Terminator: Dark Fate ★★★
FOLLOWING several failed attempts to reboot the Terminator franchise it may be fourth time lucky for its creator James Cameron.
Terminator: Dark Fate is a solid special effects actioner and the third best effort of the six-film series.
But whether the series has some life left is still debatable because Dark Fate doesn’t do anything new, it just does it reasonably well.
The 1984 original and the first sequel, Judgement Day in 1991, are among the best and most successful action films ever made.
So, hard acts to follow.
Unfortunately, Rise of the Machines in 2003, Salvation (2009) and Genesys (2015), all suffered from plot confusion and computer-generated effects overload.
Dark Fate ignores these three films and follows directly on from the events of Judgement Day (well, kind of).
It’s not hard to follow because it’s almost a direct repeat of the story up to the end of Judgement Day, with a couple of slight differences.
A modified human and a terminator arrive through time portals to fight over a woman whose survival is critical to the earth’s future. Sounds familiar, hey.
In this case the terminator is a Rev-9 model which seems to be made of a Kevlar-type skeleton with a living liquid membrane with the consistency of tar covering it.
The cool thing with this one is that it can split in two so you have to fight the super skeleton as well as the superhuman body it transforms into.
So with two terminators you’re going to need more than one hero and here this instalment has three.
The modified human from the future is a resistance fighter called Grace and she is first on the scene to rescue the Rev-9’s target, a young Mexican woman named Dani, from the first assassination attempt.
Next up we have the welcome return of Sarah Connor who has been spending the last few years since Judgement Day killing terminators, thanks to tip-offs from an anonymous source as to their locations.
Finally, and all the marketing shows you this, the original T-800 joins the party.
In a slightly humorous aside, Schwarzenegger’s character survived (still not exactly sure how) and has got himself a family and a job in curtains.
The story starts with a prologue in Guatemala in 1998 where Connor and her son John have been hanging out since they helped stop the world’s end in 1997.
We then jump 22 years later to Mexico City and the arrivals of Grace and the Rev-9. This is where the first of several good action sequences occurs in a car factory, before continuing on to a great chase on the freeway.
The premise of a new future threat is nothing ground-breaking but at least because we saw films 1 and 2 it mostly makes sense.
Arnie does his usual, Linda Hamilton is still a tough Sarah Connor and Robin Wright look-alike Mackenzie Davis as Grace and Natalia Reyes as Dani are both fine.
But it’s the action and visual effects we mainly come to these films for and Dark Fate delivers on both for its major book-ending extended set-pieces.
It’s not all special effects though, with a stunt crew of more than 100 credited and it shows, particularly in the first big freeway chase.
For this outing Cameron was a co-writer again but passed the directing chair to Tim Miller, who created 2016’s Deadpool, and I think does a solid job here.
If they could only their written imagination matched their visual one.