Watching Terminator: Dark Fate, I found it a rather nice retake on Terminator.
While Gensys was pretty entertaining, and the alternate version of Sarah and “Pops” was pretty damned fun for me: Dark Fate is a little more terminator, less popcorn. The beginning is a tad rough, but quickly leads to what we’d expect.
It’s hard to decide what I like best about Carl’s reintroduction though. That he ends up a drapery expert, or the Texas comment about his armory. The bit between Sarah and Carl, is really a positive aside to the whole cyborg / guardian battle. It’s far more a win than a distraction.
Legion’s future also seems more plausible to me, with the more stab happy Rev-7s, and the Rev-9 being far more plausible than the T-1000. And that it probably wasn’t SkyNet that created it, lol.
One of the problems I’ve long found with the SkyNet timeline, is the lack of sense it’s usually made. If we presume that SkyNet was so screwed by the time the T-800/Model 101 and T-1000 were sent back, it becomes even more plausible that SkyNet would play the most obvious card: once you’ve invented time displacement, go back and provide yourself with the necessary files to not be so screwed, develop a head start, and send back oodles of terminators. Because if we accept the linear influences, that becomes the logical course of action: not just sending two minions back in time and hoping at least one would be successful.
Actually, that let’s send back oodles of terminators is one of the things I like about The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Because why send one, when you have time on your side? Likewise, I think Legion makes a better follow up than Rise of the Machines and Gensys did, in the sense that if you buy into their model of time travel, and that Judgement Day would be inevitable despite taking out Cyberdyne, why would it always have to take the same form of SkyNet? Same shit, different timeline.