Terminator: Dark Fate
Terminator: Dark Fate is a 2019 American science fiction action film. It is the sixth installment in the Terminator franchise and a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), ignoring the events depicted in Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009), and Terminator Genisys (2015). The film stars Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising their characters Sarah Connor and the T-800 Terminator, respectively, and introduces Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna and Diego Boneta as new characters. Dark Fate is directed by Tim Miller and written by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, based on a story by James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee, Josh Friedman, Goyer, and Rhodes.
Terminator: Dark Fate
- David S. Goyer
- Justin Rhodes
- Billy Ray
- James Cameron
- Charles H. Eglee
- Josh Friedman
- David S. Goyer
- Justin Rhodes
- James Cameron
- David Ellison
Ken Seng
- Paramount Pictures (North America)
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (through Buena Vista International, International)[1]
- October 23, 2019 (Europe)
- November 1, 2019 (United States)
128 minutes
United States
English
Spanish
$185–196 million
$261.1 million
The film is set 25 years after the events of Terminator 2, when the machines send an advanced Terminator (Luna) back in time to 2020 with instructions to kill Dani Ramos (Reyes), whose fate is connected to the future. The Resistance also sends Grace (Davis), an augmented soldier, back in time to defend Dani, who is also joined by Sarah Connor and Skynet's T-800. Principal photography took place from June to November 2018 in Hungary, Spain, and the United States.
Distributed by Paramount Pictures in North America and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures in other territories, the film was released theatrically in the United States on November 1, 2019. Terminator: Dark Fate received mixed reviews from critics, though it was considered an improvement over recent predecessors. The film grossed $261.1 million worldwide and lost $122.6 million, making it one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time. As a result, initial plans for future films were later canceled.
Plot[edit]
In 1998, three years after destroying Cyberdyne Systems,[a] Sarah and John Connor have retired to Livingston, Guatemala. They are suddenly ambushed by a T-800 Terminator, one of several sent back through time by Skynet, which kills John despite Sarah's attempts to stop it.
In 2020, an advanced Terminator, the Rev-9, is sent back in time to Mexico City to murder Dani Ramos, while a cybernetically enhanced soldier, Grace, is sent from 2042 to protect her. The Rev-9, disguised as Dani's father, infiltrates the automobile assembly plant where Dani and her brother Diego work, but is thwarted by Grace, who escapes with the siblings. The Rev-9, using its ability to split into its cybernetic endoskeleton and shape-shifting liquid metal exterior, pursues them, killing Diego and cornering Grace and Dani. However, Sarah arrives and temporarily disables both forms of the entity using military-grade weaponry.
Dani, Grace, and Sarah retreat to a motel. Sarah reveals that she found them because in the years since John's death she has received encrypted messages detailing the locations of arriving Terminators, each ending with "For John", allowing her to destroy them before they become threats. Grace notes that Skynet and John do not exist in her future, meaning Sarah succeeded in destroying the former after Cyberdyne went defunct. However, humanity's future is threatened by another AI called Legion, originally developed for cyberwarfare, which was built in Skynet's place. When Legion became a threat to humans, an attempt was made to neutralize it with nuclear weapons, resulting in a nuclear holocaust and the AI creating a global network of machines to terminate the human survivors, who organized a resistance movement to counter Legion's onslaughts, and Dani's destiny is linked to their war against it.
Grace traces the source of Sarah's messages to Laredo, Texas. Barely evading the Rev-9 and the authorities while crossing the Mexico–United States border, they arrive at their source, where they discover the same T-800 that had killed John. Having fulfilled his mission and with Skynet no longer existing to give him further orders, the T-800 was left aimless. Over time and through his adaptability, he became self-aware, learned from humanity, and developed a conscience, taking the name "Carl" and adopting a human family. After learning how his actions affected Sarah and being able to detect the location of temporal displacements, Carl began to forewarn her of them to give her a purpose to make amends. Carl offers to join them against the Rev-9 and they prepare to destroy it, with Sarah begrudgingly agreeing to work together for Dani's sake. Anticipating the Rev-9's arrival, Carl bids his family farewell and tells them to escape.
The group seek out a military-grade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator from an acquaintance of Sarah's. The Rev-9 catches up with them, forcing them to steal a plane to escape, though the EMP generators are destroyed in the resulting shootout. During the flight, Grace reveals that Dani will become the future founding commander of the resistance before the Rev-9 boards their airplane and temporarily subdues Carl, forcing Grace, Sarah, and Dani to parachute from the plane into a river near a hydroelectric plant, with Carl and the Rev-9 following close behind.
Trapped, the group makes their stand inside the plant. In the ensuing battle, Carl and Grace force the Rev-9 into a spinning turbine, causing an explosion that critically damages the two Terminators. The severely damaged Rev-9 endoskeleton incapacitates Sarah, forcing Dani to confront it herself. A dying Grace tells Dani to use her power source to destroy it. Dani tries to fight the Rev-9 but is quickly overpowered. Carl reactivates himself and restrains the Rev-9, allowing Dani to stab it with Grace's power source. He then drags himself and the Rev-9 over a ledge before the power core explodes, destroying them both.
Sometime later, Dani and Sarah watch a young Grace at a playground with her family, the former determined to avert Grace's death and Legion's rise, before driving off to prepare.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Terminator: Dark Fate grossed $62.3 million in the United States and Canada and $198.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $261.1 million.[181] With a production budget between $185–196 million and an additional $80–100 million spent on marketing and distribution, early estimates stated the film needed to earn over $450 million worldwide to break even.[51][182] The film ended up losing Paramount, Skydance and other studios $122.6 million.[183] It was labeled a box-office bomb after its dismal opening weekend,[184][185] and it finished as the second biggest bomb of 2019.[183] As a result of the losses, sources close to Skydance said shortly after the release that there were no plans to continue the franchise.[186]
In the United States and Canada, Dark Fate was released at the same time as Harriet, Arctic Dogs and Motherless Brooklyn and was initially projected to gross $40–47 million from 4,086 theaters in its opening weekend.[187] The film made $2.35 million from Thursday night previews, on a par with the $2.3 million that Genisys made from its Tuesday night previews in 2015, but after making just $10.6 million on its first day, weekend estimates were lowered to $27 million. It went on to debut to $29 million. Although it finished first at the box office, it was the lowest opening in the series since the original film (when accounting for inflation), which was blamed on the lukewarm critical reception, as well as the audience's disinterest in another Terminator film.[51] The film made $10.8 million in its second weekend, dropping 63% and finishing fifth and then $4.3 million in its third weekend, falling to 11th.[188][189]
In Germany, the film started out with 132,500 viewers, placing it third on that week's charts.[190] In the weekend following its international debut, the film grossed $12.8 million from countries in Europe and Asia, considered a low start.[191][192] The film was projected to gross $125 million globally during the first weekend of November 2019.[52] Instead, it only made $101.9 million (18% below projections), including $72.9 million overseas. As it did in the U.S., the film under-performed in China, where it opened to just $28.2 million, far below the $40–50 million estimates.[51][193]
Critical response[edit]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 70% of 351 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Terminator: Dark Fate represents a significant upgrade over its immediate predecessors, even if it lacks the thrilling firepower of the franchise's best installments."[194] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 54 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[195] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, the same score as its three immediate predecessors, while those at PostTrak gave it an overall positive score of 78%, with 51% saying they would definitely recommend it.[51]
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that critics overall seemed "cautiously excited about Dark Fate, although there's a certain awkwardness about seeing repeated recommendations that it is 'easily the third-best' movie in the series".[196] William Bibbiani of TheWrap wrote that, "Whether Terminator: Dark Fate is the last chapter in this story or the first in an all-new franchise is, for now, irrelevant. The film works either way, bringing the tale of the first two films to a satisfying conclusion while reintroducing the classic storyline, in exciting new ways, to an excited new audience. It's a breathtaking blockbuster, and a welcome return to form."[197] Variety's Owen Gleiberman called the film "the first vital Terminator sequel since Terminator 2" and wrote that "Terminator: Dark Fate is a movie designed to impress you with its scale and visual effects, but it's also a film that returns, in good and gratifying ways, to the smartly packaged low-down genre-thriller classicism that gave the original Terminator its kick."[53]
Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal gave the film a negative review, describing it as "cobbled together by dunces in a last-ditch effort to wring revenue from a moribund concept. The plot makes no sense—time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension."[198] Jefferey M. Anderson of Common Sense Media gave the movie two out of five stars: "This sixth Terminator movie erases the events of the previous three (dud) sequels but winds up feeling half-erased itself. It's like a dull, pale, irrelevant carbon copy of a once glorious hit."[199] Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com gave Dark Fate two out of four stars, arguing that it suffered from "empty fanservice" and that Hamilton "deserves better" as does her supporting female cast.[200] David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised Hamilton's performance and the movie's digital recreations of her, Furlong's and Schwarzenegger's younger likenesses, but concluded that "this painfully generic action movie proves that the Terminator franchise is obsolete".[201] Tasha Robinson of The Verge stated that some combat sequences "are staged clearly and cleanly", while others "are packed with CGI blurs and muddy action and are hard to follow in even the most basic 'who's where, and are they dead?' kind of way. And when Dark Fate does deign to explain what's going on, it delivers its exposition in a self-important, hushed, clumsy way, as if audiences should be astonished by the most basic plot revelations."[202]
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian awarded it two stars out of five, stating "The Terminator franchise has come clanking robotically into view once again with its sixth film – it absolutely will not stop – not merely repeating itself but somehow repeating the repetitions." While he wrote that it was "good to see Hamilton getting a robust role", he added that "sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis." He concluded by writing, "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."[203] Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film two stars out of four, calling it a "boring retread" and "so derivative of Judgment Day", although he welcomed the return of Linda Hamilton, praised an "impressively effective" Mackenzie Davis and the "winning screen presence" of Natalia Reyes."[204] Angie Han of Mashable found the film underwhelming and its title to be quite apt: "Dark Fate is too thinly sketched to be anything but pastiche. It feels like a Terminator movie spit out by a machine designed to make Terminator movies. A dark fate for the franchise, indeed."[205]
Regarding the film's mixed reception, Tim Miller believed that some audiences were predisposed to dislike the film after being disappointed by the last three films, adding that some audiences "hate it because it's the sixth movie, and Hollywood should be making original movies and not repeating franchises".[38] Miller later gave a more blunt assessment in 2022: "Terminator's an interesting movie to explore, but maybe we've explored it enough. I went in with the rock hard nerd belief that if I made a good movie that I wanted to see, it would do well. And I was wrong. It was one of those f**king Eureka moments in a bad way because the movie tanked."[206]
James Cameron reflected on Dark Fate in 2022: "I'm actually reasonably happy with the film ... I think the problem, and I'm going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold ... And then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she's 60-something, he's 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn't your Terminator movie, it wasn't even your dad's Terminator movie, it was your granddad's Terminator movie. And we didn't see that ... it was just our own myopia. We kind of got a little high on our own supply and I think that's the lesson there."[207]
Schwarzenegger also gave a blunt assessment in a 2023 interview about the franchise: "The first three movies were great. Number four [Salvation] I was not in because I was governor. Then five [Genisys] and six [Dark Fate] didn't close the deal as far as I'm concerned. We knew that ahead of time because they were just not well written."[208]
Fate of John Connor[edit]
The death of John Connor early in the film was criticized by both critics and fans.[209][210] Fred Hawson of News.ABS-CBN.com wrote that "deciding to lose John Connor early on in this one made the emotional heart of the first two classic Terminator films stop beating as well."[211] Richard Roeper argued that killing John Connor ruined what the previous two films established: "Even though Dark Fate tosses aside the third, fourth and fifth entries in the series like a Terminator disposing of a hapless cop, it also undercuts the impact of the first film and the follow-up (which is one of the two or three greatest sequels of all time). First, they get rid of the John Connor character in almost casual fashion."[204]
Corey Plante of Inverse, who was critical of Furlong's portrayal of the character in Terminator 2, nonetheless found his character's death off-putting: "The character at the focus of every previous Terminator movie—the same young boy I irrationally hated since I was a young boy myself—was dead. Needless to say, it rattled me."[212] He also found that replacing him with new heroes undermined the Connors' importance established in the previous films: "The future that made [Sarah Connor] important died with John, and now there's a new Terminator story with a new set of heroes that makes it seem like no matter how many times Skynet or its next iteration sends a murder robot back in time to kill someone, there will always be a new hero waiting to rise up."[212] Robert Yaniz Jr. of CheatSheet described the twist as unthinkable: "In an instant, the entire crux of the franchise—the human resistance led by John—is torn away."[213]
Matt Goldberg of Collider felt the opening did irreparable damage to the legacy of Terminator 2 by rendering it pointless: "Every sequel since has diminished the ending of Judgment Day because the story 'needs' to continue (because studios like money and can't leave well enough alone). But Terminator: Dark Fate may be the worst offender thus far as its prologue directly follows T2 and goes for shock value rather than considering what it means to continue the narrative."[214] Richard Trenholm of CNET felt the opening twist summed up everything wrong with Dark Fate: "The joy [of seeing the de-aged characters] instantly becomes cringeworthy, as this prologue undermines Terminator 2 by killing a major character in such a cursory fashion it just feels silly."[215] Ian Sandwell of Digital Spy suggested that the twist was not particularly important, given that in the other films, John Connor only exists to "motivate the other characters and sets the plot in motion" and that John's role as a future leader had already been rendered moot through the elimination of Skynet.[209]
About the controversial scene, Furlong also expressed his displeasure and hoped to reprise the role in full in a future film.[216] Linda Hamilton also voiced her opinion that the scene would upset fans, as she considered John to be the true main protagonist of the franchise.[217] Nick Stahl, who portrayed John in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, also expressed interest in reprising the role in a possible seventh film.[218]
Cathal Gunning of Screen Rant noted the similarity between the decision to kill off John Connor in the opening scene to the deaths of Newt and Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Alien 3, which was criticized by Cameron, who had directed the preceding film, Aliens.[219]
Accolades[edit]
Terminator: Dark Fate received a nomination for Outstanding Special (Practical) Effects in a Photoreal or Animated Project at the 18th Visual Effects Society Awards.[220][221] At the 2020 Dragon Awards, the film received a nomination for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie.[222] It was nominated in two categories at the 2021 Golden Trailer Awards: "Talk" (Create Advertising Group) for Best Action and "Non Stop" (Aspect Ratio) for Best Home Ent Action.[223] Terminator: Dark Fate received three Saturn Award nominations for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Supporting Actress (for Hamilton) and Best Special Effects in 2021.[224][225]
Other media[edit]
Video games[edit]
The 2019 video game Gears 5 allows the player to play as either Sarah Connor with Hamilton voicing her character, Grace or a T-800 Terminator model. The game was released on September 6, 2019.[226] The T-800 model was later a downloadable playable character in Mortal Kombat 11, using Schwarzenegger's likeness, but without the actor voicing the character; he was voiced by Chris Cox instead of Schwarzenegger. The downloadable content was released on October 8, 2019.[227][228][229]
A mobile game, titled Terminator: Dark Fate – The Game, was released in October 2019.[230]
The PC game, Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance, developed by Slitherine Software in collaboration with Skydance,[231] was released on February 21, 2024.[232] It is a real-time tactics game that takes place ten years after the Judgment Day, during the war between humans and Legion.[233][234] The player assumes the role of Lieutenant Alex Church, a commander of the Founders, a group consisting of ex-U.S. military personnel. A multiplayer mode features two other playable factions: Movement (a human resistance organization) and Legion.[232][235] The game received "mixed or average" reviews according to Metacritic, with a score of 72 out of 100.[236] Alex Avard of Empire found the quality of Terminator games to be inconsistent, but wrote that Dark Fate – Defiance, with its "tightly designed" gameplay, "may have just helped to raise that historically low bar a little bit higher."[237] Jon Bolding of IGN criticized the game's difficulty.[238]
Toys[edit]
National Entertainment Collectibles Association released action figures based on the film and Chronicle Collectibles released an 18-inch T-800 statue.[239]
Canceled sequels[edit]
Plans for a new Terminator film trilogy were announced in July 2017.[48] While working on the story for Terminator: Dark Fate that year, Cameron and the writers envisioned the film as the first in the new trilogy. They also worked out the basic storylines for each planned film.[41][59][60][240] In October 2019, Cameron said that sequels to Terminator: Dark Fate would further explore the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, while stating that a resolution between the two feuding sides would be the ultimate outcome.[240][241] That month, Schwarzenegger said that Cameron would write the Terminator: Dark Fate sequels and that Cameron would begin work on the next film in early 2020, for release in 2022.[242]
Although the events of Terminator: Dark Fate erase Schwarzenegger's T-800 character from existence, Cameron did not rule out the possibility of Schwarzenegger reprising the character, saying, "Look, if we make a ton of money with this film [Dark Fate] and the cards say that they like Arnold, I think Arnold can come back. I'm a writer. I can think of scenarios. We don't have a plan for that right now, let me put it that way."[37] Hamilton said in October 2019 that she would probably reprise her role for a sequel,[243] although she joked that she would fake her own death to avoid appearing in it, saying that making Terminator: Dark Fate "really was hard" because of the physical training she had to undergo.[244][245] In April 2024, Hamilton confirmed that she was done with the role.[246]
Following the film's performance at the box office, sources close to Skydance told The Hollywood Reporter that there are no plans for further films.[186] In June 2020, star Mackenzie Davis expressed: "I really loved the movie and I'm so proud of what we did, but there wasn't a demand for it [at the box office] and to think that there'd be a demand for a seventh film is quite insane. You should just pay attention to what audiences want".[247] Later in December, Davis went on to reveal that the seventh film would not have been a sequel to Dark Fate, but a spin-off focusing on an alternate timeline version of Grace set in the future war similar to Terminator Salvation and would not have featured Schwarzenegger.[248]
