Terminator dark fate review

[Westside Steve]

Terminator Dark Fate
Paramount
R               128 min

So this month how to deliver it up a smorgasbord of films. I Netflix offering featuring at all star cast, a shocking Lake weird indie, rockumentary concert film and finally the mega Blockbuster oh, the latest installment how to TERMINATOR series DARK FATE. Looks like I saved the worst for last. To be honest I wasn’t a huge fan of THE TERMINATOR from the inception but I do admit it’s an iconic franchise. Let me give a little comparison to the RAMBO series. The final chapter was my favorite of the bunch.  Of course it wasn’t GONE WITH THE WIND but it did exactly what it needed to do to keep me awake for a couple of hours. Set up some really bad guys and let Stallone kill every last one of them. 
TERMINATOR DARK FATE doesn’t really stray from the plot of the original. As a matter of fact it’s laughably almost identical. If you remember the first time out there were a bunch of evil robot hordes it said Terminators back in time to Kill a boy who was destined to grow up to defeat mechanical empire in the future. As we remember Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) saved the world and the future is made safe for humans. Well not quite. The name of the bad robots from the first one was Skynet if I recall correctly, but now called Legion, same sh** different decade. And guess what? Now there’s another young person destined to grow up to defeat them.  Of course in today’s politically charged Hollywood the new savior is not only a woman but a Mexican named Dani (Natalie Reyes) Her protector is a  cyborg named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) whose job it is to keep her just one step ahead of the terminators. 
So what has Hamilton/Sarah been up to for the last 20 years? If you guessed she’s been taking acting lessons that would be a no, actually the rugged Connor has been on a mission to destroy Terminators especially the one that killed her son 20 years ago. She teams up with Grace and Dani blow up the latest cyber hunter from the future. So the first thing they need to do is cross the border into the United States where they have all sorts of trouble with the nasty border patrol and are forced to escape the concentration camp style cages in which they have been imprisoned. I kid you not. After that they make their way to a cabin out in the boondocks to enlist the help of the one guy that can help them on their quest. Lo and behold that turns out to be our old pal 800 model 101 now known as Carl but we all know and love him as the Terminator from the first movie. Don’t worry folks like Apollo Creed in ROCKY 3 he’s now the good guy. The explanation is that when Skynet ceased to exist he was no longer programmed to kill anybody and has spent two decades absorbing human mannerisms through his artificial intelligence. Whatever. Of course that plot is only an excuse for 2 hours and 8 minutes of running and fighting and since a Terminator can’t really be killed all the fighting is against the same guy. Sound boring? You bet. And that’s surprising because director Tim Miller also did DEADPOOL which was a lot of fun. Of course the non-stop noise isn’t the worst part not even the ridiculous plot. Let me say this about the dialogue: you know you’re in trouble when the best actor in a film is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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WSS
 

[The Gipper]

I actually thought it was just fine as far as this sort of thing is concerned.   Sure, same basic thread as the original Terminator....but tell me any action movie ever made that didn't follow that same thread.   Good guys beat bad guys...and maybe with a little help from our friends, or at least our frenemies.

The real questions are:  As we know both Arnold  Terminator versions in  T-1 and T-2 were destroyed......but in this movie, they changed the originals....by apparently incorporating a scene that got sent to the cutting room floor where Arnie's Terminator does kill they young John Conner.  (who we all though survived since we saw him at least 2-3 times later as an adult). It was the same young actor as in T-2, and Linda herself was young in that scene.  So it had to have been an outtake that they used.  So, it was this second version of Arnie's Terminator that survives in this alternate timline, instead of being melted along with Robert Patrick's liquidy  Terminator.  And the next question is:   Did the now defunct Skynet place some kind of an aging program into their terminator's   human forms so that they could carry on and appear to age? 

And, another question:   Why did Cameron let Linda Hamilton reclaim the Sarah Conner role that had been occupied by Lena Heady and Emilia Clark in more recent versions?   And will Linda Hamilton snatch a role in the new Game of Thrones series, since those 2 GOT actors got her role?

Turnabouts fair play?