Terminator: Dark Fate arrived in 2019 as the sixth film in the franchise, and it came with a promise: this one counts. Director Tim Miller and a writing team that included David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray, Josh Friedman, Charles H. Eglee and James Cameron built it as a direct sequel to The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), wiping Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009) out of the story. The tagline says it plainly: “Welcome to the day after judgement day.”
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
Sarah Connor in Livingston, Guatemala
The film opens in 1998, three years after Cyberdyne Systems falls. Sarah and John Connor are hiding in Livingston, Guatemala, where a T-800 sent back by Skynet finds them and kills John. Sarah cannot stop it.
That death is the engine of everything that follows. Linda Hamilton returns as Sarah Connor, now a battle-hardened woman who hunts Skynet’s remaining Terminators. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as the T-800, called Carl, living in Laredo, Texas, running a drapery business. He killed John, then gained autonomy, integrated into human society and started a relationship with a woman while raising her son. Sarah still hates him for it.
Dani Ramos and the Rev-9
In 2020, the Rev-9 travels to Mexico City to kill Dani Ramos, played by Natalia Reyes. Grace, an augmented soldier from 2042 played by Mackenzie Davis, comes back to protect her. Gabriel Luna plays the Rev-9, which splits into a solid endoskeleton and a shape-shifting liquid exterior. It kills Dani’s brother Diego, played by Diego Boneta, and corners the pair until Sarah intervenes.
The future here is not Skynet’s. Grace explains that an AI called Legion, built for cyberwarfare, triggered a nuclear apocalypse. Dani becomes a central figure in the human resistance against it.
What the film gets right
- Hamilton’s Sarah is the best thing on screen, and the film knows it.
- Schwarzenegger’s Carl, a Terminator with a drapery shop and a family, is the strangest and most interesting idea in the script.
- The Rev-9’s split form gives the action a genuine problem to solve.
| Element | Dark Fate | Terminator 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Villain AI | Legion | Skynet |
| Protector | Grace, augmented soldier | The T-800 |
| Future leader | Dani Ramos | John Connor |
The problem is the machinery
Dark Fate spends its first hour rebuilding a chase the franchise already ran twice, and the new parts do not carry the weight the old ones did. Grace’s metabolic crashes are a clock, not a character. Dani is written as a destiny rather than a person. The film asks us to care about a resistance we never see and a leader we are told about rather than shown.
Principal photography ran from June to November 2018 across Hungary, Spain and the United States. The film was released in the United States on November 1, 2019, by Paramount Pictures in the U.S. and Canada and by 20th Century Fox elsewhere. It grossed $261 million against a budget of $185–196 million.
That math is the real verdict. The film received mixed reviews, and the box office confirms the audience agreed with the skeptics. Hamilton and Schwarzenegger are worth the ticket. The script around them is not.
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