Lots of ink has been spilled on why Terminator: Dark Fate is bombing at the box office, but is it worth seeing anyway? I think so. Here are 10 reasons why you should go see it… but soon, as it might not last long in theaters.

1. It’s the best Terminator film in 28 years. I joke all the time how there are only three Indiana Jones movies and how The Rise of Skywalker will be the eighth Star Wars movie, but it’s rare that the people in charge of franchises do things to support fans’ desire to forget bad movies. Yet that’s exactly what James Cameron is doing now. Dark Fate is marketed as a “direct” sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The other three Terminator films simply don’t exist in the series anymore, as far as Cameron is concerned. And that’s a decision I can support, particularly considering that Dark Fate is just darned good.
2. Even though it sticks to the Terminator formula, it adds enough twists that it works. Dark Fate follows the formula established by the first two films: an AI (now called Legion, since it turns out that Sarah Connor did successfully destroy Skynet in T2) has turned against mankind and mostly wiped us out, but a strong resistance leader has emerged to take it down. Each side has now sent a warrior back in time to try to change history by killing an unsuspecting young woman (Natalia Reyes) who holds the key to the future resistance. For Legion, it’s a new shape-shifting Terminator (a “rev 5”), played this time around by Gabriel Luna, and for the resistance we have a “modified” human (basically, a person with so many implants that the line between human and machine is effectively blurred) played by Mackenzie Davis.
3. Both Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger are back, and it surprisingly works. What Legion doesn’t count on, though, is that Davis and Reyes will be helped by two unlikely allies: the still-living OG Sarah Connor and an aging T-800. (Who knew Terminators could age?) Both actors slip back into the roles seamlessly. Hamilton’s Connor has been holding onto her rage for decades, whereas Schwarzenegger’s T-800 has taken a different path: after he stopped receiving orders from Skynet when it was wiped out, he found a single woman with a young child and decided to settle down and help her raise the kid. He admits that he can’t feel love, but he has found a certain level of humanity.
4. There’s lots and lots of action. A movie whose core message is the inevitability of humanity’s destruction but also the inevitability of the power of hope to fight back against that destruction could easily get bogged down in exposition, but under the guidance of Deadpool director Tim Miller, the movie moves along at a brisk pace. Again, it is formulaic: Terminator finds Reyes, Davis fights him off, they escape, rinse, repeat. But there are enough new set pieces here, including a battle inside a military transport plane (trust me, it kind of makes sense) and a border detention center, to keep things interesting. They do ultimately run into the problem with all of these movies, where they’ve established a bad guy who is so powerful that they have to stretch logic a little to finally defeat him, but again they make it work.
5. There are fun callbacks to the original movies without seeming like fan service. Early in the movie, we learn that Reyes’s character works with her brother in an auto factory. The setting provides an excuse for a moment of ironic commentary – her brother discovers that he has lost his job to a robot – but it also gives the movie an excuse to take the new Terminator and crush it in a metal press. Unfortunately, Legion’s Rev 5 is a bit heartier than Skynet’s T-800, and being crushed barely phases it. A bit later, Schwarzenegger’s T-800 has to say goodbye to his wife. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) When asked what he said, he replies, “I told her that the time I warned about had come. And that I wouldn’t be back.” It got the laughs from the audience it was supposed to.
6. It’s not just about white guys saving women. Yes, there is one white guy who helps out a lot, but the movie is by far the most diverse in the series. Both the main bad guy and the heroine (who is anything but a damsel in distress) are of Latin descent, and the warrior sent back to help them is a woman, as is of course Sarah Connor.
7. Its vision of the future actually makes sense for the 21st century. Cameron can be forgiven for thinking in 1984 and again in 1991 that supercomputers were the big threat, and that if you could just blow up a central machine somewhere all would be good. One of the big issues Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genisys had was in trying to keep with the idea of there being a Skynet, which despite its name never really acknowledged decentralized computing. But in ditching Skynet and moving to Legion, a decentralized AI, Cameron and Miller have brought the Terminator universe into a future that might be frighteningly possible from where we sit in 2019.
8. It retcons the series, but plausibly. They didn’t just throw out the original concept and go with some new story (which is in essence what Genisys tried to do). Instead, Dark Fate takes the ending of T2 and goes with it. What if Connor did in fact destroy Skynet, but it turns out that Skynet was never really the problem? Kind of like those who argue that killing Baby Hitler might not have stopped the rise of the Nazis because the ideas were still out there and someone else would have potentially run with them, Dark Fate argues that killing Skynet isn’t enough because science for the sake of science is still a thing that happens, and we’re likely to just replace one super-powerful AI that hates us with another. At the same time, though, the movie’s retconned future also offers us hope. Just as the humans are mistaken in thinking that Skynet is the root of evil, Skynet was equally mistaken in thinking that just taking John Connor off the board would be enough to ensure its victory, because just as there will always be some new evil out there to replace whatever evil we think we’ve beaten, so too will there always be another hero to take the place of the defeated one.
9. You can probably see it in without crowds. Comedies should almost always be seen in crowded theaters, since it’s more fun to laugh with others. But for dramas and action movies, I’m always very happy to walk into an otherwise empty theater and enjoy my movie in peace. So the good news about Dark Fate’s horrific box office numbers is that you don’t need to worry about buying tickets in advance, and you probably won’t have some jerk talking on his phone during the movie.
10. But don’t spend the money on 4DX. Now for the disclaimer: I was given my tickets to see Dark Fate, and specifically to see it in 4DX, for review purposes, but as will shortly become clear all opinions are my own. For those unfamiliar, 4DX is the thing where you pay a few dollars more for your ticket and the movie basically becomes a 2-hour amusement park ride. (Check out our previous review of 4DX – with Avengers: Endgame – here.) The chairs move, lights flash, smoke bellows out in the front of the auditorium, and at times the seat in front of you sprays you with mist. On paper, it sounds fun, and to be honest I have thought about trying it out in the past, but I’m rarely willing to pay extra for gimmicks in movie theaters, and honestly I’m glad I didn’t here.

Compared to modern reclining theater seats, these much harder, non-reclining seats were uncomfortable. The flashing light was at least appropriately used in the film, when characters first arrive in the past in that shiny light bubble thing, but I don’t really need a bright flashing light in my theater. The mist only happened twice if I recall correctly, and it was just kind of weird. (It’s worth mentioning that this is the one feature of 4DX that you can turn off, thanks to a little button on your seat.) And the occasional smoke was just odd and took so long to dissipate that for some time after each smoke release, you could see the light from the projection, which just further distracted from the movie.

The movement of the chair, though, was the most constant “feature” of 4DX and by far the most distracting. My son, who attended the screening with me, described it as being constantly kicked while trying to relax and enjoy the film. Though the slight vibration when characters were traveling in cars was OK, being jerked from one side to the next during every fight scene – and this being a Terminator film, there were a lot of those – was something I definitely could have done without. Worse was that while the lights and mist and smoke were really keyed to the movie, the motion during fights didn’t seem to be. Thinking on it later, what I really wanted was a point of view. Put me in the shoes, so to speak, of our hero Mackenzie Davis, and throw me around when she gets thrown around, but not when Luna is. Just the constant slam! slam! slam! didn’t help “put me” in the fight at all. It just made me really, really want it to stop.

So there you have it. Terminator: Dark Fate is a movie worth seeing – and worth seeing in theaters. Just pick a theater with seats securely bolted to the ground, and leave the roller coaster antics to the amusement parks.