The Best Terminator Movie Since T2 Showed the Franchise Still Wanted To Live

By the time the wheels on Terminator: Dark Fate started turning, the series was already on life support. Since James Cameron left the series after T2: Judgment Day, the war between Sarah Connor and Skynet’s metalline assassins have been characterized by a sense of purposelessness. Rise of the Machines lacked the grace and precision of Cameron’s imagination, while the ambitions of The Sarah Connor Chronicles were upset by strikes and low viewership, the leaden Salvation wasted the promise of a wartorn futurescape, and, in a low point for the series, Genisys was a cartoonish, vapid nostalgia grab that all-but buried hope for ingenuity returning to the series.

Nobly, Tim Miller’s Dark Fate attempted to reset the timeline and scrapped everything to do with Genisys — something that would feel forgivable if it didn’t come after a paltry four-year gap. The result would end in a devastating box office flop: On a crazy inflated budget of somewhere in the $190 million range, Dark Fate is calculated to have lost $122.6 million.

But Dark Fate has so much going for it — a welcome focus on female characters, a tense journey from Mexico City across the border into Texas, and a much more thoughtful use of legacy characters than Genisys or Salvation. In a fittingly cruel and possibly inevitable twist of fate, the best Terminator film since 1991 couldn’t avoid the flop destiny that had been set up by the profitable but withering previous installments. But looking back five years after it came out, it clearly demonstrated the franchise still wanted to live.

Just before an advanced, lethal Rev-9 Terminator (Gabriel Luna) touches down in Mexico City, the augmented human soldier Grace (Mackenzie Davis) is sent back to protect Dani (Natalia Reyes), the future leader of the resistance against Legion. That’s the evil AI that rose up after the preemptive defeat of Skynet by Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who hasn’t been able to enjoy a normal life since her son John was killed by a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) that was sent back around the same time as the original in 1984.

As was the case in Cameron’s original film (this is also the first Terminator film to have Cameron on board in an active, creative role since T2, even if Miller has some hang-ups about his involvement), the cybernetic hunter-killer is far more calm, collected, and surgical in how they navigate the past than the twitchy and frenetic human protector, and newcomers Luna and Davis lend their archetypal characters a fierce edge and energy that easily eclipses all the other Robert Patrick and Michael Biehn imitators.

Miller is not as deft an action director as Cameron, but like the Terminator creator, he has a background in visual effects. As a VFX artist, Miller co-founded Blur Studio, which created cinematic trailers for Rocksteady’s Arkham games, produced an Oscar-nominated animated short film, and contributed to Avatar’s vast CGI backdrops. The language of Miller’s animated series Love, Death & Robots is all over his Terminator film — Grace, Luna, and “Carl” (the Arnie T-800 who remains on Earth with no Skynet orders to follow) ranges from heavy and impactful to bouncy and weightless, with the wet-tar like liquid metal covering the Rev-9 stretching and slipping off his endoskeleton like he’s in a particularly aggressive Mortal Kombat bout. (The same month as Dark Fate’s release, Carl the T-800 appeared in a Mortal Kombat 11 DLC.) What keeps the action fun, if not particularly grounded, is that Miller ups the intensity of his Terminator throughout, and the Rev-9’s inhuman physics and body-separating powers are tinged with a nasty sense of horror and dread.

The grimness of Dark Fate is what makes it such an interesting late entry in the series. Undoing the certainty of T2’s finale in such an unforgiving, kid-killing way feels like a kick in the teeth for the very fans Miller and Cameron wanted to court back to the franchise. But the fact that Grace comes from an ugly Terminator War, and hasn’t ever heard of Skynet or what Sarah sacrificed for the human race, feels like an uncomfortable and probing complication about what we take for granted in this series.

Was the enemy ever just Skynet, or was it that human beings were complicit in their own extinction? Did it matter which AI tried to destroy the world, or was the point of Terminator that it’s never too soon to fight for a better future? Nothing that triggered Skynet’s takeover — rampant militarism, paranoid tech overreach, the reduction of collectivism in society — has been solved since 1991. Dark Fate’s grim prophecy of the same nightmare unfolding years in the future reminds us of the true relevance of the Terminator series: that survival is a constant struggle, and protecting the future should feel as urgent and instinctive as machine programming.