In "Terminator: Dark Fate," SkyNet Is History But U.S. Customs and Border Protection Remains

Gabriel Luna as the latest model Terminator, the Rev-9. (Kerry Brown/Paramount)

No amount of Terminator scholarship is too much if you're me. So just as the new Terminator: Dark Fate (which bombed over the weekend, but you people keep buying tickets for those The Fast & The Furious movies, so there's no accounting for taste) is a follow-up to 2015's Terminator: Genisys (sic) that's really a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day,...

...the piece that I published on Slate tonight is a sequel to my Terminator: Dark Fate review from last week that's really a sequel to a longish T2 essay I wrote five summers ago for The Dissolve, may it rest in power. When I observed in my review of Dark Fate that the series finally got some of its old zeitgeist-surfing mojo back, this is what I meant.

The Future Is Female: "Terminator: Dark Fate," reviewed.

Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton working together are a cybernetic assassin’s worst nightmare.

As in every Terminator movie, the new Dark Fate offers no explanation for why the A.I.—SkyWho? It’s called LEGION now—dispatched only a single cyborg assassin to this time period, or why the human resistance sent only one bodyguard. The answer, of course, is that the one-on-one conceit is just more compelling and dramatic than a platoon representing each faction would be.

My NPR review of Terminator: Dark Fate, a these-were-canon-those-were-not half-reboot in the tradition of Superman Returns and Halloween (2018), is here.