'Terminator: Dark Fate' is a robotic rehash of familiar beats

For a while, Terminator: Dark Fate looks like a promising resurrection of a classic franchise.

Mackenzie Davis is a natural as an action star, in the role of time-traveling super-soldier Grace — hard enough to make you buy the brutal beatings she dishes out, soft enough to make you feel her worries. Natalia Reyes is likable as Dani, the seemingly ordinary woman Grace has been sent to protect. And hey, there's Linda Hamilton, back in action as a grizzled Sarah Connor! What's not to like? 

The narrative seems primed for resonance in 2019, too, with a nod to the loss of jobs to automation and jabs at the criminalization of immigrants and refugees along the U.S.-Mexico border. The action scenes are frequent and extravagant; no expense seems to have been spared in giving the audience all the car crashes and explosions they could possibly desire. All the makings of clever, crowd-pleasing movie seem to be here.

Nothing about it feels quite human, and I don't just mean because a bunch of the characters are robots.

But as Dark Fate grinds on, it eventually becomes clear that "promising" is as good as it gets. The script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, serves up character types rather than characters, gestures at emotions instead of exploring them, and references larger themes without engaging with them. Nothing about it feels quite human, and I don't just mean because a bunch of the characters are robots.

In fact, it is a robot that gives Dark Fate its strongest dose of humanity. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Model 101 doesn't show up until late in the movie, but becomes the best thing about it when he does. His deadpan delivery makes him distinctive, while the performance beneath it suggests an interiority deeper and more complicated than even the character himself seems able to comprehend.

It helps, too, that the film actually takes the time to show us bits of his everyday life outside the immediate plot points — something it fails to do for its other returning hero, Sarah. It's one thing to hear that she spends her days hunting Terminators and drinking 'til she passes out, but what does that look like? What does it feel like? Likewise, who is Grace beyond her mysterious mission?

There's only so much even Hamilton and Davis can do with such one-note characters (though Hamilton, at least, seems like she's having a ton of fun), and Dark Fate doesn't seem especially interested in seeing them as anything more. It's enough for this movie that we understand they're a couple of total badasses. It's supposed to be empowering, I guess. But how forward-thinking is it, really, to assume that muscles, firepower, and a surly scowl are that's needed to create a feminist hero?

For that matter, how interesting is it to build a story around such flat characters? Dark Fate works overtime to deliver the spectacle you'd expect from a movie like this, galloping from one shootout or fistfight to the next, but fails to consider that these set pieces might hit harder if we were ever allowed a beat to figure out why we should be invested in the first place — to get to know these people, to follow through on these themes.

If the action were at least remarkable, that might be one thing. But these scenes vary in quality throughout the movie, leading up to a muddy, interminable climax during which I stopped even trying to keep track of who was doing what. They make for a disappointing follow-up to the clarity and cleverness of Dark Fate director Tim Miller's Deadpool. 

So much of Dark Fate seems engineered to please Terminator fans. All the familiar beats are there — unstoppable robots, an impending apocalypse, a confused woman at the center of it all, "I'll be back" — dutifully remixed for a new era. It's the same approach that other recent sequel-reboots like Halloween and Star Wars: The Force Awakens have taken. 

But those used their source material as a launching pad for new characters and storylines worthy in their own right. Dark Fate is too thinly sketched to be anything but pastiche. It feels like a Terminator movie spit out by a machine designed to make Terminator movies. A dark fate for the franchise, indeed.