No triumphant Terminator return
Who will save the “Terminator” franchise from itself? Not “Deadpool” director Tim Miller, producer James Cameron or even Linda Hamilton.
Despite an A-list roster of talent, “Terminator: Dark Fate” is just another bad “Terminator” movie in a string of bad “Terminator” movies.
This time it really seemed promising with Cameron back on board for the first time in almost 30 years. This film was going to erase all the confusing timelines set by all the sequels that followed and just pick up where “T2” left off. It was also to be centered on a group of women, including Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis as an aug- mented soldier named Grace and Natalia Reyes as Dani, the innocent being hunted.
Simple, right? Not when there are three screenwriters and five people with “story by” credits involved.
Like many of the semi-sequel, semi-reboot films populating the multiplexes, “Terminator: Dark Fate” is at least partially a rehash of the original, with a Terminator (Gabriel Luna) emerging naked from thin air (and the future of course) to kill an unsuspecting young woman. This time said young woman is Dani Ramos, a nice-seeming but dreadfully underwritten auto factory worker who lives in Mexico with her dad and brother and takes quite some time to grasp the life-and-death situation she’s in.
Thankfully she’s got a protector in Grace, an augmented super soldier, also from the future, who is part human, part Terminator and has been sent to make sure Dani stays alive for reasons we won’t learn until much later.
“The Terminator’s” original damsel-turned-warrior Sarah Connor joins their ranks too.
Hamilton, on the other hand, has been reduced to a one-note caricature imagined by a group of men. Is the team of all-male screenwriters to blame? Perhaps. This film is a perfect representation of something that thinks it is being feminist simply because the camera is pointed at three women most of the time. But really, Dani is not much more than a plot device and Sarah is a reductive stereotype of an embittered woman.
Arnold Schwarzenegger adds a dash of life and much-needed comedy when he makes his latemovie entrance. Without giving too much away, the original Terminator has been leading a surprisingly normal life for the past few decades and it’s a rare delight in “Dark Fate.”
The action does not even make up for the story deficiencies, but a lot of it is so jumpy and confusing that it’s hard to even track on what is happening. Still, the money and talent involved should have produced something significantly better. And of course the end sets us up for more potential “Terminator” films.
After “Dark Fate” the question is no longer who can save “Terminator,” but who will be bold enough to just let it die?