Terminator: Dark Fate

And still no one’s learned …

The humans haven’t learned that if they find the melted remains of a cyborg killing machine from the future, then don’t use them to build an AI killing machine in the present.

The AI hasn’t learned that by sending cyborg killing machines back in time to prevent its eventual destruction, it will cause its eventual destruction.

It’s not rocket science!

Now, to start with, Dark Fate (bad title) asks you to forget every other Terminator movie since Judgement Day: this is the sequel; the one in which Sarah Conner drives by and saves humanity’s future.

It’s a good movie: entertaining, with some genuinely funny moments (Arnie’s latest outing as a “retired” terminator is positively surreal), but it seems to suffer from not being sure what it wants to be. It flips between being an all-out action fest and rather vague comment on the human condition. That’s not really a problem, except that it hasn’t been done seamlessly. We have a block of action, then a block (a long block) of driving about chatting, followed by a bit of action, then a flash forward, then a bit more chat … The whole thing felt a little bit disjointed to me, like a montage stuck together with no real flow.

Fortunately, this didn’t last all the way through. Once everyone is established then it motors through to the end with some stunning special effects.

The dialogue is fair (Linda and Arnie get the best lines), the story just about holds itself together, so all in all, I enjoyed it. Not the best of the bunch, but certainly not the worst.

Six out of ten.

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