Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Kill John Connor in the opening five minutes. Go on, I dare you. That's exactly what Terminator: Dark Fate does, and for a brief, startling moment you think: right, this franchise might actually have some nerve left in it. And then, slowly, it doesn't.

Let me be fair, because there's genuine good stuff here. Linda Hamilton coming back as Sarah Connor is exactly the shot in the arm this series needed. She's brilliant. Grizzled, furious, funny in the bleakest possible way, carrying decades of loss in every line of her face. This is not the sanitised, franchise-friendly version of the character. She turns up like a force of nature and you remember immediately why Connor mattered in the first place. If you want to know just how much she mattered, go back and have a look at Terminator 2: Judgment Day, because Hamilton's performance there set a bar that the sequels have been limbo-dancing under ever since. Here, finally, she clears it again.

And then there's Arnie. Now, I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much. But the ageing T-800 who has quietly settled into domestic life, developed a dry wit, and runs a curtain business, yes, a curtain business, is somehow one of the more charming things I've seen in a blockbuster in years. It shouldn't work. It absolutely does. There's something oddly moving about it, a machine learning to be human in the most mundane and wholesome way imaginable.

The new Terminator is properly menacing too, and the action sequences are slick and well-staged. The film clearly has budget, craft and ambition behind it. On a pure popcorn level, there are stretches where it delivers.

So what's the problem? The problem is that the plot is held together with string and good intentions. Dark Fate is the third film in this franchise to essentially press reset, ignore its predecessors and announce itself as the true sequel to T2. I've sat through this particular trick enough times now that it's stopped feeling bold and started feeling desperate. And while wiping the slate is one thing, you've got to replace what you're erasing with something of equal or greater weight. That's where this falls short.

Killing Connor is bold, but it deflates the emotional investment that T2 spent two and a half hours building. The new timeline logic is vague where it needs to be clear, and hand-wavy where it needs to be airtight. I'm not asking for a whiteboard full of equations, but I am asking that the rules of your own story hold up to the mildest scrutiny. They don't, not consistently.

The new central characters do their jobs well enough. The performances are committed and there's chemistry there. But I never felt the same weight behind their story that I felt behind Sarah and John's. That's not entirely the actors' fault. It's a structural problem, the film is so busy establishing its new mythology that it forgets to make us genuinely care about what happens within it.

What I keep coming back to is the curtain business. That detail is so specific and so strange and so human that it makes me wish the whole film had that kind of confidence in its own oddness. When Dark Fate trusts its stranger instincts, it's genuinely enjoyable. When it retreats into franchise obligation, grinding through plot mechanics and setting up threads that may never be followed up, it loses me.

Two and a half stars. A decent enough ride, and Hamilton alone is worth the price of admission. But this is a franchise that keeps insisting it's got one more run in it, keeps stumbling out of retirement, keeps refusing to stay down. Sooner or later, someone needs to have a quiet word.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-04-09

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