1998. Three years after defeating the T-1000 and stopping the rise of the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet, Sarah Connor is on a beach with her son, John, when another T-800 Terminator arrives, sent by Skynet, and kills John.

2020. In Mexico City a young, cybernetically-enhanced woman, Grace, arrives from the future, later followed by the Rev-9, a newer, advanced Terminator. which makes it’s way to a factory where Daniela ‘Dani’ Ramos works, hunting her down, but as it is about to strike, showing how it can turn it’s limbs into weapons, Dani and her brother Diego are saved by the fast and extremely strong Grace, who gets them away in a truck, pursued down the freeway by the Rev-9 in a stolen dozer-truck, and reveals that it has the ability to split into two separate entities, a powerful endoskeleton, and a polyalloy exterior with the ability to mimic anything it touches.

The Rev-9 drives the truck off the road, killing Diego, and is about to kill Dani and Grace when a truck pulls up from which a heavily armed Sarah appears, blasting both Terminators with explosives and slowing them down long enough for the three to make their escape. Grace collapses, revealing that her modifications require regular medications so that she can survive. After raiding a pharmacy for the drugs she needs, the three hole up in a hotel room.

As Grace reveals the future she came from, Sarah realises she was successful in preventing Skynet, but another giant human-created cybernetic entity, Legion, designed for cyberwarfare, went online and immediately turned against humans, wiping out most of mankind in only three days, devastating the planet, and also creating new variations of the Terminators. Grace reveals that she has been given the task of protecting Dani since she, like John Connor once was, the only hope for mankind. She asks Sarah how she knew they would be on the freeway, and is told that Sarah is sent a text message giving the location co-ordinates of any Terminator, sent back in time giving her time to hunt it down and destroy it, each message ending with the words ‘For John’. Grace hacks Sarah’s phone to locate the location from which the texts are being sent, and it equates to a set of co-ordinates she had tattooed on her body before being sent back.

The messages are emanating from near Larado, over the Mexican / US border, causing Dani to arrange the three of them to be smuggled over the border by her uncle, a ‘coyote’ who gets people into the US, but the Rev-9 hacks into a CCTV network and deduces where they are going to try to cross the border and head towards Texas.

Infiltrating the US Border Patrol, the Terminator arranges for the three to be intercepted at the border, having them taken to a border detention centre, but as it attempts to kill Dani, Grace and Sarah manage to organise a mass break-out, as the Rev-9, killing the genuine officers who try to stop it, is overwhelmed, unable to fight through the escaping prisoners, as Dani, Grace and Sarah escape in a patrol helicopter.

They land near a cabin deep in the woods, from where the mysterious messages have been transmitted, but Sarah is not prepared for who opens the cabin door….

The Terminator franchise has certainly tried to break out in different directions, such as the ambitious but misjudged Terminator: Salvation (’09), or the eventually hopelessly confused Terminator: Genisys (’15), but this fifth entry, Dark Fate, uses the film’s time travel element very much to its’ advantage, continuing directly from the end of Terminator 2 (’91), ignoring all that has happened on screen since and resetting the entire storyline. The continuance is all the more obvious with the return of series creator James Cameron as producer and co-writer, for the first time since the second pic, and the return of both Schwarznegger and, most the welcome, Linda Hamilton, returning to the screen in a major role after an absence of a number of years. What is also revived is the plot, which once again has Hamilton’s Sarah Connor on the run, as she has been for most of her life, trying to prevent the future destruction of the human race by a, admittedly different marque, of cybernetic menace, while trying to protect a young person whose survival is vital and being protected by a partly robotic, or ‘enhanced’ enforcer, all the while trying to evade a newer, more dangerous model of Terminator.

But then, as both Salvation and Genisys show, this is the template which works, and with the reunion of the leads and the involvement of Cameron, the result, under the director of Tim Miller (Deadpool), this entry in the saga is familiar but also effectively rejuvenated, even if rather a lot, including the various chases, involving trucks, helicopters, and a huge standout set-piece which begins in a C-5 transport plane and eventually ends, via a plummeting Humvee, in the deep water near a hydro-electric plant, seems almost comfortingly familiar.

Interestingly the franchise, although hidebound by the conventions and restrictions of it’s own storyline, has moved with the times, with three of the leads being female, in the form of the tough-as-nails Hamilton, truly convincing as the battle-hardened Sarah, Mackenzie Davis (The Martian / Blade Runner 2049) as the almost androgynous Grace, lithe and rangy and also able to carry off the innumerable fight and chase scenes, and Natalie Reyes (Birds Of Passage) as the new target, Dani Ramos, initially incredulous as to why she should be the target of the new Terminator, played with a cold confidence by Gabriel Luna (TV’s True Detective / Agents Of SHIELD), and the actual reason as to why she becomes the quarry is another clever touch in a film which isn’t short of them. And although it was ‘leaked’ that Edward Furlong from T2, and who has sadly had addiction problems and various legal troubles in his adult years, would be making a cameo as John Connor, his very brief appearance is actually a CGI-created head on a body double.

And of course the film needs an ‘original’ Terminator, and it is here where perhaps the film takes its bravest step, having Schwarznegger play the killer which took John Connor’s life, now marooned in the present day and without purpose, the future having changed, leaving him without orders, but his time without being under the control of Skynet having had him develop a conscience, and actually create what seems to be a stable domestic life, as ‘Carl’, with his answers to Sarah’s questions as to how he manages to maintain the fallacy being just about acceptable. Although never exactly the greatest actor, Schwarznegger’s later years have given him a gravity and sad feeling of presence, and although he enters the film late on, after halfway, he almost completes the picture, emphasising that this is a serious attempt to revive the character while remaining faithful to the original material.

But even more surprising is the very obvious political undercurrents, given the current political situation in the US and Schwarznegger’s very sincere and public odium of Donald Trump and his policies, particularly concerning immigration and the US / Mexican border, where a large portion of the film is located. The film is largely subtitled in its’ early scenes in Mexico City, as well as featuring Latino actors such as Diego Boneta (TV’s Pretty Little Liars / Scream Queens) and Tristán Ulloa (Sex And Lucía / TV’s Snatch), and features scenes on the immigrant trains trying to get as near to the border as possible. Its’ depiction of a coyote, or people smuggler, is probably rather too humane, but more pointed is how easily the Rev-9 assimilates into the various arms of the Border Patrols and other federal security services, some of the officials and other officers seeming to be as cold and emotionless as the cyborg.

Given a tough task, Tim Miller delivers a strong entry in the series, reintroducing the staples of the series and constructing some very effective and perfectly engineered set-pieces, the last half-hour or so being almost entirely action, which almost gets tiring to watch, but is capped by some oddly deft elements, such as the original Terminator theme, by Brad Fridel, turning up during the end credits, but played plaintively on a Spanish guitar, but for all the technical skills on display as well as the dedicated performances, the film struggled to find an audience, with rumours that, budgeted at $185m (£143.53m), could leave the producers looking at a loss of $100m (£77.58m), which makes the main character’s universally recognised ‘I’ll Be Back’ ring a little hollow.