and air. Throughout, director Tim Miller is constantly recalibrating the bar, both raising it for effect and narrowing his scope to give this action film a welcome degree of versatility. 

 

Dark Fate is very seldom boring, and perhaps the only sense of fatigue in the film is the idea that we’ve been told four times now that, no, no, this is what a Terminator film ought to do. At the core of the franchise is an irresistible – and proven – premise, though the box office receipts seem to be a tale of diminishing returns. As these films often remind us, the future is not written – and nor, it seems, are the sequels this film had been hoping to greenlight. Dark Fate may have portended its own future with its eponymous subtitle, casting the franchise prospects into uncertainty. 

Terminator: Dark Fate is rated R for “violence throughout, language, and brief nudity.” Directed by Tim Miller. Written by James Cameron, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman, David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray. Starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna.

The Terminator (1984)

When I announced in my review of Terminator Genisys that I’d never seen the original Terminator, you’d think I was confessing that I hadn’t had my requisite vaccinations. Such was the public outcry that I pushed James Cameron’s 1984 original to the top of my list. My immediate reaction was one of surprise (at the subsequent direction of the franchise) and then satisfaction. I liked it, but then I hadn’t expected I wouldn’t.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the eponymous Terminator, sent from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in 1984 before she can become the mother of future resistance leader John Connor. Her best defense is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a soldier with John Connor, also sent back in time, albeit to save Sarah from the Terminator.

There is something quite graceful about the simplicity of the plot, an art lost, I think, on today’s bigger-is-better cinematic culture. Having seen all the other installments in the franchise, there weren’t a lot of surprises to be had from The Terminator, but I was struck by the nimbleness of the film. I almost wish I’d seen this one first! It throws you into the plot without much exposition, allowing for a few nifty twists (like the presumed assumption that Kyle Reese is also a Terminator, until the film reveals that he’s not). Instead, the backstory comes in whispers and gaps, where Kyle gains Sarah’s trust during brief respites from the chase narrative.

This structure of the film led me to a feeling of surprise that The Terminator gave rise to a multi-picture science fiction franchise. In fact, I wouldn’t have expected that at all; I would have sooner assumed that The Terminator was a horror film than science fiction. Aside from the time travel element, which isn’t foregrounded at all, The Terminator has much more in common with John Carpenter’s Halloween than Terminator Genisys. There are all the tropes that were satirized in Wes Craven’s Scream – the relentless killer, the death of the sexually active, the one-last-scare in which said killer gets back up... all of which Cameron executes quite effectively. Indeed, as bored as I have been with Cameron’s more recent bloated material (e.g., Titanic, Avatar), I’m fascinated by what he can do with a much smaller scope/budget.

Going forward, it’s hard for me not to compare The Terminator to the recent Terminator Genisys, and I think the former certainly offers a few lessons as the franchise continues. First, keep it simple: the plotline of the original introduces only as many timelines as it needs to tell a coherent story. Next, keep it focused: the Terminator is terrifying because it’s relentless, not because there are a lot of them. Finally, keep it real: the Stan Winston robotics are much more chilling because they have weight, and there’s something genuinely creepy about the stilted movements as opposed to a smooth computer-generated Terminator. (This from a guy who thought the Cybermen were scarier before they could run.)

There is something very engaging about seeing Sarah Connor’s plot arc develop during the film, and Linda Hamilton does a compelling job going from naïve to tough. But maybe that’s the problem with the most recent films – we’ve covered this ground already, and it wasn’t bad the first few times. It might be sacrilege at this point (or just out of the question, depending on how many contracts have been signed), but maybe it’s time to be done with the Connors. Can the Terminators go after someone else? Can they go further back, maybe to the Old West? (Can there be a joke about Westworld in there somewhere?) Heck, I know they’ve faced Superman at least once.

Whatever the future of the Terminator franchise, it isn’t written yet, and we’d do well to look to the past for inspiration. But let it be a thematic inspiration, not a narrative one. This one was done well enough the first time around, and there are only so many diminishing returns until the well runs dry (and only so many clichés one can fit into a single sentence). As I remember, the second one entertained the heck out of my preteen self; stay tuned to see if it holds up on a rewatch.

The Terminator is rated R. Surprisingly, most of the blood in the film comes from The Terminator, whose flesh coating bleeds like a normal human’s, including a few gruesome moments of self-surgery on his arm and eye. Two men are seen nude from behind, and one of two sex scenes shows a woman topless (the second includes no visible nudity).

Terminator Genisys (2015)

Let’s get one thing clear about Terminator Genisys right off the bat:  I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. There’s some stuff – and that’s kind of the best word for it, as I’ll discuss momentarily – in this film that is entertaining to watch, but there’s a lot about the film that is largely hollow, and the word I keep coming back to is ponderous, even overly so.

After an apparent victory over Skynet, John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to the past to save his mother from an inbound Terminator. But when Kyle arrives in 1984, he finds that Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) is already prepared for his arrival, with a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) on her side. Together they realize that they’re in a divergent timeline, with Skynet set to rise in a new form.

I’ve actually never seen the original Terminator film – shocking, I know – but I have seen all the other films in the series (we’re up to five now). Even in spite of not having seen The Terminator, I have the same critique of Terminator Genisys that I had for Star Trek Into Darkness – that is, the allusions to the original source material are so obvious that even someone who hasn’t seen the original is aware of them, the effect being something akin to a clubbing over the head (I imagine) for those who are truly in the know. In both cases, the filmmakers have mistaken reference for reverence.

As for the exceptionally ponderous quality of the film, it’s as though the script writers looked at the original films and wanted to succeed by multiplying out the component parts. If you liked the liquid Terminator, this film has one of those and a shapeshifting nanobot Terminator. If you liked the time travel plot, this film has three. And if you liked Sarah Connor evolving into a badass, this film gives you a Sarah Connor who has always already been a badass. Of course, the difference is originality – we liked those beats in the films because they were different from what we had seen before. Okay, to be fair, the nanobot Terminator is pretty cool, a good adaptation of where our current understanding of robotics has taken us (even if I’m left thinking, “Didn’t I just see that in Big Hero 6?”).

Then again – and I’m not blaming director Alan Taylor for this, because he’s apparently miffed about it too – the big reveal of the nanobot Terminator was spoiled quite audaciously in the trailers. If you’ve managed to avoid the twist of which character is actually a Terminator, well done, and I won’t spoil it here because I think I would have liked the film more if I hadn’t known it ahead of time. (Although again, to be fair, it’s telegraphed a bit clearly quite early on.) And then, to top it all off, the plot is once more a race against the clock to blow up a computer before something really bad comes out of it.

I like alternate timeline stories; I think one of the best of them is Mark Millar’s Red Son, in which Superman’s rocket lands in the Soviet Union rather than Smallville, Kansas. But the difference is clear by way of one more comparison to the Star Trek reboot – where JJ Abrams’s Star Trek used an alternate timeline as a way to clear away the detritus of decades of continuity in order to do its own thing, Terminator Genisys does a soft reboot but then buckles under the weight of an inevitable future and a few obligatory callbacks (such as the inevitable “I’ll be back”).

There is “stuff” in this film – exploding things, car chases, action sequences – that is diverting enough, but they’re very much in a switch-off kind of mode that doesn’t advance the plot so much as puts it on hold. Even then, though, I’m left with questions the film shouldn’t force me to ask, like whether or not a Terminator ought to be too heavy to fit in a helicopter with two humans and their arsenal.

Unfortunately, the film ducks out on a lot of its big questions – like who sent “Old Arnold” into the past in the first place and what that mid-credits sequence actually means – because, surprise, there’s a new trilogy in the offing. That’s right, Terminator Genisys goes full Prometheus in the ending. And if the message of the film is that the future really isn’t set, let’s hope that the inevitable next Terminator film takes advantage of the alternate timeline’s freedom and does something new and surprising with the franchise. Just don’t be surprised if the next film climaxes with a few explosives around yet another computer.

Terminator Genisys is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and gunplay throughout, partial nudity and brief strong language.” Robots and humans fight, occasionally shooting or stabbing each other. We see one or two naked bottoms with implied nudity during the time jumps, and one F-bomb is dropped.