I'm conflicted over the fate of John Connor in the film. On the one hand, I like the idea that the leader of the Human Resistance can be anyone and it doesn't have to involve destiny or some fated savior. I also like that it's a young immigrant woman this time around, which is a timely message. On the other hand, given how Cameron was vocally upset with the flippant manner in which Hicks (to a lesser extent) and especially Newt were killed off in
Alien³ after all the character development and bonding Ripley had with them and effort she went through to save Newt (plus, the obvious set-up of Newt as a second chance to make up for Ripley missing her real daughter's life while in hypersleep according the Special Edition), it seems kind of strange that he so casually killed off John here.
I can see why they did it from the standpoint of giving Sarah a new mission and motivation; driven by her hatred and regret to hunt down terminators, but I think it could have also been interesting to have John survive and have to deal with the reality that because of changes in the timeline someone else becomes the savior of humanity instead, and see how he adapts to that. Does he become bitter and jaded or is he relieved to have the pressure of leadership off him but decides to help out anyway as an advisor/mentor to Dani much like his mother was to him? I thought that was a missed opportunity and would have removed the sting of killing off the primary motivating factor of the film series so far. They were originally going to kill off Connor in
Salvation and have Marcus take over for him while wearing his face, which was a horrifically bad idea that was fortunately abandoned, and while this is nowhere near that level and isn't even a bad choice
per se, I am kind of surprised Cameron went for it.
I like how they're still managing to come up with a progression of terminator advancements in each film. In
T3 we already got an armored endoskeleton with a liquid metal shapeshifting skin, but this ups the ante by making the shapeshifitng skin nanites (presumably without the vulnerabilities to freezing) and giving them the ability to detach completely from the endoskeleton and operate autonomously as a second terminator while the first does its own thing too and they tag off like Donkey and Diddy Kong. Gabriel Luna also did a nice job finding a bit of a middle ground between his
Ghostrider character's personality and the robotic movements and behavior of the T-1000.
By the same token the excellent Mackenzie Davis from
Halt and Catch Fire plays an improved version of the actual human given cybernetic enhancements (called "Augments") in the vein of Marcus from
Salvation, though aware of the change throughout and with computer targeting and other enhancements to her brain and senses . She is enhanced by the Resistance to be able to compete against Legion's (this timeline's Skynet) terminators, though she does have the disadvantage of overheating.
The CGI in the film is strangely hit and miss. When they were de-aging Arnold, Hamilton, and Furlong and plastering their de-aged CGI faces on younger actor's bodies, they did an amazing job. It's come a long way since even the de-aged Arnold in
Salvation or
GeniSys, and that wasn't that bad (not like Scary Fisher in
Rogue One, which was awful) , even though they made sure to burn its face off as quickly as possible to save money and credibility in
Salvation. But then at times during the big action setpieces it seems as if they must ave blown their wad on the de-aging CGI and nanites and couldn't afford a decent rendering of crashing planes of underwater HUMVEE's. which either looked like an early 2000s video game cut scene or were permanently shrouded in a mist like an
Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds commercial from the 80s (aging myself). "Not so fast (and blurry, and amorphous), Von Ryan!" The falling out of the cargo plane on a parachuting vehicle sequence looked just as fake and with equally bad body physics as the falling out the cargo plane on a parachuting sequence in the shitty
A-Team movie, which is not a good thing.
The final fight in yet another factory seemed kind of anticlimactic after the build-up, but I guess a melee fight with biker chains is something new.
Linda Hamilton did a great job reprising her role as Sarah Connor and bringing a snarky bitterness and sense of not giving a fuck anymore because she lost the only meaning in her life so now she's just fueled by hate for terminators.
Arnold gives an interesting new take on the terminator that surpasses even the level of emotional development it had in
T2. Here, after killing John Connor, he fully settles down with a wife (they have a "non-physical relationship") and adopted son, coming to realize through that relationship what he took away from Sarah by killing John and therefore deciding to help her via text messages alerting her to incoming terminators from the future. It really shows that Skynet/Legion is more of an oppressor/enslaver or these cyborgs than Humans were of Skynet (from its point of view). I wish we could have seen more of the
Sarah Connor Chronicles and the different factions of robots which they seemed to be going for with Shirley Manson's T-1000 character.
It's not nearly as good as
Terminator 2: Judgment Day or
The Terminator, which are two of my favorite films, but
Terminator: Dark Fate is better than the rest by a fair margin and a worthy entry in the Terminator lore.
