Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) Review
Terminator: Dark Fate opens in a familiar timeline, in an unfamiliar place. Sarah Connor (Lind Hamilton) and John Connor (returning Edward Furlong), plucked straight out of the 1992 Judgement Day, magically de-aged are relaxing in a Mexican beach-front locale. Off the grid and content that at least for the briefest of moments they’ve been able to stave off humanity’s oblivion. We don’t need to see an apocalyptic vision; rather, the apocalypse comes to fruition coldly and casually. A digitally de-aged Arnie arrives his familiar facade, causing a casual warmth to wash over John’s face. That hesitation welcomes death, and Sarah must realise her greatest fear, and the fear of any parent, an apathetic death giver arrives and snatches away her future. There’s nothing in Terminator: Dark Fate that cuts as deep as that nightmarish flashback.
Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) is on her way to her job as a robotics engineer in a large scale Mexican manufacturer when Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), Skynet’s latest Terminator and Grace (Mackenzie Davis), the human resistance’s latest augmented soldier - collide. The fate of humanity seems to rest squarely on the shoulders - same same but different.
There’s no time to get to know Reyes’ Dani - our saviour - or her family. Director Tim Miller and writers David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray, are in such a terrible rush to cast her headlong into life-threatening situations. The tragic deaths of her family, which are the motivating factors for her to grit her teeth and survive onslaught after onslaught, are as memorable as a bug splatter on your windscreen. There’s a tale to be told here of the mirroring illegal immigrants through time. For a moment, the U.S borderlands and the associated hostility seemed like a perfect prescient entanglement. However, this conceit is relegated to tapestry, rather than informing the way we’re approaching the text/sub-text of the movie.
Mackenzie Davis’ Grace is from the post-Judgement Day timeline of humanity and has cyborg upgrades that help with battle while maintaining humanity. Davis’ performance focus is the physical toll of the demands of her updates. She’s a fighting sprinter, whose fuel supply burns out fast; she’s not given the space form connections that resonate. Custodianship defines Linda Hamilton’s, Sarah Connor. She is bearing the exponential weight of humanity’s decline balancing on the fragile fulcrum of her son. When she can no longer protect him, she mops up the remaining Terminators sent by Skynet through an array of time to slowly prevent humanity’s eventual extinction. The only other moments of the film that didn’t feel like an action movie cyborg were in Hamilton projections of a quietly devastating, enduring loneliness. By the time we reach Arnie, another T-800 with a heart of gold, he’s welcome levity. A relief and torment for Sarah, whose life continues to be haunted by all iterations of this specimen. Mr Schwarzenegger can sleepwalk through the action set pieces of this character at this point.
Inspired action stakes define the series. Let’s take a detour through 1992 and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Cameron’s most epic action sequences are by today’s standards altogether quaint. Two motorcycles, a truck and a concrete tributary. A midi-gun stand that shoots up a car park with at most 15 police cars. And the final helicopter plunge toward the newly acquired swat truck. They are gargantuan in comparison to the action in the quieter, vastly more menacing tech-noir tones of the original Terminator. Each of the sequences is suffocatingly tense. Why? Well despite the transformation of Linda Cameron’s Sarah Connor from the curvy waitress into the lean and muscular guerrilla fighter and the shield of Arnie’s T-800 who virtually impervious to the readily available weaponry of the time; the fate of the human race depends on a fragile and frightened boy always under fire.
Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genysis - all of these films take action to the zenith in the brawl between cybernetic organisms. The fragility of a single regular person in the face of the overwhelming force of a sentient artificial intelligence hell-bent on extinguishing humanity is ignored for boom crash, digital robot mash — no fate, but what these dopey Transformers-adjacent movies make.
In both original Terminator films, a single stealth operative doesn’t want to attract the attention of authorities and police, left a confusing trail of death on a kamikaze pursuit. Dark Fate, despite Cameron’s guidance, unleashes Gabriel Luna’s Rev-9 and the carnage sounds like that of a natural disaster. Factories destroyed, border facilities decimated, planes/choppers hijacked, and hundreds of police and army personnel murdered. It’s easier to believe in time travel than it is to think in a restrained U.S police and military response to attacks on border facilities and hijacking planes.
The Terminator Series like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II before it, are burdened by staggering, genre and cinema redefining perfection. Every sequel blinded by servitude. The original Terminator, Sarah runs away from her destiny. In Judgement Day, Sarah embraces John and along with the T-800 rails against fate. The rest of the franchise, including Dark Fate, are frozen.
★★/★★★★
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyEX6u-Yhs&w=854&h=480]
