Terminator: Dark Fate

Deadpool director Tim Miller’s newest addition to the Terminator series is the most mediocre of the canon, but that’s partly because it’s so detached from the first three films. It’s Terminator revisionist history in a way. In Terminator: Dark Fate, the previous three films don’t even exist or matter anymore (Terminator Salvation and Genisys never mattered). The film takes place in a world where those timelines/events didn’t even happen. I mean, the Terminator movies have always been about time traveling to the past to change the future, so, I guess you can kind of do whatever you want with the story, but totally erasing the first three movies is absurd, cheap, sloppy writing, and it took only three writers to come up with this. Lame.

It’s been over two decades since Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) prevented “Judgement Day” on August 29, 1997, when Skynet decided all humanity was a threat to its existence and turned our own bombs against us. Some new characters are introduced… Dani (Natalia Reyes) and her brother (Diego Boneta) are living in Mexico when a new, more advanced Terminator, called a Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna) shows up to kill Dani. They soon come together with Sarah Connor, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cyborg, hybrid super-soldier from the future, and eventually Carl, a classic T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to fight off the Rev-9.

The Rev-9 Terminator feels like a complete rip-off of Terminator 2: Judgement Day‘s/Robert Patrick’s T-1000. The movie’s draw, Schwarzenegger takes a back seat to Hamilton and Davis, playing now clichéd, token, “woke”/“strong” females that seem to be there not because of good creative writing, but because that’s the story you’re forced to tell in 2019. On top of everything, it does feel like a nostalgic cash grab for the dwindling franchise.  Schwarzenegger needs the money though. I bet he wishes he could time travel back in time and not father that secret child with that maid of his. What an asshole.

[R]