Terminator: Dark Fate

Although the film doesn’t do anything particularly innovative with its photography or editing, and the character set-up and script feel distinctly 90s, Miller and Cameron (here as producer and also co-credited with the film’s storyline) can be thanked for maintaining the Terminator franchise’s core delights.

In a series as abused as the Terminator franchise, Dark Fate is respectable (it’s the best since T2 by a decent margin) but as a film in its own right, this tech is starting to look a little dated.

It’s the mixture as before and yet it isn’t. The opportunities to bring the premise up-to-date have not been missed – in the lengthy detour that traps the protagonists in a detention centre on the US border and in the allusions to omnipresent electronic surveillance, suggesting that the machines have already taken over.

The new main characters are all compelling, but Dark Fate works best as a genuinely sweet way to bid final farewell to Sarah Connor and the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

There might be more holes than plot in many of the underpinnings, but this film's not hanging around to worry about them. Most of the expositionary dialogue actually happens in and around some ruinously well choreographed fight scenes, so your chances of even hearing it, let alone being bored, are gratifyingly tiny.

That Hamilton has kept a low profile in recent times gives an edge to her performance, which suggests that she, like her character, feels no need to ingratiate herself with anybody.

Unlike this film's sleek killing machines, 'Dark Fate' is creaky and sometimes clumsy, and yet it ultimately succeeds by delivering sufficient thrills while also offering just enough emotional depth.

Sometimes it doesn't take much to revitalize a dead intellectual property. Sometimes all it takes is a movie in which "Hasta la vista, baby" isn't the extent of the characters' Spanish.

The Terminator franchise has come clanking robotically into view once again with its sixth film - it absolutely will not stop - not merely repeating itself but somehow repeating the repetitions.

Though Dark Fate gets more engaging as it goes on, its sci-fi ideas mostly amount to a listless skimming of hot-button issues.

By the time the movie's ready to kill its latest-greatest villain, fans have gotten a fine lesson in the perils of sequel-making one-upmanship.

Linda Hamilton makes a welcome return in a 'true' T2 sequel that doesn't skimp on the action. But Judgment Day this ain't.

Easily the third-best Terminator film, which is more of a compliment than it sounds. It's great to have Hamilton back in this role, but she's ably matched by Reyes and Davis.

If you can overlook just how glibly the game board has been reset... what follows has much to recommend it.

The new movie earns its lavishly staged action (and its emotions, too), because no matter how violently baroque its end-of-days vision, its storytelling remains tethered to the earth.