Review: Terminator: Dark Fate

Posted on 11 November, 2019

Sarah Connor and a hybrid cyborg human must protect a young girl from a newly modified liquid Terminator from the future. IMDb

If you are reading this and questioning who Sarah Connor is—this is not the movie for you.

If, however, you can say ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ or ‘I’ll be back’ in your best Austrian cyborg accent, you are going to have some fun watching this—especially if you are female.

It’s all there in the poster. Every other Terminator film has Arnie hoisting a gun, but this time it’s Sarah Connor. The important-to-the-future person that needs protecting—Dani— is a young woman.

The soldier sent back to protect her—female. Evil liquid terminator—male. And who is the complete badass of the film? A grizzled, battle-worn Linda Hamilton reprising her greatest role, which started out in 1984 as ‘the girl’.

The story is pretty much the same as always—and yes, it is gloriously, loudly a chase movie, just like the others.

However, there are subtle differences. The key character of Dani is Mexican and the antagonistic US authorities feel more like Skynet than saviour—with containment cells, high tech, multi-channel spy capabilities and a distinct lack of humanity.

The grimmest note for me—though possibly too subtle amongst the screeching metal action sequences for most of the audience—is that while Skynet was beaten, machines still become sentient in the future.

There is also a depressing acceptance that there is no way to stop the machines becoming sentient, our only hope is to fight back. Not nihilistic at all. But enough of this cerebral dissection—bring on the mayhem!

This is old-fashioned, big-budget action. More cars and trucks are destroyed in the first sequence than actually travelled on the road to Walgett in the last year. Just kidding, but you get the picture.

As jaw-dropping as that sequence is, there is better yet to come. The plane sequence, and what some of the actors would have had to go through to get the shots is very effective.

The gentle human face of the bad terminator is a wonderful juxtaposition to his black metal skeleton, which can separate from him so he can fight you coming and going. The freaky thing about the very first terminator was that he was so damn relentless – and this two-for-the-price-of-one trick helps feed into that fear of an unbeatable enemy.

Then there is Arnie – not, I’m not spoiling a surprise here, you know he was going to be in there somewhere—who actually provides the bulk of the humour in that his T-800 has worked hard to become human, even though he knows he is not.

There are lots of callbacks to T1 and T2 but he doesn’t get to deliver his signature line ‘I’ll be back’.

Linda Hamilton does.