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Look, I want to be honest with all of you, because we’re all best friends: I was not particularly anticipating going to see Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest movie in the robot/time travel franchise. And then it was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that Edward Furlong will be back as John Connor, and now I’m all in, baby! Time to crack open your digital copy of Terminator 2: Judgement Day and get streaming!
Here’s a little recap of the bizarre path the Terminator series has taken over the years. First there was Terminator, a scrappy little sci-fi action/horror movie that cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as a merciless robot from the future, sent back in time to kill Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor before she conceived John Connor, the hero who would lead the future resistance against the robots. And if you thought that was a long, run-on sentence, get ready because Terminator 2: Judgement Day blew up the premise of the first movie by jacking up Linda Hamilton into an action hero, bringing back Schwarznegger as a heroic robot sent to protect the young Connor (Furlong), and introduced a liquid metal Terminator even deadlier than the first one.
Then James Cameron, who had shepherded both movies, effectively left the franchise. There was a shockingly good TV series starring Lena Headey as Sarah Connor (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles); but otherwise, each subsequent entry in the cinematic side of things has gotten more convoluted and reaped smaller benefits.
So Cameron did what any good producer would do, and came back to Terminator, ignoring every entry in the series except his own. Terminator: Dark Fate is directed by Deadpool‘s Tim Miller, so it’s not a full-fledged return for Cameron. But it does bring back Hamilton (yay!) and Schwarzenegger (he said he’d be back), so that’s nice. The movie also includes the excellent Mackenzie Davis as some sort of human/robot cyborg hybrid, and Gabriel Luna as the next iteration of the liquid Terminator from T2.
And that’s all fine and good, but then they went and announced Furlong will return, and I personally pushed all my chips into the center of the table. That’s because the magic of T2 isn’t just the robot fights, or the meditations on the nature of time from Sarah Connor… It’s the triple-threat chemistry of Schwarzenegger, Hamilton and Furlong that made the movie work.
That’s what you can — and should — revisit right now on streaming. Though Terminator 2: Judgement Day isn’t on Netflix or Hulu, you can rent it on Prime Video for only $3.99, which is more than worth it. It’s also available on iTunes for the same low price, or Google Play for $2.99. Use that dollar you save to start a down payment on a ticket to Dark Fate! I know that’s what I’ll be doing. Hasta la vista, babies.
