Starring Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger

Directed by Tim Miller

Paramount, out now

It’s over two decades since Judgement Day – and another Terminator has arrived…

The short version of this – for anyone who’s worried about spoilers – is that this is, at long last, the third film in the series that we’ve been hoping for since 1991. Forget your Machines Rising, your Salvations and your Genesysises, this is the real deal, picking up on elements from the original two, putting a lot of plotlines to bed, but also setting things up for future films if this one does well enough. Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger are grouped in various different ways as the movie goes on (with some of the expected reworkings of lines… and quite a few unexpected), and Gabriel Luna has the CGI-enhanced dogged persistence necessary.

Spoilers follow.

The movie kicks off with scenes from T2, reminding us of the stakes that Sarah Connor was fighting for before jumping forward to shortly after Judgement Day – and her life is turned upside down once again. It’s a brave, and sensible, move, taking John out of the equation so that we know right from the start that this isn’t yet another ‘save John Connor’ movie. Then we jump forward to the present and the arrival of the first visitor from the future – Mackenzie Davis’ Grace, a different sort of fighter. In quick succession we meet Natalia Reyes’ Dani, her brother Diego (Diego Boneta) and then the latest edition of the Terminator, Gabriel Luna. Where Robert Patrick’s T2 model exuded silver, this one is all black, and has a few tricks up his sleeve that predecessors didn’t. The ability to split makes for more intense action scenes but just like the older Arnie model’s aging, we don’t really learn how or why – we just go with it.

And then we’re into the set piece fights, chases, explosions, violent deaths and more chases that show that Tim Miller really should be handed the keys to the Bond franchise. There are the odd moments where you might get lost spatially with regard to the participants, but compared with the majority of action films, these are rare. The stunt team put in their hours, as do the visual effects units,

All of which would be pointless if there wasn’t some degree of heart to the film – and there is. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor has been drifting, her only purpose to get rid of Terminators that arrive periodically; her scenes with Davis and Reyes show her gaining a new reason to survive – particularly once she learns the truth about Dani (which I suspect most of the audience will have guessed long before Grace admits it). Unlike Kristianna Loken’s Teminatrix in T3, you believe in the augmented Grace because you see the comedown and the moments where she pays the price for the upgrades she had. The three actors gel well, with their dramatic and action scenes resonating and there really isn’t a hint of tokenism about focusing on three female leads.

Luna’s Terminator may have been created by a different AI, but he’s from the same mould as Patrick (and indeed Schwarzenegger in the original) – relentless, charming when he needs to put on the act, but otherwise simply not giving up. Arnie is… well, he’s at his best in the action scenes, let’s say kindly.

The script – credited to David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray – occasionally goes a bit over the top with its nods to the first two films (we didn’t need quite so many riffs off Arnie’s most famous line, for example), and there are a couple of times on the journey across the border that feel too drawn out, but overall this is the strongest Terminator script since T2 by a country mile. Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL)’s score uses Brad Fiedel’s Terminator theme in the way some Bond composers uses Monty Norman’s piece, almost as punctuation, but I look forward to hearing it clean.

Verdict: After the last two films, you may well go in with low expectations for this – but it will exceed those considerably. It could easily have been called Terminator: Coda, although more from this team would be welcomed. 8/10

Paul Simpson

In a world where Judgement Day was averted by the actions of Sarah Connor and her son John, Dani Ramos is about to have an extremely bad day, as a new threat emerges from the future to threaten all of humanity.

Having just sat through and analysed the preceding five movies in the franchise, I will confess I went into Dark Fate worried. Could I switch off my analytical brain and just enjoy the ride, or would I find myself equally disappointed by too many plot holes and bits of silliness to do so? Oddly, the answer is a lot of column A and a little bit of Column B.

It certainly makes some bold choices right from the outset. As baller moves go, referencing your franchise’s previous high point by playing some footage from it and then fast forwarding just far enough to pull an Alien3 on one of your main characters is right up there, and it’s difficult not to be impressed by the moxie, even as you sit there wondering if you just saw what you think you saw. But these are the sorts of decisions which – if we are being honest – the franchise should have been taking years ago, and it’s difficult to fault it for taking those chances now, even if they don’t always quite come off.

Mackenzie Davis is nothing short of a revelation as Grace, an enhanced human soldier sent back from the future to protect Dani Ramos from the attentions of Gabriel Luna’s Rev 9 – a new and even scarier form of Terminator which blends elements of the T-1000, T-X and… whatever John Connor was supposed to be in Genisys, without ever being any of them, and also has a neat trick where it can split itself into two separate robots which is visually cool though rarely actually used for anything. From the first moment she arrives, David makes it clear that this isn’t the sort of resistance hero we are used to seeing come back from the franchise’s nightmare future. Tough, brutal and not above ruining the day of anyone – good or bad – who gets in her way, Davis gets the lion’s share of the best lines and has a screen presence which just cannot be ignored every second she’s on screen.

Playing opposite her is Natalia Reyes as Dani, who also earns her paycheck twice over with a performance which manages to believably convey her journey through the movie’s narrative from scared victim to something quite different, the script not having her have one single moment that flips a switch but instead giving her a sensible, well-paced arc which she inhabits completely from the first frame to the very last.

And as for Luna himself – the movie sensibly avoids his Rev 9 from having any quirks, tics or catchphrases, instead concentrating on his utter relentless drive to do one single thing. Luna’s onscreen intensity and presence help convey that as much as the script itself – he’s seldom still even for a second, and there’s no wasted motion about him. He’s just always going forward, towards his target at all times, regardless of who or what gets in his way.

And then of course, there’s the return of the Old Guard, in the form of Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hamilton’s portrayal of Sarah Connor in the opening two films has arguably never been bettered, and where this film excels head and shoulders above every other movie since Judgement Day is in giving us a Sarah who makes sense of what that character went through. Cameron’s odd alternate ending for T2, featured on the extended version, never felt right – John and Sarah just picking up and becoming normal everyday folks and having a happy ending just never felt on any level like it was realistic. Here, we have a Sarah who’s old, ornery and just generally pissed off at the world, spending her life hunting down terminators and drinking to forget in-between. She’s one of America’s most wanted (because of course she is) and she’s clearly battling her own demons.

Even more impressive, the movie resists the urge to make Sarah the solution to everything – if anything in fact, she spends large portions of the movie’s plot somewhat out of her depth and constantly wrong-footed, whether by the concept of who and what Grace is, or the very different future from which she has returned. It’s an odd juggling act that the movie does, between Sarah being important but not the centre of the universe, and to its credit it walks that line perfectly, helped by the strong performances of Reyes and Davis and a script that knows exactly which beats to land and where.

Schwarzenegger’s plotline is perhaps the boldest of all, and it’s one where the movie perhaps pushes its luck a little. I think the desire to have him be both the T-800 (or model 101 here as the film has it again) so intimately tied with Sarah’s own life and also be one who, absent the drive of a central mission from Skynet, interacts with humanity and learns to become part of is what undermines this slightly. I’m reminded of the comments from director Tim Miller and Hamilton herself that their shared least favourite moment of T2 is the ‘thumbs up’ at the end, which both feel is overly sentimental – odd then that the film works in a whole sub plot for the T-800 which essentially repackages the T2 idea of a Terminator learning the value of human life and working to prevent the very future from which it originates coming to pass. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, and it’s certainly the best role the franchise has given Arnie since T2, but if there’s a weaker part to the film from a narrative perspective, this is it.

It also tries to be relevant to a modern audience by including stuff about Border Patrol and ICE etc (and obviously Ramos herself being a Mexican character) but in fairness none of this stuff feels like it’s so much being commented on via the narrative as simply waved at as the film passes through. Again, not a major weakness, more of an observation.

On the plus side, it seems that Cameron’s Madonna obsession is finally over itself – there’s an indication early doors that Ramos will literally be the ‘new Sarah Connor’ destined to give birth to someone important in the future and therefore a worthy target of Legion (the new Skynet) for attack and humanity (in the form of Grace) to protect. It’s so nice to see the series manage to change this one simple thing, and I for one was very grateful.

It’s not all perfect by any means – some FX shots (an opening one of T-800 endoskeletons in particular but also some later green screen moments) aren’t quite up to snuff, and there’s the aforementioned oddness with Arnie’s plot. But for once this is a movie which takes the right lessons from T2 – that you needn’t worry about minor plot holes and narrative bugbears as long as you’re entertaining the audience with a kickass action film. For 128 minutes I was thoroughly entertained by amazing set pieces, snappy dialogue and a genuine sense of a relentless flight from an unstoppable antagonist. It may not be the best Terminator movie ever, but it’s a more than worthy successor to T2, and I for one am happy to play along with its conceit that Rise of the Machines, Salvation and Genisys never happened.

Verdict: Bold, ambitious and able to cover most of its flaws with excellent performances and a tight script. For the first time in years, I’d be happy to see another Terminator movie after the current one. 8/10

Greg D. Smith