So Terminator: Dark Fate opened today and this is the latest effort to make something out of the Terminator franchise. I think they will keep trying until the sun goes dark. For this one, they have wiped aside the previous three movies and made it a direct sequel to Terminator 2 (you know, the last good one). That means Rise of the Machines (the last direct sequel to T2), Salvation, and Genisys have been wiped out of existence… which is somewhere between a great big shrug and at least maybe partly ok within the confused and twisty timeline of this series.
So the evil machines and humans are waging a war in the future and the machines send back a Terminator to kill someone important to the resistance. The humans send a defender back. Yes… this is the plot of the new movie and pretty much all the previous ones except Salvation. They twist things up by giving the terminator a slightly different skill set and the human defender… a slightly different skill set. Then they bring back Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwartzenegger so we can have a whole team of heroes fighting the evil robot. One might argue a few too many heroes given that none of them really get a lot of character development (arguably, Hamilton gets the most but that’s just because she is able to bring baggage from T2).
So anyway… my overall take on this movie (that some are calling the best Terminator movie since T2) is.. it’s fine. I mean, yeah, it’s all right. Hardly the best and certainly not the worst of the Terminator movies. It’s an action flick with some sci-fi time travel ideas that it never really explores as well as I’d like… and the action scenes are all right. They aren’t great and are often shot too close up without a real sense of style or pacing or speed. It’s unfortunate since Tim Miller had directed Deadpool which gave me hope for some more creativity and more slick hand. But, no, it’s kind of pat action taken from the Hollywood action franchise store. Nothing amazing. At all.
One side note… there’s an early scene with a de-aged Linda Hamilton, Arnold, and Edward Furlong that’s so good I wondered if this was cut footage from T2. Maybe if I saw it again and knew to look for the CGI waxy-face… but on first inspection, for a surprise scene, I was really impressed. Maybe less so what they did with the scene but the FX were solid.
And that’s all I really have to say. It’s an ok movie. It shocks and surprises only in that it’s not bad but also falls right into the predictable by being inferior to the good films. You could see it or not… maybe if you love the franchise or want to see Linda Hamilton back, I guess.
Score: 76