Terminator: Dark Fate was... fine I guess?
There hasn't been a truly great installment in this series in almost 30 years (literally as long as I've been alive). This film manages to surpass pretty much all of the more recent films with the possible exception of T3, but it still isn't anything to write home about (yet here I am). Tim Miller the director behind the much-celebrated first Deadpool film doesn't demonstrate a single hint of directorial flare here, this film is utterly devoid of charm outside one or two ok lines. The entire thing feels like it was made in a board room by committee, there is no personality to the direction whatsoever.
This thing is passably shot, coherently written, and has somehow passed on Arnie's stilted acting to the rest of the cast. It also essentially borrows the entire plot structure from the second film and throws in the premise of the first film just for shits. Despite heavily borrowing from its betters the film manages to do none of it well, let alone approaching the heights already achieved.
The effects are also weirdly inconsistent, there's a lot of dipping heavily into the uncanny valley as people move at impossible speeds and pull off moves that don't even look real when a robot is doing them. The de-aging stuff is a little bit better but it's also only really one sequence. Really mediocre effects overall.
This may all sound harsh for a film that I said was alright, but that's the danger of the mediocre film, it's completely forgettable. At least a complete train wreck occasionally breaks through tedium into hilarity or awe as you watch a disaster unfold on screen. This is just completely uninvesting.
I will say that this film does fix the awful timeline established by Genysis, essentially soft rebooting the series to right after the events of T2. But it doesn't do enough with the new timeline to make it anything worth revisiting.
If you like Terminator and somehow haven't burned out on shitty sequels, then you'll probably get something out of this. Otherwise, if you're craving a Terminator fix just go watch either of the first two. You'll have a way better time.
5/10 Please don't come back.
P.S. Spoilers Sorta: Just wanted to note the huge missed opportunity here with three women serving as the most prominent characters in the film. The writing is awful at making us care about any of them. Even poor Linda Hamilton who is fantastic as Sarah Connor in T1 & T2 and is just given absolutely nothing interesting to do in this movie except basically repeating her entire character arc from T2 with slightly different motivations and worse execution.
Mackenzie Davis as Grace is the most developed of the three but it's still pretty thin stuff. Playing most of the movie stoic and then just up and delivering a massive exposition dump via emotional outburst to force a character moment is such amateur hour bullshit, be better Hollywood.
Natalia Reyes as Dani literally does nothing in this movie, she has one personality trait and basically just exists for the other characters to orbit around and talk about. Her most redeeming quality is that she's less annoying than John Connor from T2.
Good writing could have made us care about these characters and by extension care about the plot. Good writing would've even made the rest of the film's shortcomings easier to forgive. The female empowerment angle they were going for could've felt like more than just marketing. How a movie in this day and age can get a two hundred-million-dollar budget with a script that feels this paint by the numbers still blows my mind. But hey, it's number one at the box office so what the hell do I know.
P.P.S. Trigger warning to all the parachute riggers out there, there is an airdrop scene with multiple cargo loads including a Humvee and it is god awful. One "highlight" a cargo parachute is deployed underwater and envelopes a terminator like it was shot out of an air cannon. Watch at your own risk.
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