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Terminator: Dark Fate is a throwback for the franchise
The Terminator franchise has always had a fundamental problem: past the hit film that kicked off the story, nothing that happened in the series really mattered. The timeline got complicated, screenwriters monkeyed with the story mechanics, directors brought new special effects into the battle to keep the action fresh. And yet every Terminator story basically assumed the same thing: that a sentient, murderous AI called Skynet would rise, design a series of powerful kill-bots called Terminators, largely wipe out the human race, then send Terminators back in time to kill off anyone who might have a prominent part in resisting the genocide.
Every movie or TV episode in the series was a desperate battle for survival, but because of the perceived demand for sequels, that survival never seemed to change anything for anyone - not for the human race, which was still doomed, and not for Skynet, which never learned to mix up its strategies a little in the interest of maybe winning a fight for once.
Arguably, Skynet's relentless dedication to trying the same plan over and over, no matter how often it failed, was a feature rather than a bug. From the beginning, with 1984's The Terminator, the series was primarily about one thing: the merciless, pyrrhic single-mindedness a machine soldier could bring to its missions. Terminators chasing humans throughout the franchise lost limbs, had their skin torn or burned off, and eventually got cantaloupe-sized holes blown in their heads every few scenes, but they still kept implacably coming.
The franchise has followed the same principle: no matter what the protagonists do to fight the future, Skynet keeps rising, and Terminators keep traveling back in time on murder missions. The first movie made it seem like it was possible to win against a Terminator and against fate. But the relentless pileup of sequels made it clear that the fight was never anything more than an exhausting delaying action, and the best humanity could hope for was to keep a few key personnel alive long enough to ensure humanity would only mostly die off.
At first blush, the new Terminator: Dark Fate seems like an actual step forward for the human race. This film is a direct sequel to 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it dismisses 2003's Terminator 3, 2009's Terminator Salvation, 2015's Terminator Genisys, and the 2008 television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as alternate-timeline stories, all successfully prevented by freedom fighters Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton in Terminator and T2) and her son John. At the end of T2, Sarah and John seemed to have changed the timeline in a way that would prevent the rise of Skynet and avert global Armageddon. The sequels suggested otherwise, but now, Deadpool director Tim Miller and a team of six writers (including Cameron with a story credit) are rebooting to suggest that the Connors did at least have some worthwhile effect on the future.
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