You could even say that it feels too much like a proper Terminator film, which is why it ends up seeming so pointless. It may make a profit, and it definitely offers a sweet Schwarzenegger / Hamilton reunion, but otherwise there is no discernible reason for Terminator Dark Fate to exist. It has no new thoughts on predestination and free will to boggle our minds, no new visual effects or stunts to quicken our hearts. It has nothing that hasn’t been done better in the other films. All the tweaks are cosmetic ones, the answers to a set of staggeringly uninteresting questions. What if the AI was called Legion instead of Skynet? What if the Terminator’s target was Mexican rather than American? What if the person protecting her was a woman rather than a man? The previous two Terminator films may have been duds, but one had a futuristic setting and the other had some twisty-turny time-travel shenanigans, so at least they were trying to do something different. From the off-the-peg subtitle onwards, Terminator Dark Fate aims to be no more than a comfortingly familiar rehash – and that’s what it is.

Maybe it couldn’t escape a dark fate of its own. At this stage, it looks as if making further Terminator sequels is as much of a doomed endeavour as making further Alien sequels. In both cases, there were two sublime opening episodes (the second Alien episode was directed by Cameron), followed by a succession of sequels, prequels and spin-offs which couldn’t recapture that early magic. And in both cases, there was a devilishly simple science-fiction / horror movie premise. Keep that simplicity in the later sequels and what you get is essentially an inferior remake. Complicate the mythology and you lose the first films’ white-knuckle intensity. The makers of Terminator Dark Fate went for the former option – the inferior remake – and the results aren’t bad. But if that’s the best they can come up with, then why bother? This franchise needs to be terminated.

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