Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Terminator 2 was the best one, wasn't it, and so it is little wonder the floundering, misstepping series, having tried among other things forward time travel and making John Connor bad, has done a full-circle and with this 2019 episode is trying especially hard to emulate that second, 1989 one, featuring as it does a white-singletted tech-enhanced Sarah Connor lookalike leading the charge against a T-1000 lookalike (a liquid metal bot from the future with the requisite short dark hair, the tried-and-true steely look and some new tricks up its policeman-uniform sleeves) and the action happens on highways in trucks and helicopters, the drivers-seats of which the morphing bot slops into and out of a la Robert Patrick, and to help mark this movie as something more than a vacuous action retread, Arnie returns (and has one of the funniest lines of the entire series to date (<deadly serious> I said, 'Don't. Don't do it!') as well as Linda Hamilton, though perhaps she signed on very late into production - it appears very much like the young thing in her white singlet was originally intended as a Ripley B/ Sarah Connor B character, perhaps rewritten last minute?

★★★☆☆

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Commando (1985)

A good way in, Rae Dawn Chong's character, a woman with zero reason to be tagging along with an ex-commando as he tries to  recover a kidnapped daughter, exclaims, "I can't believe this macho bullshit," and you can imagine, as Arnie launches a violent mercenary through the air on to something sharp, that the end of her sentence, had she not been interrupted by the thud, might have been "...used to constitute blockbuster cinema in the 80s."

★★☆☆☆

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The Terminator (1984)

For an 80s sci-fi action that is essentially a string of cgi-free car and foot chases set to broken synthesizer chords and interrupted with occasional scenes of exposition (our mulleted heroes trying to soberly discuss a ridiculous time-travelling robot assassin plot), the original 1984 Terminator is a masterpiece and even more enjoyable to rewatch now to see the genesis of the Terminator motifs that recur throughout the sequels, like the first appearance of Dr Silberman (here dismissing as mental illness the robot killer threat but himself destined for the insane asylum) and Arnie's first utterance of the line, "I'll be back," and a few clever smaller details like the scene where a fellow waitress being glib about the future tells Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor not to worry about the customer's child who spoons ice cream into her apron pocket because no-one is going to care in 100 years.

★★★★☆

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Terminator Genisys (2015)

Terminator Genisys (or Terminator 5) has the distinction of being the Terminator movie that starts messing with the established formula: John Connor is the bad guy, the T-800 ages and gets old, characters in the future don't just travel back in time but others in the past flash forward, and while it starts promisingly, pretty quickly it descends into a mess more concerned with perpetuating the franchise than with meeting the expectations of series fans.

★★☆☆☆

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The 6th Day (2000)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Adam Gibson finds his life has been taken over by a clone and finds that Robert Duvall's team of clone scientists wants him dead in this overlong and woefully written 80s scifi that awkwardly blends action and cornball humour and presents a hi-tech vision of the future featuring hologram and clone technology but also featuring venetian blinds, door hinges, duct-taped eskies, glitchy Betsy Wetsies, and Cadillac car chases through leafy suburban streets.

★☆☆☆☆

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Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines (2003)

This serviceable third episode of the Terminator franchise is essentially the same movie as 1991s Terminator 2 just with more humour and different skins: John Connor, conceived in number one, a teenage kid in two, and a twentysomething here, gets hunted by the latest Skynet threat, T-X, a scowling, stilettoed female version of the T-1000 liquid metal cop of movie number two, and Arnold Schwarzenegger again zips back in time, steals clothes, shades and a motorbike and helps keep John and his new friend Katherine Brewster safe...although it is her turn to have all her nearest and dearest slaughtered.

★★★☆☆

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Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991)

In this second movie of the ever-growing Terminator series, Schwarzenegger reprises his role of assassin robot from the future only this time he is fighting with, not against, the Connors: tortured and muscly Sarah and her son John, future leader in the war against the machines but here a petulant live-action Bart Simpson rascal, are being hunted by an all-new liquid metal Skynet threat, and the chase is a ripping action story only slightly marred by the movie's persistently flat affect and some inconsistency in the liquid metal robot's functions.

★★★★☆

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