Terminator: Dark Fate is a well-made action film many are going to enjoy quite a bit, which likely means Sarah Connor will be back busting cybernetic heads before any of us know it.

But in the pursuit of setting up a new world, as well as planting the seeds for future sequels, the filmmakers fail to construct a self-contained story worthy of an audience’s attentions let alone their emotional investment. It’s a robotic descent into Hollywood financed, corporate-driven stupidity, diluting a once powerful franchise to a place it had yet to travel to until now: irrelevance.