Dark Fate is the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, but if you asked James Cameron, he’d say it was only the third. Harnessing his unparalleled creativity to imagine a fictional world in which Terminators: Rise of the Machines, Salvation and Genisys (groan) never happened, the “visionary” behind Avatar makes his triumphant return to the series that made him a household name among fans of explosive sci-fi action by—what else—playing it safe as the man behind the man behind the camera, with both a “story by” and producer credit.
It’s a bad sign when the movie starts with a flashback from the series’ high point, T2: Judgment Day, and then follows up with a new scene that negates the entire reason that movie existed. Cut to the year 2020 in Mexico City, where a couple of those now famous balls of electricity form high above the ground, dropping their respective time-travelers tens of feet to the ground, either because people in the future can’t calibrate ground level anymore, or more likely because the filmmakers just thought it would look cool.
There’s a lot of cool-for-the-sake-of-cool going on in this movie. The new terminator, played by Gabriel Luna (presumably because he has Robert Patrick-esque ears), is basically the T-X from the third film, only this time the nano-liquid and metal endoskeleton are black and can work independently of each other. (Cool.) If you’re asking yourself why an all liquid-metal terminator couldn’t just do the same thing, jus- jus- just shut up, okay? Luna isn’t bad as the nigh-unstoppable killing machine, but he adopts the visage of other characters so often that it seems pointless for such an android assassin to be programmed with a neutral appearance other than to give an actor a role.
This time around, he’s hunting down Dani (Natalia Reyes) who will become an important figure in the future. Dani is protected by Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an “enhanced” human, who, like an outdated iPhone, has terrible battery life and must be “recharged” with syringes full of milky stuff. At heightened moments, this of course provides “tension” that makes lots of sense and isn’t contrived. Luckily, Linda Hamilton returns as Sarah Conner—more hardened than ever—to add some additional protection whenever Grace crashes.
Director Tim Miller (Deadpool) makes Dark Fate the best-looking of the previous three movies, but the often-nonsensical plot (new terminators don’t have built-in WiFi?) shows that he’s only as good as the material he’s working with. While the first half plays like a beat-for-beat knockoff of T2, the latter half hints at what could’ve been, with some exciting action sequences and the inclusion of a familiar face that gives the film some of its best pathos as well as levity. But by that point it’s all too clear that Cameron’s pseudo-return and attempt to ignore the previous three films only resulted in the third-best Terminator movie.
