Ultra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Linda Hamilton is back as pistol-packin' mama Sarah Connor and badass as ever, her days dedicated to a familiar mission: ridding the world of killer robots. Dark Fate is James Cameron's first active role in the franchise he created—here as a producer and co-writer—since 1996's T2:3D theme park ride, which surely accounts for much of the movie's old-shoe feel. It's essentially a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, wherein Sarah saved humanity from a doomful destiny, but we learn that her happy ending was short-lived. Flash forward a couple of decades and now another young girl is being both targeted and protected by strangely capable soldiers. Yep, they're from the future, with each seeking to ensure victory for his/her side in the war to come.

The mayhem is over-the-top at times and includes a wildly calamitous highway chase in a flight for survival from a virtually unstoppable enemy. Hope for salvation comes from an unexpected ally who also teaches our heroes a thing or two about free will and forging a better path. It's not a bad story really, but the damsel is rather bland, and I wondered at some point if a bygone Terminator still has a place in today's highly evolved action movie landscape.

A nighttime scene on a moving train would be almost unwatchable without high dynamic range, available here in Dolby Vision (the same scene appears to have been graded quite differently on the regular 1080p Blu-ray disc included in this bundle). HDR also adds punch to scenes with car headlights in comparison with the regular HD version. Colors are highly desaturated to effectively display an unhappy vision of the future.

Within the first few minutes we are treated to the sort of busy surround sound activity we expect from classic action films, with a brief laser-blasting endoskeleton encounter recalling the sci-fi crack and boom of Cameron's first two installments in the series. Bass is generous when called for, and there are plenty of explosions to give your subwoofer a workout. Lots of overhead flying sounds from helicopters, drones, and cargo planes in the disc's Atmos soundtrack add up to a high level of sonic engagement.

Six deleted, extended and/or alternate scenes (the bad guy steals Wi-Fi!) appear on the regular Blu-ray, along with an hour of "making of" featurettes.

ULTRA HD BLU-RAY
STUDIO: Paramount, 2019
ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1
HDR FORMAT: Dolby Vision/HDR10
AUDIO FORMAT: Dolby Atmos with Dolby TrueHD 7.1 core
LENGTH: 128 mins.
DIRECTOR: Tim Miller
STARRING: Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta