Terminator: Dark Fate for Femme Fatales

I really liked Terminator: Dark Fate. There’s something ironic and absurd about assuring the reader that this film is the third best in the Terminator series, but it is precisely that. It certainly could have been better and all too sad that it wasn’t but it’s a damn sight better than Terminator 3, 4 and 5. Then there’s the awesome return of Sarah Conner! While a chorus of modern women chant that only just yesterday did women finally get a chance to play the kind of roles generally reserved for men, Linda Hamilton skids onto the screen and like a bad ass gets out of her SUV and opens up a can of whoop ass on the most recent Terminator sent to kill the most recent threat to the machines future, reminding the world she was kicking ass and taking names long, long ago.

Directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool) with the aid of returning producer and Terminator creator James Cameron, the film should have been better than it actually is. Part of the problem lies (as it usually does) in the hodgepodge of writers credited with the screenplay by David Goyer, Justin Rhoades, and Billy Ray based on a story by James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee, Josh Friedman, Goyer and Rhoades. It’s not that all of these minds make for a confusing story line. The story is really just a retread of T:2, but with all these writers what is not excusable are the lazy moments of exposition and absurd clues left behind for villains to exploit.

At one point, the newest Terminator Rev 9 investigates a cabin in the woods looking for clues as to where he might find his target. The target is a young woman who has been assigned her own protector, this time an enhanced human woman who along with Sarah Conner and another Schwarzenegger T-800 model who goes by the name of “Carl,” now a family man with a wife and son and who apparently works as a handyman and drives a van with his business logo. For whatever reasons (beyond the lazy clue) Carl has a photo of his van on the refrigerator alongside pictures of his loving family. What great luck for the Rev 9 sent to kill his target that Carl is so fond of his van he keeps a photo of it on the fridge.

What does work, and I know many hated it but from the get-go Dark Fate let’s us know that John Conner was killed shortly after the events of T:2. One of the complaints I’ve seen regarding John Conner’s dark fate is that by killing him the franchise has killed the heart of the story. I don’t understand this belief and in fact, that all the Terminator sequels that followed the second lacked a prominent Sarah Conner in them and that all of those sequels sucked is really strong correlation. Sarah Conner has always been both the heart and soul of the Terminator series and the return of Linda Hamilton is the films strongest asset.

Of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger is back too but with this particular T-series Terminator, the continued path of castrating a robot with no balls only gets sillier. Playing the terminator that killed John Conner, it turns out he feels really guilty about that. Carl has been stealthily sending Sarah coordinates where other terminators are being sent so that she may destroy them. This is how Sarah meets Grace and Daniella “Dani,” (played respectively by Mackenzie Davis and Natalie Reyes).

Grace is an enhanced human anti-terminator sent from the future to protect Dani from assassination by future terminators…so, just like the original only different. Gabriel Luna plays the Rev-9 terminator sent to kill Dani and it looks like he’ll accomplish that until bad ass Sarah Conner joins the party. Grace is a mega-bad ass, but Rev-9 is even badder, so she can use the help. This, however, is why these three women need the help of “Carl” the domesticated T-800 Model 101 (Schwarzenegger).

The assumption on Sarah’s part is that Dani is the new Sarah in that she is probably going to be the mother of the future’s savior now that John Conner is dead. This assumption is a nice and subtle critique on patriarchal notions. Without getting in the audiences face about it, Dark Fate both reminds people that long before yesterday, the Terminator films (more so T:2 than the original, the only two that matter) were celebrating the female bad-ass, as well as picking apart assumptions about male saviors.

There is far more right with this movie than there is wrong with it, and it has plenty of silly plot lines and plot holes. Whether it is able to kick-start a dying franchise or not, Dark Fate is a fairly satisfying bookend to (given the retcon of 3, 4 and 5) to the first two and gives the fans of Terminator (finally) a trilogy worth watching.