Causality loops and Terminator’s 35-year struggle to make time travel convincing

SCIENCE FICTION is a literary laboratory for ideas that could one day fill our future. And no idea has been examined more vigorously than time travel. Terminator, the biggest time-travel franchise of them all, gets its sixth instalment with Dark Fate. The film marks James Cameron’s return to the series, as executive producer.

This is good news., Cameron’s last movie, things got … confusing. In 2003’s , the Judgment Day apocalypse wasn’t really averted, just postponed. Which felt more like a plot device for the studio to make movies that could take place after August 29, 1997, the date of the series’ original end-of-the-world conclusion. From there, and would go on to muddy things beyond recognition. Even Tim Miller, director of , calls these films ‘misfires’.