Terminator Dark fate: Not as bad as I feared.

Terminator Dark Fate by Tim Miller on Ultra HD 4K
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2 out of 5 stars

A young female Mexican worker, Dani Ramos, is hunted down by a virtually indestructible terminator from the future called a REV-9. However, she is protected by an enhanced human named Grace who is also from the future. They flee from the unstoppable terminator and out of the blue Sarah Connor helps them on the road. All three head to Laredo, Texas, where Grace has the coordinates of a possible support and where they meet a T-101 who is living in an isolated location with his family. The group teams up to try to destroy the REV-9.

I guess I’m late to the party on this one but a) I live in Europe and here the movies are often arriving a bit later and b) I rarely go to the theaters any more but wait until the movie is released on Blu-ray (mostly UHD  4K nowadays).

Anyway, I was a bit scared when they announced a new Terminator movie. After all the last couple of movies in this franchise has been less than stellar. I have to say that this one was actually not too bad. Not stellar, it had its issues, but not too bad indeed.

The special effects and the action was generally pretty cool. The idea of a liquid terminator with an exoskeleton that he could separate himself from was not bad at all. As usual there was some dumbass stuff. The flight scenes with the C5 was just unrealistic to the point of being dumb. Yes, it is Sci-Fi but that plane and the age where that was supposedly taking place was supposed to be today. But then that is Hollywood. They always assume the audience is a lot dumber than they really are, that is almost as dumb as most Hollywood writers nowadays.

As for the characters. Well, let’s make one thing clear right away, the movie was shouldered by Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The rest of the main characters was mostly bland, or worse. Natalia Reyes was not too bad as Dani but Mackenzie Davis was pretty meh and, unfortunately, Gabriel Luna, was the most unsuitable Terminator yet.

Come one, the Terminator is supposed to be a menacing hunk of terror. Not this choir boy. Whoever picked this guy for a terminator movie should, quite frankly, be shot. I think this is my main gripe with this movie and I felt it really dragged it down.

It’s a bit of a shame that they kind of had to rewrite/reboot the entire Terminator story but given the state of the franchise, especially after the last couple of movies pretty much made a mess of anything like a coherent time line, I can understand why they did it and what they did was not too outrageous. Not the most intelligent plot but workable.

Overall I’d say that this movie was quite worthy to watch. I find it a shame that, if the rumors are correct, the useless Hollywood bean counters decided to not make a sequel since, apparently, this one did not meet up to the over-inflated expectations they apparently had.

One last thought though. The Terminators have all kinds of uberpowers, especially the liquid metal ones, and they, apparently, do not really care about showing them off and slaughtering every human that stands in their way. So why the f… does he go back to human form all the time. Just take on a more efficient forms and then morph into a human if you need it, which seems to be rather rarely.

Guess I’m too logical for Hollycrap now 🙂 .