Review: TERMINATOR: DARK FATE features a kick-ass Linda Hamilton, but not much else

The Terminator franchise might be one of the most mishandled in all of fandom. James Cameron’s 1984 Terminator, and its era-defining 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, are bona fide genre classics, while the subsequent three films have been mostly forgettable attempts to broaden the scope of the original films. Now comes Terminator: Dark Fate, the sixth film in the franchise, which attempts to recreate some of that initial magic by bringing back James Cameron (Cameron produced and co-wrote this latest installment) along with Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with decidedly mixed results.

For all its flaws, the first half of Terminator: Dark Fate at least tries to show us something new. In Mexico City, two beings from the future separately appear in search of Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). There’s Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), a powerful new Terminator targeting Dani, and Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cyborg who joins up with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to protect Dani from the deadly new Terminator. Much like Laurie Strode in the latest Halloween, Sarah Connor has become a hardened survivalist over the years, dedicating her life to hunting down terminators each time they arrive in this timeline. Aided by a mysterious collaborator, Connor teams up with Grace to protect Dani from the shape-shifting Rev-9, while trying to get to the bottom of who has been helping her along on her quest for justice against the terminators. As we learn, Dani plays a major role in the resistance against a deadly A.I. in the future, and must be protected at all costs.

Keeping the action in Mexico is a refreshing change of pace, and a story beat involving border agents as the action moves further north (not to mention making a Latinx woman the saviour of humanity) all point towards new ways of looking at the franchise. Yet despite that early promise, Terminator: Dark Fate eventually settles into very familiar territory soon after the trio meet up with the T-800 (Schwarzenegger), who has taken on the human name of “Carl” and settled into a facsimile of human life, living with a woman and her son in the woods and selling drapes (!) as a cover.

The early interactions between Hamilton and Schwarzenegger are great, with a pithy back-and-forth banter that shows just how fun this film could have been. But soon after their awkward reunion, the newly-enlarged team simply battle the Rev-9 in a series of interchangeable CGI-heavy fight scenes. Director Tim Miller (Deadpool) has shown he has a knack for action sequences, but the battle scenes here are often flat, with none of the flair or excitement of the first two films in the franchise (which were already polar opposites stylistically). 

The performances are strong all around, but Linda Hamilton steals every scene as the weary badass soldier who’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale. It’s great to see her essentially leading this film as a full-on action hero — this is a film that features Sarah Connor nonchalantly firing a rocket launcher in the middle of a highway — and her intense portrayal is the perfect foil to Schwarzenegger’s stoic T-800.

Yet despite their fun chemistry, Terminator: Dark Fate doesn’t really offer anything new. It basically mimics the structure of T2 by placing Hamilton in the Schwarzenegger role as the tough-as-nails hero out to protect a young person who will eventually become a key figure in the resistance wars against a mobilized A.I. You can see the story beats coming from a mile away, and the whole film feels slight in some way, more of an excuse to pump out another entry in the franchise than a real desire to tell a new story set in the Terminator universe. It may be better than the lacklustre entries that preceded it, but this still feels like a major missed opportunity to push the series forward after so many failed attempts. The machines have finally won.