Terminator: Dark Fate review: James Cameron hits the reset button with a satisfying crunch
Dir: Tim Miller; Starring: Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Luna. 15 cert, 128 mins
The Terminator franchise has a lot in common with its chrome cyborg superstars. Even after taking the kind of hits that could puncture the QE2’s hull, the blasted thing just keeps lumbering on. Of course, much of the damage over the last two decades has been self-inflicted, after an opening salvo, both directed and co-written by James Cameron, that altered action cinema for good.
The 1984 original tried something entirely new, welding slasher-movie brutality and tension onto a wilfully convoluted science-fiction plot – upgrading Arnold Schwarzenegger to a Hollywood demigod in the process. The 1991 sequel proved the formula came into full flower on a blockbuster scale, and set the tone for a quarter-century of popcorn thrills. (No Terminator, then no Matrix, arguably even no Marvel.)
But after that, all that followed was floundering postscript – from the self-parody of 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to the rickety cinematic-universe-building of 2009’s Terminator: Salvation and the mangled fan-service of 2015’s Terminator: Genisys.
One of the good things about franchises that involve time travel, though, is that you can just send your characters back to tape over the parts you’d rather forget – and as such, Dark Fate, the sixth and latest instalment, has been positioned as a “direct sequel” to Terminator 2. Directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool), yet produced and co-written by Cameron, Dark Fate feels like an attempt to recapture a heyday. Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it’s been painstakingly made to a formula reverse-engineered from the classic instalments.
So again, an unstoppable time-travelling killer is on the tail of a civilian target: they’re the Rev-9 cyborg (Gabriel Luna), a robotic skeleton covered by a shapeshifting dark carbon goo, and Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), a young woman from Mexico City with a pivotal role to play in the coming war between humans and machines.
As for the mysterious protector role, it’s split three ways this time: there’s Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced marine from the future, another trusty old T-800 cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and also Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) herself, who returns for the first time since the second film with quite the arsenal in tow.
If you can overlook just how glibly the game board has been reset – in short, after the evil neural network Skynet was vanquished, another one called Legion sprung up in its place – what follows has much to recommend it. The Rev-9 is a genuinely fearsome piece of creature design, the plot is pacy and streamlined (albeit with some clumsy shortcuts) and the action scenes have a satisfying 20th-century crunch, thanks to a tactile intermingling of practical effects and CG. Even after 35 years, there is something primally thrilling and horrible in seeing a human face torn or burnt to reveal a gleaming metal skull underneath.
It’s a pleasure to see Hamilton and Schwarzenegger back in action as leathery veterans, though the script shunts the cast onto some unexpectedly topical terrain, including a heroic escape from a US-Mexico border prison camp, with detainees’ cages flung open in triumph.
Yet it’s Davis’s brusque and androgynous Grace who turns out to be Dark Fate’s most stonily compelling asset. In another time – 1984, say – she’d be the rightful star of her own part one, rather than a co-lead in someone else’s part six.
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