Terminator: Dark Fate is basically The Force Awakens… but
with Terminators. It’s the same shit, new
generation. It really doesn’t offer
die-hard Terminator fans anything we haven’t already seen before. Well, except that the new Terminator (Gabriel
Luna) looks like shit. I don’t mean that
in a derogatory manner. I mean it literally
looks like shit. Like the T-1000 in T2,
it squirts, leaks, and drizzles around, but instead of being a cool silver
color, it’s diarrhea black. The Terminator’s target, Dani (Natalia Reyes) isn’t
much different than the Sarah Connor of old, and her protector, Grace
(Mackenzie Davis) is only a slight variation on Sam Worthington’s character
from Terminator: Salvation.
The
one thing we haven’t seen in a Terminator flick happens early on. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a pretty ballsy
move. Too bad that’s about as ballsy as the
movie gets. From then on, it just
becomes another retread. An entertaining
retread, to be sure, and yet the feeling of déjà vu is still unshakeable.
It’s
just so good having Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor that it’s easy to
overlook some of the film’s flaws. She’s
been away for a while, but she hasn’t lost a step as she immediately shows she
can still kick major ass. There’s enough
built-in goodwill from her presence alone to carry Dark Fate over its clunkier passages.
The
movie, unfortunately, has a few of those.
The good news is, it picks up considerably once Arnold finally shows up,
and when he does, he steals the show. You wouldn’t guess what he’s been up to all
those years and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you. All I’ll say is that his present vocation
makes for some of the biggest laughs in the entire film. His tense scenes with Hamilton give Dark Fate
an edge the last few sequels have sorely lacked.
The
problem is, like The Force Awakens, the new characters aren’t nearly as endearing
as their elders. I guess it doesn’t help
that they spend most of their time running around. Still, Michael Biehn did the same thing back
in ’84 and he managed to give us a fully fleshed-out character you could root
for.
As
portrayed by Luna, the new Terminator lacks the menace of the previous
incarnations. Grace does what she can
with her underwritten role and handles herself just fine in the action
sequences. Likewise, Reyes makes for a
serviceable lead, even if her big change of character feels a bit rushed in the
finale.
I
know we’ve waited a long time for James Cameron to come back to the franchise. Unfortunately, what he has to offer are only tweaked
reworkings of not only his films, but
the sequels he had nothing to do with. Then
again, maybe that’s the point. Because
of its very nature, the Terminator timeline is doomed to keep repeating itself
again and again. The alternate timelines
will keep skewing further and further into the future until everyone involved with
the original is long gone.
There’s
a good chance of that happening too as there’s enough rousing moments here to
remind us there’s still some life in the long-running franchise. While Dark Fate lacks the wham-bam action of T3,
the grittiness of Salvation, and the sheer goofiness of Genisys, it has its own
identity, even when it’s recycling bits from the previous films. Despite his abbreviated screen time, Arnold
still gets some good lines and kicks ass (albeit belatedly), and for many
Terminator fans (or at least me), that’s ultimately what matters most.
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