TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019)

Studio:      Paramount Pictures
Director:    Tim Miller
Writer:      David Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray
Producer:  James Cameron, David Ellison
Stars:     Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta

Review Score:

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Summary:

Sarah Connor, a T-800, and an augmented human super-soldier team up to defend a future freedom fighter from a highly advanced terminator.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Livingston, Guatemala – 1998 – Despite seemingly saving humanity from an apocalyptic future by destroying Cyberdyne Systems, Sarah Connor watches in helpless horror as a T-800 terminator suddenly kills her son John Connor at a beachside bar.

Mexico City – 22 Years Later – Augmented human super-soldier Grace teleports from the year 2042 to protect future resistance leader Dani Ramos. A REV-9 model terminator, which has the ability to split into an endoskeleton as well as a reconstituting liquid metal form, also comes from the future on a mission to kill Dani.

The REV-9 kills Dani’s father Vicente in order to assume his physical appearance and infiltrate the Arius Motors factory where Dani works with her brother Diego. Grace rescues the siblings in a violent showdown with the terminator. Diego dies during a vehicle chase following the factory fight.

As the REV-9 prepares to confront Grace and Dani on a bridge, Sarah Connor suddenly arrives. Not knowing who the other woman is, Grace and Dani escape in Sarah’s truck while Sarah slows the terminator by blowing it up.

Grace begins collapsing due to physical exertion exceeding her artificial enhancement capabilities. Grace robs a pharmacy for medical supplies. Sarah finds Grace and Dani and hides out with them in a motel while Grace recovers. The three women then go on the run together to protect Dani from the terminator.

Grace explains she was sent back in time to rescue Dani because Dani becomes a key leader in the future fight against ‘Legion,’ an artificial intelligence built for cyber warfare that ultimately attacked humanity. Sarah realizes Legion rose up in place of Skynet since she and John destroyed Cyberdyne.

Although John and Sarah became unknown figures due to changing future history, Sarah nevertheless turned into a present day terminator hunter. Sarah explains that she receives anonymous texts with the words “For John” that reveal where terminators will spawn, which is how she found Grace and Dani. Grace traces Sarah’s encrypted texts to Laredo, Texas. The location matches coordinates tattooed on Grace’s torso, which is where her commander told Grace to go if she needed help in 2020.

Dani’s uncle helps Dani, Grace, and Sarah cross the Mexico border so they can get to Texas. However, border patrol agents capture the three women. The REV-9 tracks down the trio and assaults the border patrol detention center. Dani, Grace, and Sarah eventually escape in a helicopter.

Upon arriving in Laredo, the women meet Sarah’s anonymous contact ‘Carl,’ who turns out to be the T-800 that killed John Connor. Having fulfilled his mission and been set free when Sarah destroyed Skynet, Carl explains he grew to understand humanity and developed a conscience by marrying an abused woman named Alicia and raising her son Mateo, who don’t know Carl is a machine. Now sensitive to the concept of family, Carl believed he was giving meaning to John’s death by turning Sarah into a terminator hunter.

Although Sarah remains uneasy about allying with the machine that murdered her son, Carl joins Sarah and Grace to defend Dani. The group enacts a plan to destroy the REV-9 by first acquiring EMP grenades from their military contact Major Dean. The REV-9 finds the fugitives, kills Major Dean, and destroys the EMP grenades in a firefight before Carl, Sarah, Grace, and Dani flee in a military transport plane.

Grace reveals Dani rescued her from marauders in the future after Judgment Day destroyed civilization. Grace further explains that Dani, whom she became loyal to in the resistance, personally sent Grace back in time to protect her past self.

The REV-9 pilots another aircraft to crash into the transport plane. A battle ensues in the sky until everyone jettisons in humvees equipped with parachutes. Carl, Sarah, Grace, and Dani crash into a dam where they decide to make their last stand against the terminator.

During the final fight, Grace forces Dani to kill her so Dani can use Grace’s augmented power source to fry the REV-9’s neural net. Dani disables the terminator by stabbing its skull with Grace’s power source. Carl then sacrifices himself to hold down the other machine until the shockwave melts them both.

Some time later, Dani observes Grace as a child on a playground. Dani vows to not let Grace die for her a second time. Sarah prepares to train Dani for the battle ahead.

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Review:

The decision for “Terminator: Dark Fate” to retcon events of the preceding three films, not to mention “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” TV series, made perfect sense to me. Despite seeing all of those movies, I couldn’t tell you a single plot point from any of them even if I had a liquid metal spike arm pointed at my head. My mind merely remembers “Salvation” as “that one where Christian Bale blew up at the cinematographer” and “Genisys” as “that one with Khaleesi from Game of Thrones.”

Just now I had to look up which of those two sequels was which. In doing so, I was reminded Arnold Schwarzenegger features heavily in 2015’s “Genisys.” The fact that I totally forgot the series’ main star was in the most recent film says a lot about the lasting impression it leaves.

My unenthused experiences with these post-T2 projects are not exclusive among casual fans of the franchise. Foggy memories and disinterested yawns from general audiences practically demanded another retool. At the very least, they ensured changing the overall arc yet again might not matter much since few people cared about what had already taken place anyway.

Not only that, ignoring inconvenient sequels is all the rage for rejuvenating withered IP nowadays, particularly when trying to restart a new trilogy, which “Terminator” has attempted more than once now. It brought Blumhouse big success with “Halloween” 2018 (review here). Why not see if “Terminator” could benefit from a similar baton passing from old guard characters to new?

Of course, when that baton goes into the hand of a woman, a person of color, or (gasp!) both, trolls come out on cue with crazy conspiracy claims of “PC propaganda,” “leftist liberal” whatever, and “woke” something or other. See also: “Ghostbusters” 2016, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Black Christmas” 2019 (review here), etc. Predictably, prominently portraying three strong female leads and including sequences involving the Texas/Mexico border meant similarly hateful slander would dominate discourse about “Dark Fate,” and perhaps played an unfair part in its underwhelming box office performance too.

If I thought there was a snowball’s chance in Hell of a remotely rational response, I’d ask, “how exactly does someone differentiate between a female-focused movie that innocuously includes women and one that was orchestrated by an anti-patriarch cabal out to ruin childhoods by forcing purposefully politicized diversity down our throats?” Just kidding. I know logic doesn’t apply to paranoid and prideful misogynists who imagine movie-based threats against masculinity.

FIRST SCENE SPOILERS

Stuff shortsighted stupidity aside and anyone can find qualitative reasons to feel legitimately lukewarm about “Terminator: Dark Fate’s” boat-rocking creative choices. One point I’ll concede to its detractors is that the film starts on unstable ground by unceremoniously icing John Connor.

Picture someone watching “The Terminator,” “Judgment Day,” and “Dark Fate,” currently the only canon films, in chronological order for the first time. It’s really weird to establish John as the fiction’s consistent linchpin and devote four hours to an emotionally-charged plot to protect his life only to suddenly gun him down at a Guatemalan beach bar. All of that effort expended and “Dark Fate” just erases John Connor from history in a two-minute prologue. What do the first two movies mean now?

END SPOILERS

“Dark Fate” becomes to “Terminator” what “The Force Awakens” is to “Star Wars.” It pulls beats that were popular in previous entries, then refashions them into a similar story that’s essentially an amalgam of the first two Terminator movies, except with different characters fulfilling the same roles. It’s odd to see eight separate people credited with the story and screenplay, and several more affiliated with various drafts and rewrites, when the shooting script completely clones preexisting concepts.

At least that saves me the trouble of recapping the movie. Start with the setup for “Terminator 2.” Sarah (Linda Hamilton) stays Sarah. So does Schwarzenegger’s T-800. Kyle Reese is now super-soldier Grace (Mackenzie Davis). Replace John Connor with Mexican factory worker and future freedom fighter Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Swap Robert Patrick’s T-1000 for Gabriel Luna’s REV-9. Now all you need are some standard action setpieces and you have a “new” movie.

It appears that’s literally what “Dark Fate” did. According to a Hollywood Reporter interview with director Tim Miller, James Cameron created a list of unconnected ideas for action scenes, for no project in particular. Things like, “what if a tank drove down Main Street and then went through a mall?” Miller and Cameron thus cobbled together “Dark Fate’s” ‘sound and fury’ through this questionable strategy, reminiscent of producer Jon Peters insisting on “Wild Wild West’s” giant mechanical spider because of something he saw in his child’s school play. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Without knowing these origins, you can still sense the soulless interchangeability of “Dark Fate’s” spectacle-oriented sequences. The film certainly features more than its fair share of fights, gunplay, and explosions, as well as vehicle chases on the ground and in the air. Partly for this reason, I’m rating the film with a reticent thumbs up because it fulfills the basic functions of blockbuster entertainment engineered to sell concessions and merchandise. But the emptiness from not having story-specific stakes eventually numbs eyes and ears with noisy tedium. By the time a climactic airplane encounter turned into a nigh endless procession of puffed up improbabilities ending at a dam, I was mentally checked out of the movie.

“Dark Fate” also wears the scars of a project created from the cuts of clashing creators, corporate interests, and producers taking the safest route possible to hopefully return Terminator to evergreen profitability. Every time it seems like the movie might finally venture out on a fresh limb, it retreats to the familiarity of formula. It feels like the film only dips its toe in the water of what Terminator could become while wearing a life preserver to boot.

Undercutting issues exist everywhere. Whenever someone jumps or otherwise flies through the air, accompanying CGI looks like herky-jerky Spider-Man silliness from the Sam Raimi era. Sarah Connor’s constant cynicism grizzles her character into a corner of off-putting crustiness. The classic T-800 largely exists to provide comic relief, although I expect some Arnold fans will find this odd turn to be hilariously endearing.

None of this automatically equates to disappointment however. Because the previous sequels it kicked to the curb repeatedly reset the expectation bar lower and lower, “Dark Fate” ironically wins out as one of the better installments in the series, even though it is an independently average action movie.

Had the franchise become healthy again, maybe I’d inflict harsher punishment on “Terminator: Dark Fate” for not advancing the mythology so much as only altering it. It’s a lateral move that mostly maintains mediocrity, which qualifies as “good enough” for a property whose best days appear cemented in the last century.

That’s bad news for anyone with the optimism that “Dark Fate” would restore Terminator to its former glory. The good news is that if another ill-fated opportunity to try again should arise, pretending “Dark Fate” doesn’t exist won’t just be commonplace, it will be expected. So why should anyone give any more than the minimum amount of attention to another Terminator movie that might not matter in the long run?

Review Score: 55

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