Terminator: Dark Fate Parent Guide

Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) lives a quiet life in Mexico City until a time-travelling killer robot (Diego Boneta) from the future shows up at her job wearing her father’s face and tries to kill her. Saved by Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier from the same future as the Terminator, the duo go on the run. With the Terminator hot on their tails and options running out, they find help in an unlikely place - aging hero (and wanted fugitive) Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). With Sarah’s help, Dani and Grace now have to find a way to stop the Terminator and save the future.

In the most merciful act of retroactive continuity in recent memory, Terminator: Dark Fate ignores the existence of Terminator 3:Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation, and Terminator: Genisys, and functions solely as a sequel to 1991’s Terminator 2. I say this is a mercy because T2 was the last enjoyable movie in the franchise. I still wish studios would make the effort to come up with new ideas, but if they’re going to keep flogging the dead robotic-future-horse of this series, I’m glad they’re taking the time to make the new films halfway good.

And Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be halfway good. Linda Hamilton is crazy fun, playing everyone’s traumatized, mad-as-heck, and heavily armed aunt as she guides them through life on the run. The action is fast and interesting, and the stunts are insane. The writing alternates between funny and expository (which is both awkward and clunky), but what more can you ask from a dumb action movie? Personally, I would have asked for a better use of the CGI budget. Most of the film looks awesome, but a lot of the shots of the new Terminator (called the Rev-9) look plastic-y.

Paramount has given up on trying to bring this franchise in at a PG-13 and accepted that you can’t have killer robots from the future without some mess. That said, the violence is much less explicit than it could have been (although it is ubiquitous), and the non-sexual nudity associated with time travel is tastefully shot so as not to expose very much skin (or nanobots, as the case may be). The profanity is really where the film earns its “R” rating, with twenty uses of the sexual expletive by my count.

Fans of the franchise will have a fun time with this one, since it’s the first Terminator movie since 1991 to feel as fun and dangerous as it should. Hopefully, it’s also the last one, because the older Arnie gets, the harder it gets to convince anyone that he’s just “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton” and not an aging ex-politician whose bodybuilding days are further in the past than they used to be.