Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

I noticed on my way home tonight that Blockbuster had a huge “In stock or it’s free” sign up in their window for Terminator 3. Since I missed it while it was in the theaters, I picked it up.

I’d avoided seeing T3 on the big screen. Much as I enjoy sci-fi and action movies, and as much as I like The Terminator and T2: Judgement Day, I’d had nothing but bad feelings about T3 ever since I started hearing about it. None of the news I read when it was being made was good — James Cameron, the man behind the first two, wanted nothing to do with it. Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor in the first two) described the script for T3 as “soulless.” I think I remember reading during production that Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese in T1 and the director’s cut of T2) also declined reprising his role, though I can’t find a source for that now and could be mistaken. I didn’t think that there was any way that the series could continue without the key people behind the success of the first two and still be even remotely interesting.

Now that I’ve finally taken the time to watch T3, I’ve got to admit…

…damn, was I right.

I was bored throughout most of the film. Bored. During a Terminator movie. Sci-fi, cyborgs, car crashes, big guns, explosions — and none of it caught my interest. I actually considered turning it off at one point, then looked at my DVD player and realized that I was only about 35 minutes into the film, and I should probably stick it out and give it a chance. What? Half an hour in, and I was ready to turn it off? That’s a sad, sad sign right there, especially when I can pop either of the first two in and get completely sucked in.

First off, there’s too much, too soon, with too little invested in any of the characters. T1 didn’t have a really major action set piece until far into the film, after you’d spent a good amount of time getting to know Sarah and Kyle. While T2 does have a large action sequence fairly early on, with the T-101 and John Connor being chased by the T-1000, by then Cameron’s direction, the solid script, and Ed Furlong’s acting had already built up a level of interest in John, so the initial big set piece was thrilling, especially with the sudden revelation that the T-101 wasn’t what you expected him to be.

In T3, though, we get almost nothing before being tossed into the action. We know who John Connor is only as a character from the first two movies, and Nick Stahl gives us nothing to latch onto or care about in the scenes that introduce the older John to us. Claire Danes fares a little better, but not by much. These are empty people — if it we didn’t know who John was from the first two films, we’d have no reason to care about anything that happened to him.

Additionally, when we are thrown pell-mell into the chase sequence, it is so ridiculously over-the-top that it entirely fails to be captivating, and is instead merely ludicrous. A huge crane truck goes careening all over the place with precious little damage, zooming down city streets with the truck supports extended and slamming into cars without affecting the speed of the truck. The crane boom swinging Arnold all over the place, into cars, trucks, and even buildings, and yet he comes out of it all with only a few scratches on his face? Okay, he’s a robot, but he’s got real skin overlaying his metal endoskeleton, and even the T-101 would have far more than a few scrapes and cuts after getting thrown through multiple buildings at fifty miles per hour. Besides, the entire sequence felt like nothing more than a rehash of the chase sequence from T2 (Arnold on a motorcycle, the bad guy in a big truck, etc.), only turned up to 11 in a sad attempt to out-Cameron Cameron.

Kristanna Loken entirely fails to convey any real sense of danger as the T-X (or “Terminatrix” — ugh). Instead of feeling like she’s a leaner, meaner, more effective model of Terminator, you feel like she’s a former model who lucked into a high-profile gig in a major budget action movie when the power that be decided that a little T&A would help boost the profits (and to make that worse, while we got a brief shot of A, the T part of that equation was sadly missing!). It’s sad, too. While I was (justifiably) concerned when word leaked out that the new Terminator was going to be female, I held out hope that it could work. After all, I’ve seen some women do some seriously good work kicking ass, taking names, and looking good doing it — Angela Bassett in Strange Days, for example. Unfortunately, Kristanna is definitely no Angela Bassett, and I just couldn’t take her seriously.

And what about the Governator himself? While he still looks the part (mostly — he’s still got the build, but it’s hard to hide the fact that it’s been nearly 20 years since the first film), the character of the Terminator came across as little more than a sad caricature of the Terminator from the first two films. Part of what made the T-101 so scary the first time was his inhuman stoicism and invulnerability. Part of what made him a hero in the second one was the masterful work done humanizing the character, using (but not over-using) humor as John taught the machine what it means to be human over the course of the film. In T3, you get the feeling that the director was trying to blend the creepiness of the original Terminator with the humor of the second, and it didn’t work — the humor felt forced at best, and failed to make the T-101 either a worthy hero or a villain we could love to hate. Rather, he’s just a prop — another special effect.

In the end, rather than being a worthy addition to the Terminator world, T3 is nothing more than an overly loud, overblown, sad attempt to capitalize on one of the strongest sci-fi series of all time.