How could it be anything else? With Cameron returning as a producer and story consultant, on screen Schwarzenegger and co-star Linda Hamilton are back together for the first time since T2.

For the diehard fans, it means the reprise of Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, the waitress-turned-warrior who ultimately gives birth to the future leader of the resistance in a world one day overrun by machines. “I think with Linda coming back, it really was a return,” says Miller.

“To me, as important as Arnold is to the franchise, Linda is equally important. And this movie is once again built around her story, like Terminator 2 was really. A mother fighting for her son.”

The big reveal early on in Terminator: Dark Fate is that Connor’s fight to save her son ultimately failed; she might have saved young John Connor from Robert Patrick’s T-1000 but, it transpires, multiple Terminators were sent back to kill him – and one succeeded.

Now, 22 years on, Connor is spending her time cathartically slaughtering rogue Terminators, a mission that sees her cross paths with Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an augmented human soldier sent back from the future to protect Dani (Natalia Reyes), a young Mexican who has yet to realise her importance to the world.

While Grace serves the same function as the Kyle Reese character in the original film, the antagonist this time comes in the shape of the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna), an upgraded killing machine capable of not only morphing into the shape of anything it touches, but also splitting itself in two.

“We had a big whiteboard with all kinds of potential weapons and abilities,” reports Miller, who says it was essential that the Rev-9 stayed “grounded” to give its battles some credibility.

In terms of the franchise, what it means is a blatant rejection of the last three films, which didn’t feature Sarah Connor. “There wasn’t a lot of continuity between those other films,” says Miller.

“They sort of drifted off the message of what Jim [Cameron] had done in Terminator 2, and they went their own way with different actors and different roles and treated time travel in different ways. There was no consistency, even among them, so we were very rigorously staying consistent to the first two films.”

While there is a return for Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator – “you can’t keep Arnold out of a Terminator movie”, laughs Miller – the film skews towards the female.

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“It’s more diverse, this instalment,” acknowledges Davis, “but it’s always been this story about this resilient, ferocious central female character and we join her again – but it feels like that’s what’s cool about this. It’s part of its DNA; this really interesting character that has a huge evolution and is fully dimensional.”

Miller concurs, noting he wasn’t making some kind of statement in the post-MeToo era. “What was important to me was to do something that was different and felt more of our time, I guess I would say, and to travel the road less travelled.

“It’s just more interesting to me to see a woman pick up a gun than it is to see a dude do it, because we’ve seen a dude do it 1,000 times for every time we’ve seen a woman do it. It just feels a little more flesh. I don’t have an agenda … I wouldn’t pretend to be a feminist or anything like that. I just find it more interesting.”

For Davis, she got to work up close with the 63-year-old Hamilton, who effectively came out of semi-retirement – her roles have been sporadic in the past decade – to play Connor.

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“I think we were all really focused on honouring what it meant for her to disrupt her life and come back into this world that she hadn’t been a part of,” says Davis. “I mean, it’s a great thing. It’s so cool that she came back but it’s also a huge risk. She has a lovely quiet life and to expose herself again … I think we felt really protective of her.”

Intriguingly, the last entry in the franchise, Terminator Genisys, was saved by the US$112 million contributed by the Chinese market; the film took just US$89 million in the US. In the past, Hollywood studios have courted the huge potential of the Chinese market, casting actors from the region, such as Angelababy in Independence Day: Resurgence , as one example.

So did this affect the development of Terminator: Dark Fate? Was their consideration to anything that Chinese audiences might like?

“Not for a second,” answers Miller, defiantly. “We assumed that Chinese audiences want to see the same thing that every audience wants to see, which is a good story well told.

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“And in the case of blockbuster films like this, some great action and a good time at the movies. So we didn’t think about that at all. We thought about it a little later when it comes time to get the movie to the Chinese audience … how it’s going to play in China. But not the content of the movie.”

Doubtless, Chinese audiences will embrace Dark Fate, if only to see Schwarzenegger – maybe – for one last time in his most iconic role. Here, we see a slightly “different” version of the cyborg: hiding out in Texas, under the name Carl, and – amusingly – running a drapery business.

“He’s so comfortable in that role, obviously,” observes Davis, “but I didn’t realise how funny he was as a person and how much humour the character had.”

Yet from the thundering strains of Brad Fiedel’s score to spins on classic lines (“I’ll be back” and “Come with me if you want to live”), the film is still recognisably of the Terminator universe.

“The world is like this opera,” says Davis. “Everything is heightened. You have to act bigger and yell louder. Everything is just bigger than I’m used to.”

For a Terminator movie, even the sixth in the series, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

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