I'm a huge fan of Terminator and Terminator 2. They we're ground breaking, had interesting stories and exciting action with characters you actually cared about. Now in its sixth outing Terminator: dark fate is a frustrating mess echoing these previous movies and plot, gender swapping this time in a lazy attempt at updating the franchise.
In this iteration Grace (Played by Mackensie Davis) is our lone warrior, an augment, sent back through time to protect Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), a mexican worker who has no idea that she is the future savior of mankind.
There is a trend in attempting to rewrite existing franchises to shoe horn in female characters, who are woefully underwritten for political reasons and not because it makes for a great story. Take Dani Ramos for instants, her character is almost non-existent, a cipher, forceful but single dimensional. It perhaps didn’t help that I thought Natalia Reyes seemed a little out of her depth, lacking the spunk of Linda Hamilton, her turn bland and uninteresting.
Mackensie Davis doesn’t fare much better, hampered with stilted dialogue like ‘come with me or you’ll be dead in thirty seconds’ an obvious throwback to Kyle Reece’s ‘Come with me if you want to live’ only this time rote and contrived. The movie is chock full of throwbacks some that work and others not so much.
Much of the dialogue feels forced and without character. Scenes without action are tired, lacking in chemistry almost like Director Tim Miller had only a passing interest in them, preferring to focus on the action instead. Which leaves the characters exposed, Linda Hamilton struggling to revive the intensity of Terminator 2’s Sarah Connor, leaving a faded copy xeroxed until faintly recognisable. Which is a shame as she was a seminal female character of the 90s. In this she is given short shrift in favour of introducing new ‘characters’ that don’t really work. There is an uneasy alliance between the three that feels unnatural and forced. As a result the acting is laboured and devoid of chemistry.
When Arnold appears the movie picks up, his familiar turn as the T-800 a welcome (And funny) reprise even though his presence doesn’t really make much sense. In an opening prologue we witness (Spoiler alert) the T-800 gun down John Connor after they have supposedly saved man-kind from Skynet. Throwing the first two movies under the bus to reinvigorate the franchise in favour of female empowerment to the detriment of story and everything else. It feels badly contrived and Natalia Reyes performance doesn’t sell this idea at all effectively, seemingly miscast in her role. The story involved a bad case of word swapping, the world essentially the same, Skynet replaced by Legion, Dani Taking over from John Connor. You get the idea.
The action is frenetic but without tension or a distinct style. CGI overload, rinse and repeat. Gone are the physical effects bypassed in favour of acrobatic maneuvers that look completely fake. There isn’t a successive build up of escalating tension that is characteristic of the first and second Terminator movies. Now it is a desperate case of throwing as many things at the screen as possible in the hope that something sticks. None of the action scenes are particularly memorable or for that matter involving. Perhaps in part to the fact you don’t really engage with any of the characters - they don’t exist in that realm, cynically substituting male for female without introducing ‘character’ within them.
Overall a disappointing mess.
** out of *****
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