Terminator 3: 
Rise of the Machines
(2003)
review by Big McLargehuge

I walked out of the theater uneasy. There isn’t anything specifically wrong with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but I had this gnawing feeling this film could have easily not been made and not one person, except perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger, would have noticed.

My relationship with the Terminator franchise is complex. I saw the first one way back in the late 1980’s on laserdisc (yeah, remember those?) and absolutely loved it. James Cameron’s original Terminator was one of the reasons I began writing science fiction stories. The story was so simple, and so often done in science fiction, something sent back to the past to alter the future, but Cameron put such a stylistic spin on the central idea that even an idea as overdone as time travel seemed fresh and exciting. Add the performances by a young Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn (the best of both their careers to date) a crushing sense of doom and immediacy, and you’re set for a 108 minute thrill ride. Certainly part of the appeal was watching Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) adapt to the idyllic world of 1984 while still dealing with his complex and detailed memories of the horror of the future while valiantly protecting Sarah Connor from a monster of truly mechanical efficiency. This oscillation between immediate danger and future suffering helps reinforce the desperation of his mission. Throw in a heavy handed technophobic atmosphere and an unkillable, unstoppable, mechanical monstrosity as the counterpoint to Reese’s all-to-damaged human psyche and you’ve got possibly the best science fiction film of the 1980s.

Terminator was the best science fiction film of the 1980’s. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was unnecessary.

Terminator 2 kept the story moving briskly along, and although it set several standards for special effects and action film making, seemed to lose some of the intelligence that made the first film so damn good. I am and always have been sort of ambivalent to the second film not because it’s bad, but because it moves the characters further from the audience. Linda Hamilton, the everywoman of the first film is now a walking, talking, mercenary with the skills of a Navy Seal. When we meet her in the mental institution she’s already lost to the audience. Her very being consumed by the coming nuclear holocaust. We can’t relate. Instead Cameron gives us young John Connor (A brooding Edward Furlong) an early teen who will eventually lead the humans to victory against Skynet. T2, like its predecessor, doesn’t fail to capture the imagination of the audience, but rather than give us a few moments of pure humanity, like the growing relationship between Reese and Sarah Connor in the first film, T2 lets the Furlong/Schwarzenegger relationship emphasize the humanity of the characters, for example Furlong instructing the T-800 not to kill humans. This softening of the man-vs-machine framework that played on our deepest techno-terrors significantly decreases the tension established in the first film. Detracting from the relentless mechanical efficiency of the Terminator of the first film is the Robert Patrick/CGI liquid silver T-1000. Never clearly human or clearly machine, his villain further blurs the line between techno-paranoia and straight action movie. Cameron toned down the gore in T2 as well, perhaps to make the film more palatable to mass audiences, and in doing so, lost some of the grit of the original.

Terminator 3 attempts to blend the technology of the of the first two films with a retelling, in essence, of the third, and for all the big-kabooms and car crashes, it just feels so “been there, done that.” The Terminatrix (Kristanna Loken) looks human enough, and although she possesses the exoskeleton of the T1 and the liquid metal of the T-1000 she still fails to stoke that fear of the mechanical vibe so necessary in the Terminator mythos. She also performs virtually all of her killings off screen, which while I guess letting the audience fill in the gory details, reminds us over and over again that this is only a movie. Since she initially kills several characters who have no identiy other than a name, and with no backstory on why she is killing them (initially) provides virtually no reason to care. Cameron got around this inherent drawback by letting us linger over the terror of the whole situation.

“You are Sarah A. Connor?”
“Yes, can I help you?”
Bang, bang, bang... shot in the chest.

Shocking in its explosive and otherwise senseless voilence, yet humanized by the frame of the shot. Cameron got it right, Mostow doesn’t. Compare the scene in Terminator when the T-800 walks, naked, up to three punk teenagers. “Your clothes, give them to me.” The T-800 is a machine ruthlessly kills the teens for their clothes. Cameron lets us see their vain attempts to defend t hemselves and in doing so provides a metaphor for humanity’s coming struggle. Even naked and disoriented, the machines will have the edge. In T3 the Terminatrix walks to a woman sitting in a Lexus convertable. “I like your car,” she says, then the scene cuts away. The impact is not only muted, but lost.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines picks up ten years after T2 with John Connor (Nick Stahl) living among the fringes of society, with no phone, no address, and no concrete grasp of the future. Enter the TX, or “Terminatrix” as it’s referred in the film, a new generation of Terminator machine that is half robotic exoskeleton and half liquid metal charged with killing not John Connor, as he is untraceable, but with killing the lieutenant who will serve him in the future.

When John Connor “accidentally” becomes entangled with Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) one of his former classmates, and coincidentally, one of the people on the Terminatrix’s hit list, it’s up to Arnold Schwarzenegger as the reprogrammed T-800 to protect them from dying in the armageddon that will occur in a mere three hours or so.

The background follows General Brewster (David Andrews) the chief architect of Skynet and Kate Brewster’s dad, dealing with a worldwide computer virus outbreak that wrenches control of America’s civilian and military infrastructure from human control. He is reluctant to release the Skynet program into the wild world of the Internet although he is sure that it will eliminate the viral threat in a few mere moments. He doesn’t trust artificial intelligence. It is this release, so we learn, that triggers the war John Connor will eventually win.

Terminator 3 relies on several action set pieces to keep the audience engrossed in the story, but this is a miscalculation on Jonathan Mostow’s part. Although we in the audience understand the need and reason for the action, it’s the human story that makes us care about what goes on during the film and for the first forty-five minutes or so we get little more than car chases, explosions, and gunfire. By the time the human side of the story, truncated to fit the remaining hour of the film, makes its appearance, the immediacy of the character’s predicament is lost.

Jonathan Mostow isn’t a bad director, and he certainly knows how to shoot action sequences, but the script was too thin to make sitting through those sequences worthwhile. Adding to my frustration was the fact that I just couldn’t shake the change in character of John Connor, he mentions the terrible dreams he has (although they look exactly like the T3 future sequences which is annoying because he wouldn’t be able to dream of Kyle Reese’s future) but it never gets any deeper into his psyche than that. Where Furlong rebelled against his destiny, the older, perhaps wiser, John Connor floats through life without an anchor. Whereas Sarah Connor became a one-woman army, he become an aloof drifter never certain that the future he prevented in T2 won’t come to pass, and yet, rather than prepare for the “possible” he remains aloof.

Mostow gives us four action set pieces with barely lip service paid to the human elements of the plot, each of these action scenes offers a little bit of new information into the story, but it’s barely enough to keep the established story alive. From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mugging and horrid one-liners (a trait carried over from T2) to contrived conversations between Danes and Stahl used to avoid expository dialogue explaining why they are being hunted by a leather clad supermodel, to the almost immediate acceptance of the situation from the word go, Terminator 3 limps along through familiar territory. Perhaps Mostow equates larger with better, but it doesn’t, it’s just larger. In Terminator we get Arnold on a motorcycle chasing Reese and Connor in a car, in T2 we get Arnold on a motorcycle chasing Furlong on a motorcycle while Patrick chases both in a Semi-tractor trailer truck, in T3 we get the same, just change vehicles around, crane and cop cars/ambulances in place of the Semi. Where in T2 the majority of the chase took place in a drainage basis, in T3 it takes place on crowded streets. Sure, the crashes are exciting and the direction is fluid and watchable, but without the human elements of the first film and the overarching sense of dread carefully nurtured through Terminator and T2, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines presents contextless, mostly bloodless, action in place of plot and character.

I did enjoy the film though, complaints aside, the stunt work is magnificent as are the fight sequences, the chases are exciting on a purely visceral level, and the last ten or twenty minutes of the film is absolutely gripping. I even loved the denouement that so many other critics have railed against.

I just wish I had more of a reason to care.