Terminator: Dark Fate
You and whose Arnie?
RELEASED 2 MARCH (download out now)
2019 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/ DVD/ VOD
Director Tim Miller
Cast Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger
This movie’s a battlefield of potential futures. There’s one in which the Terminator franchise survives, oozing like liquid metal into further sequels, prequels and reboots. Alternatively this is the brand’s final stand, crushed like one of those skulls that litter post-apocalyptic cityscapes, just waiting for the pitiless stomp of some mechanical bastard.
Judging by the tepid box office, Dark Fate may have triggered the darkest timeline. It certainly fights for its life by screwing with its own past, slashing away previous screen adventures like gangrenous flesh – nearly two decades of continuity – to insist it’s a direct sequel to Judgment Day. And that’s welcome. It allows this entry to breathe, and brings a clarity to the storytelling that’s liberating.
Distorted, static-filled images precede the titles. A distraught Sarah Connor warns the world of imminent apocalypse, but wait – that future never arrived. She saved us all. Cue a bitter twist as we accelerate to 1998, where a new Terminator pops through time to undo the residual feelgood of T2 – like Alien 3 smashing the happy ending of Aliens.
Moving into the modern day, the film quickly conforms to the established techno-Road Runner template: chase-evade, chaseevade, rinse and repeat. The target? Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), a young Mexican who claims she’s a nobody but holds the fate of the world in her hands. The pursuer? Gabriel Luna as the Rev-9, an altogether more boyish iteration of Terminator. The protector? Grace, an augmented soldier from the future, played with Amazonian presence and a vital degree of vulnerability by Mackenzie Davis.
Linda Hamilton also returns for the first time since T2, and director Tim Miller grants her a suitably showstopping entrance.
You may well wince at her appropriating “I’ll be back”, a meta-moment clearly engineered as trailer-bait, but Hamilton plays this 21st century Sarah Connor with age-worn sensitivity, allowing glimpses of the damaged soul behind the hardened exterior.
She’s reunited with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a former Terminator living off the grid in Texas. It’s one of his quieter, more deadpan performances, a world away from the outsized turns that built his legend. But his understatement works, gifting Hamilton the spotlight. The film never quite recaptures the pair’s previous chemistry, but in fairness a plot wrinkle accounts for that.
Miller stages the obligatory spectacle with verve. An early freeway chase is a fine, visceral bit of road carnage, its rupturing cars rather overshadowing the film’s
Misses the mark in crucial respects
climax aboard a plummeting plane. But it’s the well-played character dynamics that truly impress, the three women at the heart of the story shifting from distrust to empathy.
This is an admirably lean, clean addition to a knotty saga. But for all its efficient thrills it also misses the mark in crucial respects. There’s no visual or technological ground being broken here, only twists on established iconography (one Terminator splits in two, another has tentacles). The pursuit-heavy plotline feels rote, a Force Awakens-style remix of the original myth. And while Dark Fate hints that our modern world, with its surveillance cameras and data trails, is ripe for exploitation by malign machine intelligence, it never capitalises on this tantalising thread.
Extras Nine minutes of deleted and extended scenes (six in all), which include a four-minute take on the battle of the border crossing, and a brief but surprisingly resonant moment between Sarah Connor and Alicia, addressing a T-800’s potential humanity.
“A Legend Reforged” (20 minutes) is a decent, interview-led
Making Of while “World Builders” (33 minutes) digs a little deeper behind the scenes, focusing on the effects, stunts and location work. There’s also a look at the climactic turbine fight (eight minutes) and a wordless visual effects breakdown of the film’s future-war assault craft, the Dragonfly. Frustratingly, an audio commentary which teams Miller and editor Julian Clarke is only available digitally, as are two more brief featurettes and three pre-viz sequences. Nick Setchfield