Some spoilers ahead! While I won't be spoiling every single detail of the movie, I will not judiciously avoid all spoilers either, so if you haven't seen the movie and want to see it without knowing anything about its contents, you might want to avoid reading this blog post until after.
I am a huge fan of the Terminator movie franchise, and I consider particularly Terminator 2 not only the best movie in the series, but in fact one of the best action sci-fi movies out there. I have seen that movie probably a dozen times by now.
(Perhaps somewhat ironically, I'm not a huge fan of the first movie, something that most avid fans would consider heresy. I just find the first movie too low-budget, too low-quality, too "early 80's" (in a bad way), too cheesy, and too full of inconsistencies and annoyances, to be all that enjoyable. Sure, many people take all that as precisely what makes the movie so charming, but I don't, really. I mean, it's not a bad movie by any stretch, especially considering the era and the moviemaking technology of the time, and the constrained budget. I just don't enjoy it much.)
When the first trailers of Terminator: Dark Fate came out, many critics of the far left jumped to declare the movie (and thus the franchise) having "gone woke". After all, the trailers seemed to present a very female-heavy cast: Not only was the person-in-the-past-to-be-protected female, but so was the person sent from the future to protect her, and so was Sarah Connor, who also somehow gets involved as a third wheel to protect her. The trailers also appear to depict both of the latter as completely unrealistic badasses, "strong women", with Sarah Connor even single-handedly handing the pursuing terminator his ass, in a scene that's clearly supposed to show how magnificent of a badass Sarah Connor is, but only ends up making the terminator look weak.
If I remember correctly, there were also some hints in the behind-the-scenes promotional material that was published prior and shortly after the launch of the movie, that seemed to indicate the film crew being feminist activists.
Many of these critics of the far left were fully expecting "the message" to be artificially shoved into the movie, and for it to be a completely cringe propaganda piece. It didn't exactly help that the opening scene of the movie, which clearly happens a short time after the events of Terminator 2, just outright has a terminator kill young John Connor, which many fans took as spitting in the face of that movie.
I must admit I was quite prejudiced against the movie as well. However, when I noticed that it was on Netflix I decided to watch it anyway. Who knows, maybe it's not as bad as I was led to believe?
And, indeed, it wasn't even nearly as bad as I was led to believe. I was actually positively surprised.
The bad
Or, perhaps more precisely: The not-so-good. "Bad" is perhaps too strong of a word here.
While I didn't like the depiction of Sarah Connor as this ultra-badass terminator killer, especially in that famous scene depicted in the trailers, and especially since she's like 60 or something, in the overall context of the entire movie it actually makes some sense. It doesn't come completely out of the blue, nor is she a complete deus ex machina. While I still think that they should have handled it rather differently, and have her be less of a "terminator-destroying badass", it's not as bad as I was prejudiced to think before watching the movie. Not good, but not completely bad either.
Also how the T-800 (or possibly T-850) in this movie came to be "the good guy" doesn't make much sense. In Terminator 2 the T-800 had to be specifically reprogrammed to change its mission to protect John Connor.
In this movie it was sent by Skynet to the past, something like 2 years after the events of Terminator 2, to kill John Connor, this time succeeding in it, after which (according to its own words), having completed its mission, it had no mission anymore, no goal, and thus it just wandered the Earth and essentially learned to become "good" and (anonymously) help Sarah Connor.
(On a side note, it is mentioned in the movie that terminators appear about every 2 years. It's not elaborated nor explained further, but the implication might be that that's the most frequent interval at which stuff can be sent to the past, which I suppose explains the age-old question of why not send an entire army of terminators to the past. It seems to be implied that there's some limit to the time travel, allowing only few individuals to be sent about every 2 years.)
Given that the T-800 in Terminator 2 had to be specifically reprogrammed to change its mission parameters, it's kind of illogical why a non-reprogrammed terminator would change on its own. Or why it didn't have any further programming to be done if the mission is successful (such as making sure that Skynet is created.) It's heavily implied that Skynet just programmed the terminator to look for John Connor, kill him and then... nothing. There was nothing else programmed for the terminator to do, so it was just left completely to its own devices, to aimlessly wander the Earth and learn stuff on its own, with no goal, no mission, nothing. That doesn't make much sense to me. Surely Skynet would have programmed it to do something more useful in the case its mission is completed successfully. Or at least stopped it from "learning" to be a good guy on its own, without explicit reprogramming.
As iconic as Schwarzenegger is as the Terminator, I think his role in this movie was a bit superfluous. Or, at a minimum, they could have written him to fit a bit better into it, rather than this "I aimlessly wandered the Earth, got a family, and learned to value human life and became good" nonsense.
Again, even that storyline wasn't completely bad, but it wasn't very good either.
The good
Regardless of what the doomsayers were saying when the first trailers popped up, this isn't actually a "feminist" movie. At least not overtly so.
I was actually a bit (and pleasantly) surprised: At no point, anywhere, in the movie does any of the characters deliver any feminist message of any sort. There is no frustration against men, or claims that men are this or that, or that women are strong, or a woman being abused because she's a woman, or any other typical feminist message. At least not that I could discern anyway. That topic was, thankfully, completely absent from the movie.
Regardless of the fully-female main cast (with the exception of Schwarzenegger's T-800, which is male in appearance only, robots being sexless by nature), it actually felt natural and organic, not forced, like is so common in movies with a feminist agenda. If the writers (all male, by the way) or the director (also male) had any sort of feminist agenda behind their choice of casting, they hid it quite well, as it was not brought up or emphasized in any way during the entire movie.
Before seeing the movie I had reservations about the main antagonist, ie. the terminator sent to kill the new protagonist. However, after seeing the movie I actually liked it. The entire movie felt a bit like a rehash of the previous movies, but it still had enough original ideas to make it feel fresh enough to not be bothering, and the new "gimmicks" of the new terminator were not overtly egregious, and in fact were kind of cool. Regardless of my prejudices, I actually liked it.
How about the story overall? It was passable. Perhaps not the best storytelling in existence, but it wasn't completely bad either. In this day and age I'll take an "average" movie with no "message for modern audiences" as a success.
I actually give this movie a pass. It's not even nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I would even qualify it as better than average. It is canon in my books.
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