I don’t think it is controversial to state that Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are among the best movies ever made. These movies created two of the most memorable heroes and two of the most memorable villains in sci-fi history. When it comes to sci-fi horror and sci-fi action, each has a home in the canon. And then there was sequel after sequel after sequel. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation, and Terminator: Genisys are all legitimately terrible movies. It’s completely reasonable that I would assume Terminator: Dark Fate would follow their inauspicious path. Directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool) and with six credited writers, it seemed like just another cash grab sequel trying to ride the coattails of a franchise that hadn’t felt relevant in decades.
I was wrong.
Terminator: Dark Fate is good, actually. It’s not great. It definitely has its flaws. But it is the first Terminator film that felt relevant since 1991. More importantly, it is the first Terminator film that understood the allure of the original duology.
“What’s next?”
Terminator 2: Judgment Day ends on a surprisingly optimistic note. Arnold’s T-800 and Linda Hamilton convinced Miles Dyson to cease working on the program that would become Skynet. They destroy the prototype, then they destroy the Terminators. They avert the apocalypse.
And then the sequels came. It turns out Skynet would still be invented. Same name and everything. And it still needed to kill John Connor. Same dude and everything. Over the course of three more sequels, the series became more and more invested in robot armies and time travel shenanigans and lost sight of what was interesting about the series. In a very real way, a series that was about humanity’s ability to choose a better future became a dour slog in which our tragic fate was predetermined.
Terminator: Dark Fate doesn’t. It jettisons John Connor for more of a focus on his mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), who was always the more interesting character. It gets rid of Skynet completely, acknowledging that we can change the future. But it also recognizes that taking out a single company doesn’t matter in a corrupt system. Instead, what Dark Fate suggests is that small changes do matter, but only systemic change can save the future.
“3,000 people out there.”
Before I wax rhapsodic, let me say that Terminator: Dark Fate is still a modern blockbuster. That comes with some problems baked in. The overreliance on CGI is expansive. The franchise has never shied away from cutting edge effects, of course. But too many people attributed the menace of Robert Patrick’s T-1000 to the melting liquid CGI, and not to… well, Robert Patrick’s terrifying performance. Consequently, we have yet another melty robot here, this time portrayed primarily by Gabriel Luna (Agents of SHIELD). Luna is fine, but it would be hard to match Arnold and Patrick and he does not do so.
To Luna’s credit, he gets one thing right. The implacability of the Terminators are the series’ best special effect. The way Luna always beelines for Natalia Reyes’ Dani, no matter what gets in his way, is the only time the effects really work. There’s something visually arresting about someone so focused on killing you that they are ignoring multiple shotgun blasts to the face to do so. In the small moments where the film pits Luna, Reyes, and Mackenzie Davis in close proximity, the action works.
For a minute, at least. Because a bigger problem is that the action sequences are long. Like, really long. Too long. Near the beginning of Terminator: Dark Fate, there is a really great sequence at an automotive assembly plant where Grace, Dani, and Diego fight off a literal avatar of automation. But then the car chase starts. And then the gun fight on the bridge. There are individual moments of inspiration, like Linda Hamilton’s eventual arrival, but overall it’s more than a little grating. If this was the only weightless CGI slugfest, that would be manageable. Unfortunately, not only is it not the only one, it’s not even the most egregious example of them.
Also, this is a small thing, but there is a small but persistent “girl power” thread running through the movie. Given that it is written by six men and directed by another man, you might wonder: How do they handle this theme? The answer is, very clumsily. Better than, say, the “girls squad” moment in Avengers: Endgame, since at least these characters have relationships with one another, but still. Writing tip, my dudes? You don’t need to have characters come out and talk about their wombs to make an empowering film. You can just have them be cool.
“What happens when I tell them they’re just keeping a spot warm for some machine?”
One of the most remarkable things about T2 is that it followed through on its premise. Knowing what Cyberdyne would create, the movie argued in favor of launching a terror strike against a major American corporation. It’s almost unthinkable today.
Terminator: Dark Fate goes one step further. In the film, Dani, Sarah, and Grace need to cross from Mexico to Texas. They decide to hire a coyote and cross the border illegally. The Rev-9, following the T-1000, masks himself as a law enforcement officer, this time as a Border Patrol agent. And that’s where a more modern horror story takes over.
Terminator came out in 1984. Terminator 2 came out in 1991. While technology was a common fear at the time, it wasn’t as omnipresent or pervasive as it is today. Dark Fate saw our hyper-militarized border and realized the potential for horror there. An LAPD officer has a lot of leeway; a Border Patrol agent, on the other hands, has access to drones, helicopters, and thousands of assholes in a gargantuan military force trained to see immigrants as sub-human. The Rev-9 uses them all to attempt to kill Dani.
Every day, law enforcement finds new ways to use technology to watch you. Five years ago, police used a robot to execute a civilian for the first time. What Terminator: Dark Fate understands is that this trend has been happening for decades, and that the surveillance state has gotten more omnipresent and more dangerous. The lesser Terminator sequels are scared of the robots taking over. Only the superior Terminator films understand that the real fear is how easy modern society makes it for them to do so.
“Suspects are now 220 meters south of checkpoint seven-bravo.”
In the commentary track for Terminator 2, Cameron, discussing why Robert Patrick’s T-1000 took the form of an LAPD officer, said:
“The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.”
When Terminator: Dark Fate first came out, there were people who decried it as “social justice warrior propaganda.” In reality, they had simply misunderstood the message of the films. They feared the robots, and had forgotten the people who created the robots. Had forgotten why people created the robots.
The Terminator films have always been haunted, in a way, by capitalism. Their vision of the apocalypse is one in which a private corporation sells faulty software to the United States military, which uses it thoughtlessly. And that, to me, is the horror of the series. That is the implacable force that pursues us to the end of the world. Don’t fear the machines. Fear the things we create, and the way those things unmake us. That we are allowing ourselves to become less human so we fit in better with a less human world.
Which is why Arnold is important to the series. The T-800 is a machine, but Terminator 2 was about humanizing him. It let a machine become human. Terminator 2 provided the hints of a path forward. Terminator: Dark Fate has a brilliant expansion of that story, which forces Sarah to come to terms with the humanity of the T-800. It’s a small moment, but this is the rare ‘late sequel’ that manages to push the original cast in new and interesting emotional directions.
“They are known members of the Sinaloa Cartel.”
As I said above, Terminator: Dark Fate will never overtake Terminator or Terminator 2. It’s too much the product of a committee, too tied to modern trends. The first two films innovated; this one merely refines what already worked.
But I still wanted to write this. When I watched Dark Fate, I expected a mediocre-to-bad sequel that fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of the franchise. I expected Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. And there are elements of it present, certainly. But there’s also a smarter, kinder movie here. Buried under a mountain of bad effects, perhaps. But present.
And I think that is worth celebrating. James Cameron’s Terminator films are remarkable. Not just for the world they build, but for the way they reflect the anxieties of the hour. Terminator: Dark Fate is the rare blockbuster that manages to do just that. For all its flaws, I was thrilled to be reminded that gigantic sci-fi action movies can have something to say. They just have to want it.