Paramount Pictures | Release Date: November 1, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
18
Mixed:
29
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Dark Fate will likely feel like a blessing for Terminator diehards, a reboot that taps into what made the original films special and smooths out a timeline that’s grown more convoluted with every sequel. For newer fans, Hamilton’s and Schwarzenegger’s performances should be enough to keep things absorbing without the lure of nostalgia.
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What I found uniquely depressing about Dark Fate, though, is how resigned it is to the reality of its title. How it organizes itself as a paean to tireless scramble and triage, to the fight not for something better but for less of something worse. It’s a bitterly pessimistic film. It may be a realistic one, too.
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The TelegraphOct 22, 2019
It’s a pleasure to see Hamilton and Schwarzenegger back in action as leathery veterans, though the script shunts the cast onto some unexpectedly topical terrain, including a heroic escape from a US-Mexico border prison camp, with detainees’ cages flung open in triumph. Yet it’s Davis’s brusque and androgynous Grace who turns out to be Dark Fate’s most stonily compelling asset.
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Dark Fate gets more right than it gets wrong (just about, anyway), and there’s an undeniable thrill in seeing Hamilton and Schwarzenegger reunited onscreen for the first time in almost three decades. But this fourth attempt at crafting a worthy sequel to James Cameron’s peerless sci-fi double bill only just gets passing marks.
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Dark Fate serves as a case study for the difficulty of crafting a satisfying follow-up to a pair of certified classics, a process that seems to involve constant toggling between hopelessness and insisting that all is not lost. As such, it’s hard to blame Cameron for keeping his old series at arm’s length. It’s also hard to stay interested in a franchise that looks, with each inessential sequel, more and more like a doomsday prepper rephrasing the same old prophecy.
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In the hands of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Dark Fate by and large pulls off recapturing the goofy fun of the original, though with a twist. It evokes the earliest Terminator films, but Dark Fate doesn’t want to just rewrite Terminator’s future — it wants to reevaluate its past, too.
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Despite an A-list roster of talent, including people behind the scenes who theoretically should know how to resurrect this brand and move it forward, Terminator: Dark Fate is just another bad “Terminator” movie in a string of bad “Terminator” movies (although better than “Genisys”).
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It suffers greatly from obeying the imperative the first sequel established: Trying to blow minds and up the ante the way that FX-pioneering adventure did, this one offers a series of action set pieces that go from big to huge to ludicrous, even as the script's additions to fear-the-future mythology underwhelm.
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IndieWireOct 22, 2019
As a genre exercise, it mostly works; set pieces are tense, explosive and pleasingly gory, littered with flying scraps of metal and meat. Davis in particular is an authoritative presence. As a sequel, it’s baldly opportunistic, grab-bagging contemporary political issues (reproductive justice; undocumented migrants) in a transparent attempt to justify its cultural relevance.
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The GuardianOct 22, 2019
It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.
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