Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) - Movie Review

One of the most common hypotheticals in the realm of time travel fiction is the Baby Hitler scenario: Travelling back in time to kill Hitler as an infant before he grows into one of history’s most notorious dictators. There are a lot of ethical dilemmas and potential consequences that spring out of this idea, but one of the lesser-discussed ones is the possibility that making the kill successfully wouldn’t solve everything. That while the very specific threat Hitler posed may be prevented, something just as bad, or worse, could take its place in human history. It is this idea that forms part of the core of today’s feature, and it makes for one of the most welcome surprises of the year.

The story itself plays out as one would expect from a Terminator film: A woman has been targeted by literal death machines from the future, as she is destined to give birth to the resistance that would destroy those machines. She goes on the run, aided by another time-traveller who was sent back to protect her. While the writing banks on a lot of modern specificity to generate its more pointed imagery, utilising U.S./Mexican tensions and the current horror show that is the treatment of immigrants trying to cross the border to add a certain Battle Angel Alita tinge to what has become a very familiar story. It certainly makes for a refreshing change from the norm where the only thing about Mexico that gets big-screen attention is the cartels.

But for as repeated as much of the film ends up being in differing ways, that ends up becoming an afterthought compared to the more important aspect: The delivery of what has been done before. While this film basically retcons every other film that came out after Judgment Day, a fitting tactic given how underwhelming T3, Salvation and Genisys turned out, it holds onto the more interesting additions from those films and gives them space to properly flourish.

The multiversal trappings of Genisys give way to the reintroduction of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, essentially a remnant of the original timeline after she both succeeded and failed at her initial mission, as well as a very nice revival of Arnold Schwarzenegger as ‘Carl’, yet another T-800 who maintains the genuine heart and humour that made his turn in Genisys as good as it was.

From Salvation, we get the front-line imagery of the future war between man and machine, right from the opening beachfront invasion of the Terminators that makes for some particularly unnerving visuals. They also bring back the man/machine hybrid that Sam Worthington failed to make interesting and restructured it with Mackenzie Davis as Grace, whose gruffness and take-no-shit attitude balances out nicely with her sheer will and determination to keep Natalia Reyes’ Dani safe. She also somewhat realises T3’s idea of a female Terminator, although without the incessant need for fan-service that made that previous attempt so bloody embarrassing.

Aside from rebuilding on past ideas, and honestly doing them justice this time around, it also builds on the notions of free will vs. pre-determinism that gave the original films their emotional edge. Rather than just outright repeating the past, it expands on it, particularly in regard to Sarah Connor and her place in the story. For as much as the first two films emphasised her place as the shepherd for John, the ‘real’ leader of the resistance, that ends up going against the fact that she remains the most compelling human character in the entire franchise.

And here, her continuing trauma and intensified worries for the future are put into overdrive after she succeeds at stopping the rise of Skynet… only for another AI to take its place in the future, and for a Terminator to actually succeed at the mission it was designed for. This results in a revelation that between Sarah, Dani and Grace, they’re not waiting for a man to give them their purpose for the future. They’re going to grab at it for themselves, making for a refreshing re-analysis of the original story in a way that gives it a Halloween 2018-style repolishing while keeping it in-step with what came before. Well, the good that came before, at least.

Then there’s the visuals, and holy shit, Tim Miller was the perfect choice to helm this latest do-over of the classic series. After the iffy-ness of Deadpool, seeing Miller direct another film would normally instil some form of worry… but that ignores how Miller also spearheaded Love Death & Robots, one of the most ingenious CGI showcases of the entire 2010’s. If anyone was going to give this franchise the restructuring it needed, while maintaining the pedigree for special effects that made the first two so damn good, Tim Miller is one of the few working today who could have pulled it off.

The effects work here definitely show that he’s been honing his craft as far as computer-assisted visual storytelling. This is especially true in the realisation of this film’s resident Terminator, the Rev-9, a hybrid of T-800’s metal skeleton and T-1000’s liquid metal. Gabriel Luna channels a lot of Robert Patrick-esque menace in his delivery, and as a showing of both a force to be reckoned with in a fight and as a tech-savvy infiltrator, he certainly makes for an entertaining villain. Then again, all the fight scenes look great, from the shootouts to the up-close brawling between the Rev-9 and Grace, to the more creative moments like a battle aboard a crashing plane and even an underwater car chase.

Simply calling this film the best Terminator entry since Judgment Day would be too obvious; not exactly difficult to outclass the self-parody of Rise Of The Machines, and Salvation and Genisys operating more as springboards for trilogies than their own encapsulated stories. What makes this remarkable is how this so very easily can stand next to the original two films because it manages to succeed in the same way that they did, if not at the exact same level of competency. The character drama, the effects work, the glorious action scenes, the use of time travel storytelling that doesn’t outright confuse the audience, even its ponderings on creating one’s own fate; it all rings true and make this into a worthy successor to two of the greatest sci-fi films of all time.