Ter­mi­na­tor: Dark Fate

Back in 2005, dur­ing his open­ing mono­logue for the Oscars, Chris Rock ques­tioned the wis­dom of the evening being referred to as the Night of a Thou­sand Stars, ​“There’s like four stars here, the rest of you are just pop­u­lar peo­ple.” He was bemoan­ing the fact that there weren’t enough bona fide movie stars for the amount of films Hol­ly­wood was releas­ing each week, famous­ly earn­ing the ire of Sean Penn when he said, ​“If you can’t get a star… then wait! If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law… then wait! They’re not the same thing. Jah Rule isn’t the same as 2Pac!”

Tim Miller, direc­tor of the com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful Dead­pool and now this sixth entry in the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, isn’t the same as James Cameron. If you want James Cameron and all you can get is Tim Miller…

Ter­mi­na­tor: Dark Fate isn’t a good film, at least when held up against the clock­work pre­ci­sion of 1984’s The Ter­mi­na­tor, or the rare, char­ac­ter-dri­ven mono­lith of action stag­ing that is its 1991 sequel, Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judg­ment Day. It even pales in com­par­i­son to the affect­ed navel-gaz­ing of once-a-mid­dleweight-con­tender Jonathan Mostow’s three­quel from 2003, Rise of the Machines. But it’s a bet­ter film – maybe even a half-decent one – when com­pared to what came lat­er: the fea­ture-length video game cut-scene that is Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion and the gib­ber­ing inco­her­ence man­i­fest in the very title of Ter­mi­na­tor Genisys.

It’s a thor­ough­ly con­tem­po­rary block­buster, fuelled by nos­tal­gia, fan ser­vice and plas­tic CGI spec­ta­cle; a soft reboot that pays lip ser­vice to ques­tions of ille­gal immi­gra­tion, gen­der pol­i­tics, work­er obso­les­cence, and, in Macken­zie Davis’ aug­ment­ed cyborg Grace, non-bina­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, with­out say­ing any­thing espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing about any of them.

Much has been made in pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als about the return of Lin­da Hamilton’s Sarah Con­nor, a char­ac­ter of pri­mal, pro­tec­tive, mater­nal instinct, here reduced to an angry alco­holic who real­ly likes crisps. The title char­ac­ter fares lit­tle bet­ter, despite the ignominy of Gen­sisys’ ​‘Pops’ – a degra­da­tion of the killing machine who once upon a time couldn’t be rea­soned or bar­gained with – receiv­ing an upgrade to a more benign ​‘Carl.’ Still, upon intro­duc­tion, Schwarzenegger’s Ter­mi­na­tor is wear­ing car­go shorts, drol­ly mono­logu­ing on impo­tence and new­found domes­tic bliss in a sequence every view­er will have to wres­tle with on their own.

Per­for­mances across the board are game and com­mit­ted, with Davis and Hamil­ton evi­dent stand­outs, but it’s hard to get too excit­ed about a film that, while return­ing to the found­ing, chase-pic­ture premise of the fran­chise, appears to have been algo­rith­mi­cal­ly con­ceived and direct­ed by an AI film­mak­ing-chip that some­how made it out of the Skynet lab back in 1991.

It says a lot about the cur­rent block­buster land­scape that we can call this numb­ing­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry, over-the-counter dopamine hit the best film in the series since T2 and have that be good enough. Ulti­mate­ly, Dark Fate is the T‑800 mod­el of the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise; effi­cient and propul­sive, but star­ing down the exis­ten­tial dilem­ma any self-respect­ing Ter­mi­na­tor has to final­ly ask them­selves in the grim the light of day: is it bet­ter to face up to obso­les­cence or just chug along as a Carl?