TERMINATOR: DARK FATE [Film Review]

The latest entry in the Terminator franchise is the cinematic equivalent of patching holes in your dorm room wall with toothpaste and hoping that the RAs won’t notice when they do the end of term inspection to give you back your security deposit. If that analogy escapes you, think of it as slapping a crappy coat of old paint on an old story and calling it “new”.
Joining the recent (and fucking annoying) slate of films that retcon all the previous films in the series (last year’s Halloween immediately comes to mind), this latest Terminator purports to be the “official” sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, thus nulling and voiding all the Terminator movies that have come down the pike since 1991. That’s fine, since all of those now-unofficial sequels were kinda crappy anyway. But the thing is: this new film is also kinda crappy.
Hiding under a false glaze of feminism and “girl power” the film is literally machismo on overdrive masquerading as Marianismo. It’s also an unapologetic (and perhaps lazy?) pastiche of the story and plots from the original Terminator and T2: JD, the only prominent difference being that now we have 3 female protagonists instead of one: Mackenzie Davis is effectively Michael Biehn and Natalia Reyes is the female John Conner. How about giving us some original and multi-dimensional female characters? Instead we are given a trio of women who spend the bulk of the film trying to out dick wave one another in an endless stream of verbal and physical pissing matches.
What’s more, the whole “girl power” angle is a sham in my opinion since the film is directed by a man, the screenplay was written by 3 men and is based upon a story that was concocted by 5 men, and--HUGE SPOILER ALERT--the ultimate hero of the film is none other than the former poster icon of macho masculinity hisownself (that would be Arnie, if you couldn’t guess).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for strong women characters being injected into action films, but rather than just taking an old male dominated story and changing the gender of the main characters, how about actually writing something vaguely original and making those female characters individualistic, rather than just one-dimensional riffs on previously rendered male characters.
Faux feminism aside, the core problem with TDF is that it’s as lifeless as the Rev-9 killing machine hunting down our spunky trio of heroines in the film. There is no chemistry between the actors and when they’re not not interacting with one another onscreen everyone’s main modes are glaring and scowling. Don't even get me started on the Uncanny Valley aspects of the opening montage or the giant plot holes that it presents, either. As for the action sequences, well, they are not only tepid, but also feel as if they are running on an autopilot program that favors redundancy (i.e. you’ve seen most of these sequences rendered more excitingly in other films). If that weren’t bad enough, many of the scenes are shot in a murky darkness so you can’t even see what’s happening. Most will remember how the liquidic T-1000 effects in T2:JD seemed fresh and vibrant in the ‘90s; here, however, they just seem ho-hum and behind the times.
In short, the oft maligned Terminator: Genysis was infinitely better than this film, which should give you some idea of how lackluster and lame this one is.
Like the Alien franchise before it, the Terminator franchise just hasn’t been able to recapture the originality or vibrancy of the first two films. Perhaps whomever takes the helms for the next go-around should actually re-visit those films to understand what made them so good and then rather than poorly mimicking them, actually write something original and exciting.

Rating: 2 (out of 5)
RIYL: Terminator 3; Terminator: Salvation