Causality Loops And Terminator's 35-year Struggle To Make Time Travel Convincing

Science fiction is a literary laboratory for ideas that could one day fill our future. And no idea has been examined more vigorously than time travel. Terminator, the biggest time-travel franchise of them all, gets its sixth instalment with Dark Fate. The film marks James Cameron’s return to the series, as executive producer.

- Darren Orf

This is good news. Because after 1991’s Judgment Day, Cameron’s last Terminator movie, things got … confusing. In 2003’s T3: Rise of the Machines, the Judgment Day apocalypse wasn’t really averted, just postponed. Which felt more like a plot device for the studio to make movies that could take place after August 29, 1997, the date of the series’ original end-of-the-world conclusion. From there, Salvation and Genisys would go on to muddy things beyond recognition. Even Tim Miller, director of Dark Fate, calls these films ‘misfires’.

Fate, however, ignores everything after Judgment Day, allowing the series to return to time travel’s core debate: fate versus choice.