- UK release: October 2019
- Director: Tim Miller · Writers: David Goyer; Justin Rhodes; Billy Ray
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Skydance Media; 20th Century Fox
- Genre: Science fiction action / legacy sequel · Runtime: 128 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Linda Hamilton (The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) as Sarah Connor; Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Predator) as the T-800 / Carl; Mackenzie Davis (Blade Runner 2049) as Grace; Natalia Reyes as Dani Ramos
- Rotten Tomatoes: 70% critics / 82% audience · My rating: 7.5 / 10
There is a particular trick going around at the moment, and Terminator: Dark Fate leans on it hard: take a franchise that lost its way, ignore the sequels everyone would rather forget, and reconnect directly to the one film people actually loved. Halloween did it last year, Jurassic World did a softer version of it, and the template was set by The Force Awakens. Here the offer is blunt. Three Terminator films have happened since Judgment Day, and Dark Fate would like you to pretend they did not. James Cameron is back as a producer, Linda Hamilton has been coaxed out for the first time since 1991, and the message is that the adults are back in charge. The question is whether a franchise this picked-over has anything left to say, or whether this is just a better-dressed apology.
The setup
A young woman in Mexico City, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), is going about an ordinary working life when two arrivals from the future drop into it on the same day. One is a new and nastier model of Terminator, sent to kill her. The other is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an augmented human soldier sent back to keep her alive. The pattern is familiar, because the future has rearranged itself but not learned anything: the machines still want a particular person dead, and the resistance still wants her breathing. Into the chase comes Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), older, harder and entirely out of patience, who has spent the years since Judgment Day hunting Terminators as they appear. What she has not reckoned with is the fourth figure waiting further up the road, a question the film holds back rather than the sort of thing I will spoil here.
The cast
Hamilton is the reason to turn up and she knows it. Her Sarah Connor is not a nostalgic cameo but a lead, weathered and furious and very funny in a bone-dry way, treating the whole apocalypse as an admin problem she has been managing for decades. Mackenzie Davis is the real discovery, all coiled physical conviction as Grace, selling the idea of an enhanced soldier who runs hot and burns out fast. Natalia Reyes has the trickiest job, the ordinary person the plot happens to, and she grows into it as the film widens her part. Schwarzenegger, when he arrives, is handled with more wit than you might fear: this is an old machine given a strange domestic afterlife, played with a deadpan melancholy that lands better than it has any right to. The four of them generate the thing these films live or die on, which is the sense of people actually running for their lives.
The craft
Tim Miller made his name on Deadpool, and he brings the same appetite for kinetic, legible action. The set pieces are the strongest part of the film: a freeway pile-up, a mid-air sequence aboard a falling transport plane, a flooded dam finale, all staged so you can follow who is where and why it matters. Tom Holkenborg’s score knows when to gesture at Brad Fiedel’s original theme and when to leave it alone. The effects are mostly excellent, though the new Terminator’s split-into-two trick occasionally tips into the weightless digital soup that the 1991 film, with far less computing power, somehow avoided. It moves at a proper clip, never lingers, and for two hours it does the basic job of an action film better than the series has managed in a long while.
How it stacks up
The honest comparison is the one the film invites and then cannot win. Set beside Terminator 2: Judgment Day, still one of the great action films, this is a capable cover version of a song you already love. The structure is the same, the beats rhyme, and a couple of moments feel like deliberate callbacks rather than fresh ideas. Against the rest of the franchise it fares much better. It has more conviction than Salvation, more coherence than Genisys, and a clearer sense of what a Terminator film should feel like at speed. As a legacy sequel it sits in the upper half of the current crop, closer to The Force Awakens in its mix of comfort and competence than to the films that simply trade on memory.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come round to it more warmly than I expected, calling it the best Terminator sequel in years and singling out Hamilton’s return and the action. Audiences are running a touch higher still, and yet the cinema seats are emptier than anyone at Paramount wanted, with a franchise-fatigue that the film cannot quite outrun. That split feels right to me. The reviews are correct that this is the most assured the series has been since Cameron left it, and the muted turnout is the price of a franchise that has cried wolf too often. None of that changes what is on the screen, which is a solid, well-made action film carrying a great deal of baggage that is not its fault.
Verdict
I came to this braced for another cynical exhumation and found something with more life in it than that. It is not intelligent science fiction in the way the first two films were, and it does not build a new world so much as repaint an old one, which keeps it short of the top tier on the things I most value. But it is fast, it is funny where it means to be, Hamilton and Davis are genuinely good, and the action is the cleanest this series has staged in years. I would happily watch it again, which is more than I can say for most of what came between this and Judgment Day. 7.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. The big freeway and dam set pieces are worth the larger screen.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Dark Fate underperformed badly enough at the box office to stall the planned new trilogy, and for the moment it stands as the last live-action Terminator film, the franchise pivoting afterwards into the animated series Terminator Zero (2024). Its reputation has settled roughly where the reviews left it, as the best of the post-Cameron sequels and a film undone more by audience fatigue than by its own quality. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on the major streaming services depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, bloody images, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Sustained action scenes feature occasional bloody stabbings, shootings and impalements, as well as crunchy blows with fists and heavy objects.
Injury detail: There are occasional images of bloodied dead and injured people, including sight of wounds and pools of blood.
Language: There is use of strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherfker’). Milder terms include ‘shit’, ‘asshole’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘piss’ and ‘bastard’.
Additional issues: There is frequent and sustained moderate action threat. Other issues include infrequent non-sexualised rear nudity.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
