"Terminator: Dark Fate" review

I know why some will cry to see this franchise go, though it is something I will never do.



The "Terminator" series ostensibly self-destructing itself in the form of releasing the same, tired, overblown formula of an action flick is just about the most fitting epitaph that this series could hope for.

While continuing to serve up the same aborted leftovers of science fiction classics "Terminator" and "Terminator 2:  Judgement Day," series creator James Cameron and director Tim Miller somehow manage to produce the franchise's final nail in its developing coffin by seemingly acknowledging the misgivings of its own previous sequels and flagrantly admitting that they seem to just not care.

"Terminator: Dark Fate" lavishes praise and homage for its superior predecessors from the visual references to musical score only to do something in the first 5 minutes so brazenly disrespectful to any sense of investment in the series that I almost wanted to applaud its audacity.

Unfortunately, despite bringing Linda Hamilton back as a wearied and broken Sarah Connor that's forced to live with the reality of a pyrrhic victory in yet another alternate timeline that promises to be unlike anything this franchise has ever produced, the film proceeds to introduce a young woman in her 20s, ripped away from all that she knows and loves to become the ball in a chase between a killer future robot and the apocalyptic soldier sent back to protect her because she's the key to humanity's salvation amidst the machine uprising.

By now, a "Terminator" sequel lifelessly and hypocritically rehashing the only 2 flicks of this series worth a damn is so par for the course that it's hard to not grade this husk of movie on some kind of curve, especially since, objectively speaking, the movie does have the best craftsmanship of any of these sequels post "Terminator 2."

Mackenzie Davis, Gabriel Luna, and Natalia Reyes do admirable work with the material given despite the overall flatness of their characters and Tim Miller clearly has an eye for visual storytelling when it comes to rendering the exaggerated in a gritty detail without getting bogged down by an ugly color pallette but none of it draws attention from the prevalent sense of the 6 screenwriters attached to this turkey being not only a case of too many cooks in the kitchen but some of those cooks clearly being dispassionate about the material they had to work with.

"Terminator: Ironically Prophetic Title the third" may be one of the most cynical things I've seen a studio try to pass off for major franchise treatment since the tanking of "The Mummy" and its "Dark Universe," though perhaps even more transparent here.

Even if the action didn't whiplash back and forth between mundanely average and so over the top and drawn out it makes episodes of "Dragon Ball Z" look comparatively subtle, the movie can't even settle on what it wants to be thematically.

It's thesis is that Skynet has been successfully wiped out and the terminator's out to get protagonist Dani this time around are from an entirely different self aware military AI overlord that just so happens to use the exact same types of machines to hunt down humanity for the same purpose and causing a nuclear holocost to do it.

Maybe this sort of pointlessly and hilariously convoluted repetition would be just slightly more palatable if the series still wasn't convinced that it was about defying fate to carve out one's own destiny but I was actively fighting to not get up and leave when, in setting up the most telegraphed "twist" possible, Mackenzie Davis's Grace reiterates the franchise credo of no fate but what we make, in the movie about an alternate reality that is exactly like the reality allegedly averted, in a beat for beat chase narrative culminating in a final warehouse battle that this series won't cut loose from.

No fate but what we make... unless that fate doesn't have killer robots, nuclear holocausts, time travel resulting in car chases and explosions, the phrase come with me if you want to live, and an Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg. Other than that, the sky's the limit.

The aforementioned flatness of their character's doesn't exactly help either. Dani is built up to be somebody important but because the film is desperate to make how important an embarrassingly kept secret, we don't really get to see any sort of decently sold growth or transformation out of her, undercutting the intended final pay off of the movie.

I've probably made this sound like a more profound negative experience to sit through than it truly is, even if it was absolute torture for me personally.

"Terminator: Dark Fate" is not a terrible movie but after listening to a movie studio bang its head against the wall for years to figure out how can we fix something that obviously doesn't work, hype up their bold $200 million solution as the movie fans have been waiting for, and then watching them double down on the well documented and overly complained about problems, I'm out of patience. Paramount studio executives are clearly insane.

There are germs of fascinating ideas lying underneath the surface; strong concepts that get snuffed out without blossoming due to neglect in favor of fellating the series' 2 inaugural entries regarding the modern day replacement of the working class with machines and the ability of immigrants, systematically locked in the proletariat by a homogenous upper class that finds it easier to posture at wanting to help rather than actually help by defying racist institutions of corrupt law enforcement.

Nurturing these ideas however would have implied that "Terminator: Dark Fate" was the product of an artist, rather than a studio realizing 5 years to late that the schtick of their franchise is tired and failing to mask that fact by throwing in whatever names that they could get a hold of that might have clout with geek audiences, not the general public.

For all of "Dark Fate's" talk of being the start of a new trilogy, it has now become the third of 3 failed trilogy starters for this franchise in a decade. If Hollywood wants to prove it has even a scrap of sanity left, it will put this franchise on the shelf and just walk away. And DON'T COME BACK.

4 Temporal Paradoxes out of 10