TERMINATOR: DARK FATE

This, the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, wants to have its cake and eat it.  

On the one hand it tries to recapture the glory of T1 and T2 by bringing back both Arnie and Linda Hamilton, and by pretending that the three immediately preceding films never happened.

But it also reboots the whole darn thing with a storyline that comes perilously close to saying that everything that happened in T1 and T2 counted for nothing.

We're off to a bad start when John Connor is killed off in the very first scene, in an offensively casual way considering how important he is to the franchise.

But never mind, we’ve got two new characters!

There’s young Dani who is a kind of replacement for John in this reboot in that she will play a crucial role in the new resistance in a new future where humanity yet again is under threat from AI, only in this new timeline the AI is called Legion rather than Skynet.

And there’s Grace, an enhanced human sent from the future to protect Dani.

And of course there's a new Terminator sent from the future to kill Dani. 

So the basic plot dynamics are identical to that in T1 and T2, but by now I’m getting bored with them, especially since the new characters don’t bring much to the party.

What enjoyment I did get here was from seeing the old hands Schwarzenegger and Hamilton do their thing, but at the risk of being ageist they are at this stage in their careers a little past their sell-by date for this kind of shenanigans. 

RATING: x Find Something Better To Do