Terminator Dark Fate: Better Than I Expected

The very opening moments of Tim Miller's Terminator: Dark Fate are subversive, to say the least. And one thing I've come to understand about unusually strong and adverse audience reactions to varying franchise films is that they often have less to do with actual misgivings with the quality of the movie and more to do with a harsh disdain for a decision the director made that they think in some ways soils the legacy of the franchise. In essence, I don't think the complaints about Dark Fate are as organic as they are justifications these naysayers thought of to hate it because they disagreed with one particular decision the movie made. After all, I hate this movie because I disagree with a subjective creative choice, doesn't sound like a very concrete reason to hate a film, does it? Don't blame me, it's introductory psychology. That's only one reason I'm hesitant to support franchise filmmaking full-stop. Not only do you have to write a good movie to appease critics, but you also have to write it in a way that doesn't offend people, or you lose. That's not to say that Dark Fate is a perfect movie, but as someone familiar with the discourse surrounding it, it was far better than I'd been led to believe. It also ignored Terminator: Genisys, a decision you won't hear me making too many complaints about. 

After a dusty and gray Terminator Salvation and a hopelessly generic-looking Terminator: Genisys, it's good to see a franchise film that wants to look fun. The colors of Dark Fate pop like nobody's business, a welcome departure from the cold grays of the last few installments of Terminator. Mexico is a colorful country if you know where to look, and future Resistance soldier Dani, time-travelling Grace, and readily familiar Sarah Connor's flight through its countryside is a lot of fun to look at. The Rev-9 Terminator unit chasing them is also a pretty terrifying sight, his shape-shifting liquid metal form somewhat similar to the T-1000 of Terminator 2, yet radically different in others. Given, the visual effects of this movie aren't nearly as impressive as its color scheme. They're technically superior to past installments, but I wasn't as taken by their plasticky, commercial quality. They suffer from a commercialization that I can only call Marvel-itis, where they're a blast to look at but lack obvious weight. 

Dark Fate flirts with the familiar person who knows everything protects the person who knows nothing premise, a dynamic we've seen even within the confines of Terminator lore. Still, its Mexican road trip backdrop reminds me more of Logan than anything else in its own universe, certainly more than other movies in this series that glow blue rather than orange and brown. The Mexican setting of Dark Fate is a refreshing shift from the more contemporary habits of its predecessors, and while it's a movie that may behave similarly to everything that came before it, it looks and feels entirely different. 

Dark Fate is a female-centric movie, yet as far as I could tell, it's largely and refreshingly free of a lot of the combative posturing of Genisys. It's a pretty matter-of-fact action movie, one that I dare say I enjoyed quite a bit. It fully respects and includes an eventually-appearing Arnie as part of the posse, as it should. It's neither a muscle-bound Men's Health advertisement nor a feminist Facebook page fan fiction, and that's a good thing. It may occasionally lose itself in trying to be epic. It may occasionally lose itself in its visual effects. It may even lose itself in a story that would have benefited from existing in a smaller sphere. But it's not trying to be socially inflammatory, and so it instead allows itself to be something important: fun. 

Dark Fate is the third-best Terminator movie after the first two films, and that's not a knock on it in the slightest. It might suffer from a debilitating need to be a big blockbuster when it would have been better off keeping its story more grounded around the ladies and their perspective of this latest lethal high-tech chase, but as far as popcorn flicks go, Dark Fate is a great one. Its horizons are unfamiliar, its story conversely comfortable, its Terminator terrifying, and its Arnie and Linda firing on all cold-steel cylinders, even if the new cast isn't much to write home about. It's two hours well spent, and best of all, it doesn't make empty demands of your intelligence as if it were anything more. 

Terminator: Dark Fate - 7/10

Proverbs 24:11-12