Terminator: Dark Fate 4 stars☆☆☆☆☆

As a teenager in the UK in the 1980s, my four horsemen of the apocalypse were (in no particular order) nuclear annihilation, rabies, spontaneous human combustion and Margaret Thatcher.

So when I first saw T2: Judgement Day in 1991, that scene where Sarah Connor watches a nuclear bomb exploding while she screams against the wire fence of a children’s playground left me feeling like I’d just sat through one of the most chilling moments committed to film. It still does.

I loved T2, though because of my teenage obsession with nuclear war I found it profoundly depressing, one of the few movies where that feeling of utter deflation and cold fear stayed with me afterwards.

Watching Terminator: Dark Fate (a sequel to T2, with the later films now seen as taking place in alternate realities) took me straight back, and not just because of the frequent nods to the earlier film (nods that I delighted in, though some people will find repetitive).

The wasteland future in Dark Fate, skulls lying around like pebbles, black skeleton terminators taking out human soldiers, brought back that sense of desolation and hopelessness even 28 years on.

Lest that all sounds too miserable, Dark Fate is a hopeful film, in a blockbuster way, anyway – personal and intimate while its characters literally battle for the human race’s future.

The action scenes are supremely thrilling, and – when Arnie Terminator turns up living in Texas – it’s also pretty funny. Oh, and it’s an emotional journey (I almost cried at the end, and I hate emotional journeys).

Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes, excellent), who lives with her brother and father in present day Mexico City, is being hunted by a Rev-9 Terminator (Gabriel Luna), sent from the future.

It’s an alternate future – you could see Dark Fate simply as an alternate reality Judgement Day – thanks to Sarah Connor’s earlier fight, though still a horrific one thanks to our species’ inability to listen to Ian Malcolm’s wise words in Jurassic Park. (Whether or not Jurassic Park exists in the Terminator Universe is immaterial. It exists in ours and we haven’t paid much attention.)

This different future is also one of cyber warfare, with Skynet never existing and Legion taking its place (it turns out AI, as well as nature, abhors a vacuum): “those assholes never learn,” says Sarah Connor when she arrives.

In a neat twist, Dani’s brother Diego (Diego Boneta) has just found out his factory job has been taken over by a machine, but soon he and Dani are on the run with Grace (Mackenzie Davis, single-minded with welcome flashes of uncertainty), an augmented human sent from the future to save her.

That first extended chase, with Dani, Diego and Grace in a truck pursued by the Rev-9, is utterly exhilarating. The latest incarnation of the Terminator is able to temporarily clone itself into those black skeletons, like spiders emerging from a nest; which with its slithering black liquid tentacles makes it a truly nightmarish synthesis of animal and machine.

They’re saved by Sarah Connor, who turns up in her truck – and even having seen this in the trailer I still felt a thrill as she got out and blasted the Rev-9 into pieces, temporarily at least.

It turns out Sarah has been playing Terminator wack-a-mole for two decades, helped by anonymous encrypted text messages she’s sent detailing their whereabouts, and signed “for John”.

The trio’s need for assistance leads them to Texas and Arnie Terminator, now relaxing into family life as Carl the curtain guy: he’s older, mellower, in control of his own destiny and has developed something approximating a human conscience.

Like the people whose jobs are taken by machines and robots, Skynet had no further use for him once his mission had been completed, but while he may be old on the outside, he can still fight like a bastard.

The action sequences are increasingly preposterous – partly because killing a Terminator is so damn hard – but thoroughly enjoyable. Considering how many people in real life die after tripping over their own feet, I’m even more impressed that Dark Fate‘s protagonists survive falling from a burning plane in an actual truck.

The focus now, nearly three decades on, is on determining your own destiny without making yourself unrecognisable. It’s a journey for Dani, and a question left dangling of the two half-human/half-machine creations. Grace, human but augmented with superhuman strength and with an artificial power core, contrasts with Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, a sophisticated machine who has become almost human.

With three women battling together for a better future, there’s a welcome theme of motherhood and motherliness, in all its meanings, threaded through the film.

It’s good on those tensions between fear-inducing female power, and female vulnerability, and how that vulnerability can sometimes be a strength: Dani, who may be the future mother of a resistance leader, and assumes caring roles within her family and during their mission (she refuses to leave people behind); Grace volunteering to protect Dani to the death if necessary; Sarah continuing her one-woman fight against the future as she can’t face her present.

Linda Hamilton is superb as Sarah, who is now battle-weary and paranoid, even though they are indeed out to get her; trying to counter the real dangers of trackable modern tech with a mixture of urban legend and practicality (she keeps her phone in a foil crisp packet and, heartbreakingly, has no photos of John).

Driven by rage, necessity and a desperation not to have to face what has happened to her, she is resolutely human, never more so than her conflicted feelings of relief and mild irritation that Grace doesn’t know who she is.

By changing the future she wrote herself out of history.

Dark Fate is a reunion and a very welcome one (though an early scene feels like a punch in the gut).

I haven’t seen the in-between films, but I love the melding of old and new in this. Two old timers in Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton and Terminator/Arnie, in a story driven by women, whose heroine (and the individual on whom the future rests) is a working class, woman of colour.

This may be a blockbuster, and blockbusters aren’t known for their nuance (there’s some enjoyably clunky dialogue); but it feels like a rebirth rather than a farewell.

If you want spoilers (honestly it’s better to watch it without!) you can scroll down the page for the main ones…

Watch the first and second trailers below, and scroll down for a featurette about the film:

Second trailer:

Featurette with Arnie, Linda, co-writer / producer James Cameron and director Tim Miller:

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SPOILERS!

Okay here goes… that gut punch I talk about is because John Connor is dead, killed as a child (a friend on Twitter alluded to it as being the Alien³ moment and that’s exactly what it felt like – when Hicks, Newt and Jonesy died at the start of that film). Arnie Terminator in Dark Fate is the Terminator who killed John. Dani doesn’t give birth to a new leader, she is the new leader. She creates the Resistance after the machines take over, bringing the surviving humans together. She also rescues Grace, growing up alone in the aftermath of the war. At the end of the film, Dani uses Grace’s internal power source to kill Rev-9, and Arnie Terminator also dies. (Yes I really did nearly cry! What of it.)