Note: contains minor spoilers for Terminator: Dark Fate.
While promoting Terminator: Dark Fate, director Tim Miller told Variety that: "If you're at all enlightened, [Grace] will play like gangbusters. If you're a closet misogynist, she'll scare the f**k out of you... We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she's just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early shit that's out there, trolls on the internet. I don't give a f**k."
This devil-may-care attitude can be felt joyfully and viscerally throughout Terminator: Dark Fate.
It takes place over two decades after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In Dark Fate, the new Rev 9 Terminator is sent from the future to terminate not Sarah Connor, but a young woman in Mexico City named Dani Ramos.
20th Century Fox
To protect her, the resistance also sends someone back through time: Grace. She's an augmented human, engineered to have some of the powers of a terminator but still very much a human. Luckily she won't have to protect Dani on her own, because Sarah Connor is there to help.
These elaborate relationships are a lion's roar away from, for example, the all-women A-Force moment in Avengers: Endgame which was justly criticised for being ham-fisted and tokenistic. It was a quick scene which brought together the women superheroes: a morsel meant to sate women's appetite for representation.
Some might want to tar Terminator: Dark Fate with the same brush, to say that putting three women in the lead roles was simply pandering to the woke. But this assessment is both lazy and wrong. Because Terminator: Dark Fate actually puts its money where its mouth is. It's a three-course meal and it tastes delicious.
20th Century Fox
Where Terminator: Dark Fate succeeds in ways that both Terminator: Genisys and Endgame didn't is in the nuance of each of these women. They all have their own goals, their own histories, their own strengths and vulnerabilities mapped out by screenwriter David S Goyer and brought to life by Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton respectively.
Davis described it to Digital Spy like this: "It's amazing to get good roles as an actress. That's what feels more important than being a 'strong woman'. You want to play a whole host of interesting, diverse, weak, strong, funny, strange, characters and any time you get a good role it's, 'What a cool gift!'"
Which is exactly what Dark Fate did. Dani, Grace, and Sarah are not solely defined by being strong women who kick ass. This is just one of each of their many facets. How they each become strong women in their own right is different. Thus they approach each situation differently.
Of course it's easy to note the recent uptick in women superheroes and say we're oversaturated with 'strong women', but one person who disagrees is Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he told Digital Spy why: "They have superpowers because of the way the story's written in the comic books. [The women in Terminator] don't have superpowers. They just have to get in and fight because there's a machine who is chasing them. So they have two choices, go and surrender and get killed or fight it. And they decide to pick up arms and fight it."
He's right. The Terminator franchise has never shied away from presenting us with strong women. Yet it has also been blighted by the fact that Sarah Connor became the epicentre of this saga because she will give birth to the man who will lead the resistance.
It's something she points out with understandable bile in Dark Fate. "You're not the target," she says to Dani, "it's your womb." It's a salient distillation of so much of what women live with. But by speaking it aloud Dark Fate acknowledges it and turns it on its head.
20th Century Fox
Dani isn't going to give birth to the leader of the resistance, she will become the leader. And all of these things that are happening will shape her into that person who can galvanise humanity to act against the machines.
Terminator: Dark Fate allows Dani to grow into a role that is both preordained and uniquely hers. And it flanks her with women whom she can lean on, learn from, and value for their individuality.
There are also those who might say this is an unrealistic view of the world, that if there really was a machine-led genocide of the human race, the people in charge would be men. Would they, though? We live in a world with women pushing boundaries in space, the military, and science. In fact, they always have – they've just had less visibility.
20th Century Fox
It was novel and exciting to see women working together, fighting together. The stunts are choreographed so that they move like starlings, in impossible-to-predict synchronicity. As Gabriel Luna described, "All these are individually powerful people and then they came together and move together in a way… the fights are choreographed [so that] when one is weak the other comes in."
Do they argue? Yes! Of course, they argue. But they argue not because women just don't get along or because they are jealous and competitive, but because they have different goals and methods. They argue the way we argue with our sisters, our mothers, or our friends. Like women.
All of this means that despite the sci-fi world they inhabit the characters are each relatable and distinct from each other. They aren't just a blur of 'strong women' brought in for a wink at women watching the film. They are, most importantly, well-thought-out characters.
20th Century Fox
A cynic might say this is all undone by the fact that it was written and directed by men. And, as we've written before, movies starring women are the perfect opportunity to champion women filmmakers. We can hope that a sequel sees more women behind the camera while also recognising that Miller and Goyer did right by the women they cast.
The fact that time travel means being naked when you arrive is played as almost incidental, a humorous aside. There were no skimpy, impractical outfits, no lingering shots of bare legs or silhouettes of hourglass figures. No slowly batted eyelashes blinking away tears as a vague love interest dies in battle protecting them.
20th Century Fox
These women are their own protectors, each other's protectors. Dark Fate presents the fierce camaraderie that we are so used to seeing between men in battle, and gives it to the women. Which is exactly what you'd expect to see.
In this way, being women is somehow inexplicably incidental and also imperative to who the characters are and how they approach the situation.
"Any of those characters could have been played by men as well," Linda Hamilton told Digital Spy. "You just look at them all as characters. However, having those two strong actresses, ladies, at my side was an absolute miracle for me, because they are so perfect and strong and they're my equals in every way. I loved working with them.
"To be able to forge that with actors or 'actresses' is always the greatest gift in the world. And we really did it."
Terminator: Dark Fate is out in cinemas now, and out in cinemas on November 1 in the US.
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