Linda Hamilton brings the thrills
New movie bills itself as a direct sequel to 1991’s ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’
It’s strangely comforting to see the end of the world looming once more in Terminator: Dark Fate. You can already guess how it begins: Out of the night-time shadows emerges a sentient slab of metal and muscle, a butt-kicking emissary from the future that will not rest until its deadly mission is complete, and probably not even then. By now, there is something curiously quaint, even comforting, about this menacing opener, which kicked off James Cameron’s original Terminator 35 years ago and has remained a visual mainstay of its four highly variable sequels.
Maybe it’s because the world seems so much more complicated and terrifying now than it did in 1984, but surely there are darker fates that might await us than one in which the machines have taken over. (The machines are smart; they probably solved climate change.) If anything, the fact that our evil AI overlords keep attempting variations on the same time-travelling assassination plot is less terrifying than reassuring — a reminder that our foolish, vainglorious species can nonetheless be awfully hard to kill.
So too are certain studio blockbuster franchises, especially when time travel is involved: Unbound by the dictates of narrative logic, even a flailing action-movie cycle can rewrite and regenerate itself in perpetuity. Directed by Tim Miller
(Deadpool), Dark Fate is a good-enough hybrid of fiery nonsense, fan gratification and pop-savvy series regeneration that wisely erases, or at least neutralises, a lot of forgettable recent history. The last three sequels — Terminator 3:
Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator: Salvation (2009) and Terminator: Genisys
(2015) — have effectively been written out of existence, relegated to the ash heap of alternate-timeline history.
The new movie bills itself as a direct sequel to 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment
Day, a designation that the marketing executives at Paramount are no doubt hoping you will interpret as a return to form as well as basics. And up to a point, it is. This is the first time in 28 years that we’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator shooting the breeze (among other targets) with Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, and their long-overdue reunion is an inescapably poignant one, deepened by the passage of time and charged with undercurrents of rage, bitterness and crusty humour.
It’s also the first picture since Judgment Day to reunite the Terminator mythology with its creator, Cameron, who is given producing and story credits here, and whose lean, none-too-taxing approach to narrative clearly informs the screenplay by David Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray. (The writers have also done a fine, presumably intentional job of replicating Cameron’s flair for memorably tin-eared dialogue.) Miller, like most directors, isn’t remotely in Cameron’s league as a maestro of action technique. But he gives the visual-effects-encrusted combat scenes a nicely visceral intensity, with just the right ratio of spatial coherence to logistical chaos.
TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
But Terminator: Dark Fate is more than just a trigger-happy trip down memory lane. Much of it takes place in Mexico, a shrewd and refreshing change of scenery, and its new faces are almost as diverting as the older ones. That time traveller from the future is Grace (Mackenzie Davis, intense and committed), an estimable human warrior with a cybernetically enhanced body and a mission not to kill but to protect. She drops into presentday Mexico City just in time to rescue a young woman named Dani Ramos (the excellent Colombian actress Natalia Reyes), who has no idea why she and her family are suddenly being targeted by a killer cyborg called a Rev-9.
I don’t mean to oversell the political subversiveness of Terminator: Dark
Fate, whose real-world reference points are nothing if not calculated — which doesn’t, of course, make them any less meaningful or sincere. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to revitalise a dead intellectual property. Sometimes all it takes is a movie in which “Hasta la vista, baby” isn’t the extent of the characters’ Spanish.