Terminator: Dark Fate

Marked essential because it is the only film that continues the trunk rather than branching off it, and because Cameron came back to produce and shape the story. Stopping after Judgment Day is still a completely defensible way to watch this series, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What it does in its first three minutes is the reason it divides people. John Connor, saved at such cost in the previous film, is shot dead by a leftover machine in 1998 while Sarah watches. Judgment Day was prevented, and the sequels before this one all argued that the prevention failed. This one argues instead that the prevention worked and did not matter: a different future arrived, with a different AI and a different war, and the thing Sarah gave everything to protect was killed anyway. That is bleaker than undoing the ending and it is also, structurally, the only honest way left to continue.

The film that follows is the best post-Cameron entry by a distance. Linda Hamilton is back and plays Sarah as somebody who has spent twenty years with nothing to do but hunt. Mackenzie Davis as an augmented soldier and Natalia Reyes as the new target give it a three-woman spine, and the border and detention-centre sequences put the series somewhere politically specific for the first time.

Its weakness is familiarity. The chase structure, the reprogrammed protector, the final fight in heavy machinery are all beats you have seen twice. It also underperformed badly, so this branch has no continuation either.