Dark Fate Director Explains How The Film Deals With Terminator 2’s Ending

While we’re currently in the middle of the summer blockbuster season, this fall still has plenty to look forward to, including Tim Miller’s Terminator: Dark Fate. The beleaguered series has had a rough go since the franchise pinnacle in 1991 with T2: Judgement Day.

Miller’s retooling, which directly follows the aforementioned cinematic triumph, ignores the already-forgettable third, fourth, and fifth sequels, the latter of which has one of the dumbest names in movie history. While that trailer gave us a decent sense of the tone and what the film is going to include, many questions still linger.

In an effort to diffuse some of the mystery, and perhaps calm the few remaining Terminator stans out there, the director and series star Linda Hamilton sat down with the folks over at Entertainment Weekly for a chat about their labor of love. Right away, when asked about how, and also why, the film follows up on everyone’s favorite sequel, Miller had this to say:

“This will be more clear when you see the movie, but the first two movies really deal with time as a loop; what’s happening is the same thing that happened before and everybody is fighting to ensure that happens again. Jim [Cameron] had this lucky break that he only broke that rule at the end of Terminator 2 when Sarah destroys Cyberdyne, it’s the first thing that happened that hadn’t happened before, and so it was going to change the future — but no one knew how. And I don’t think the movies that came after it really explored that in a clean way like I believe we are, with true consequences, and it makes perfect sense for Sarah to be the one to face those consequences since they were her choices to begin with.

Linda Hamilton, who put over a year of work into rebuilding and reshaping her iconic heroine, discussed the evolution of Sarah Connor and who she is now upon the start of Dark Fate:

She’s a woman without a country. Her original mission has changed due to circumstances and she really doesn’t have a team anymore, she just has a thirst for vengeance, so that makes her very alone. She’s still a wildcard, but a wildcard without a real true mission is a lot more unpredictable. Basically very hard for her to find her humanity, so once again we get to take a journey on that level, to have some deep things that need to be rediscovered for her survival.

While some more light has been shed on this mysterious follow-up, I still wonder about some things. For one, I wonder if the new Sarah Connor is cool, and what about the new Kyle Reese, this Grace woman? Is she, like, a Terminator with human skin, kinda like that John Connor-bot from Salvation? Or is she, like, just an augmented cyborg human kinda thing? Wait, isn’t that basically just a Terminator, then? I’m sorry, I know nothing of robotics, or building things, or things in general. One thing I know, though: Linda Hamilton’s hair looks amazing.

In any case, I’m sure your/mine/our questions will be answered in the upcoming months as we await another time traveling romp, which will arrive in the form of Terminator: Dark Fate.