Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Produced by James Cameron and directed by Deadpool's Tim Miller, Dark Fate makes a decisive choice earlier films had only gestured toward: it discards every sequel between 1991 and now as non-canon and picks the story back up directly after Judgment Day, decades later, with Sarah Connor exactly as bitter and unfinished as that ending always implied she'd become. Linda Hamilton returns not as a legacy cameo but as the film's genuine emotional and narrative spine — a woman who saved the world and lost everything else doing it.

Mackenzie Davis's Grace is the film's best new creation: an augmented human soldier from a future war, not a robot, whose superhuman strength runs on a battery she has to physically recharge mid-fight — a clever, character-driven twist on the "unstoppable protector" role Michael Biehn and Schwarzenegger both originated. Opposite her, Gabriel Luna's Rev-9 splits its liquid-metal shell from its rigid endoskeleton to attack as two separate threats simultaneously, the nastiest hardware upgrade the saga has produced since the T-1000.

But the film belongs to Hamilton and Schwarzenegger sharing the screen for the first time since 1991 — and to a startlingly blunt final act that finally, honestly reckons with what "protecting" someone by killing on their behalf actually costs the protector. Dark Fate didn't get the box office to launch the new trilogy it was built to start, but as a direct, R-rated continuation of the two films that made the franchise matter in the first place, it's the most purely satisfying Terminator sequel since Cameron himself left the series.