Humans hunted by robot drones. Refugees huddled in camps. Bodies invaded without consent. This isn’t the dystopian future the heroes are trying to avoid in “Terminator: Dark Fate,” it’s the dystopian present they live in. Tim Miller’s welcome, topical, action-packed sequel smartly overlays the sci-fi spectacle of James Cameron’s first two “Terminator” movies on top of a contemporary world which is, in its own way, just as harrowing.
The first two “Terminator” movies imagined a future in which an artificial intelligence called Skynet took over the world and nearly obliterated the human race. When a man named John Connor took back the planet, Skynet sent robot assassins back in time to kill his mother before he could be born, and when that failed, to kill him as a teenager, before he could become a soldier.