Curator Watchlist
A competent but uneven franchise revival that works best as a Linda Hamilton showcase and as a brisk, old-school chase movie. It has some strong action beats and a few smart ideas, but the familiar structure, generic visual style, and underwritten new characters keep it from feeling essential.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 8m
Director: Tim Miller
Starring: Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis
Decades after Sarah Connor prevented Judgment Day, a lethal new Terminator is sent to eliminate the future leader of the resistance. In a fight to save mankind, battle-hardened Sarah Connor teams up with an unexpected ally and an enhanced super soldier to stop the deadliest Terminator yet.
Tim Miller
Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis
A competent but uneven franchise revival that works best as a Linda Hamilton showcase and as a brisk, old-school chase movie. It has some strong action beats and a few smart ideas, but the familiar structure, generic visual style, and underwritten new characters keep it from feeling essential.
Terminator: Dark Fate is the rare legacy sequel that seems to understand what made the franchise matter, even if it can’t fully recapture it. Linda Hamilton gives the movie its spine, and the film is at its most alive when it treats Sarah Connor as a battle-scarred action hero rather than a nostalgic cameo. There’s also a decent sense of momentum in the first half, with a lean pursuit structure that keeps the machinery moving.
But the movie keeps tripping over the same franchise habits it wants to escape. The new characters are more functional than vivid, the villain is serviceable rather than frightening, and the digital polish often flattens the impact of the action. It feels professionally assembled, sometimes even confident, yet rarely surprising.
As a continuation of the series, it’s better than several of the weaker sequels and far more watchable than its reputation suggests. As a standalone blockbuster, though, it’s mostly a reminder of how much this property depends on a very specific mix of tension, personality, and visual grit.
Patrick Willems (2.5★) · 1720 likes
Me during every scene of Terminator: Dark Fate: “Man if James Cameron had made this it would probably be pretty good.”
James (Schaffrillas) (2.5★) · 894 likes
Lots of good ideas here, Linda Hamilton's performance is great, this is probably the most interesting (albeit underdeveloped) use for Arnold since T2...and yet the main character kinda fell to the wayside a bit, the villain was pretty forgettable, and the visuals reeked of generic CGI gray sludge. Best in the series since T3!
davidehrlich (1.5★) · 849 likes
Despite being the sixth (and hopefully final) installment of a franchise that hasn’t really been relevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tim Miller’s competent but coma-inducing “Terminator: Dark Fate” has no reason to feel this far past its expiration date. In a studio age of intellectual property where nostalgia and innovation are tugging us so hard in either direction that it doesn’t seem to matter what happens right here, nothing this side of a “live-action” Disney remake could
Matt Singer (3.5★) · 740 likes
For decades, The Terminator has been thought of as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s franchise. He’s the guy who appears in five out of the six movies to date — and the sixth one was so desperate to include him even though he was Governor of California at the time that they made a CGI Ahhnuld who could fight Christian Bale. What Terminator: Dark Fate makes clear is that while the Terminator may be Schwarzenegger’s signature role, he wasn’t the key ingredient that made these movies really work. It was Linda Hamilton. Full review at ScreenCrush.
David Sims (3★) · 411 likes
fuck me up Linda
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legacy sequels, artificial intelligence, fate vs free will, protective motherhood, pursuit and survival, found family, human-machine conflict, militarized future
science fiction, action thriller, legacy sequel, dystopian future, AI uprising, high-speed chase, nostalgia, female-led action, CGI spectacle, late-2010s blockbuster