TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES review: why was this movie even made?

The original Terminator was released in 1984. Terminator 2: Judgment Day came along in ’91. Then, suddenly, entirely unsolicited, Arnie’s metal man made another appearance in 2003 with Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. If you thought T2 just about wrapped up every important narrative thread pertaining to John and Sarah Connor, their pet T-101, and the shenanigans of Skynet or Cyberdyne or whatever the bad guys were called, you’d pretty much be right. So why is T3 sitting on the DVD rental shelf alongside its superior, elder siblings?

The new film starts off dull and doesn’t improve. We are reintroduced to John Connor, now inexplicably hooning around the countryside refusing to settle down or face his destiny, and then we meet someone called Kate Brewster, and then … a lady Terminator comes back through time, and then Arnie’s T-101 model is sent again to stop her, and then … they fight. And then they fight again. And they fight a little more. And then the script attempts to sprinkle some bombshells in terms of John’s mysterious future, but they just seem weird and boring. More fighting occurs, and then the movie suddenly ends on a completely unforeseeable and unwelcome note.

The first problem in the movie is John Connor. He’s just not the same kid we left at the end of T2. He’s dull, boring, aimless, and there’s just nothing interesting for the audience to grab onto. There’s no moment where he ”saves the cat,” thereby endearing himself to the audience, there’s no real action or decision on his part, and he spends all his time running away from something you can’t run away from. This guy is stupid, and is a terrible protagonist.

Kate Brewster is barely any better. Sure, she saves cats for a living, but otherwise there is literally nothing about her to care for or encourage. She’s just an average middle-class white American woman, working hard and getting married and doing all those other cinematically boring things. She also interestingly cops all the hard knocks – the only major characters that die are close relatives of hers. I suppose the screenwriters had to motivate her somehow.

The running theme of incompetence tying these two characters together is the spectacularly awful casting. I’m sure Nick Stahl and Claire Danes are fine actors when given the right material and direction, but here they come across as totally unconvincing and superfluous, kind of serving as stupid cyphers to explain to audience what’s going on and how they’re supposed to feel. The men that play Kate Brewster’s fiancé and father are both horribly mis-cast as well — nice-looking fellas like Kate’s dad just don’t become warlords in movies, it’s jarring.

I have no idea how director Jonathon Mostow managed to do this, but even Arnie can’t pull off his old character. Mostow seems intent on building up any potential comic relief, and is obviously micro-managing Arnie’s timings and expressions, but it just comes off cheesy and unwarranted. And it’s sad to see that Arnie has forgotten all the great direction James Cameron gave him regarding expressionlessness and physical presence — here it’s just wrong, all wrong. This is one of the few Arnie movies out there where I actually feel uncomfortable watching Arnie, like his own discomfort is telegraphed straight into my brain by a subtle combination of expression and body language. I know Arnie was probably always awkward and possibly confused on set, but other directors do a lot more work to cover it up, but here it just comes blasting straight through. And this is coming from someone who’ll happily watch Eraser and Total Recall without cringing. Almost.

The script being read throughout this movie actually isn’t technically atrocious. Some of the dialogue is pretty snappy, Arnie gets some good one-liners, and there are some brave, potentially fanboy-upsetting retcons worked into the story, but every last iota of originality and fun is squandered by weak direction. I can’t stress enough how utterly dull Mostow’s shot composition and visual aesthetic are. Where Cameron went for bold, hard lighting and geometric frames and lots of wide angles of the imposing T-101, Mostow just goes for the lame old three-across-the-front setups for most scenes, with a brown, grimy palette ruining most interior scenes. His direction of the actors is similarly bad, with timing, characterisation, and nuance thrown out the window in favour of George Lucas’ infamous “faster, more intense” mantra. T2 was also a movie about the end of the world, but at least it took the time to make us care about the people whose world was ending. Here, it’s like, 3 billion people? Living in this world presented to us in TV-quality shots? With no likeable characters or charismatic actors to speak of? Eh, let ‘em burn.

Thankfully, the action scenes aren’t so badly mishandled. What is odd, though, is that the biggest action scene takes place towards the front of the film, leaving the rest feel top-heavy. But the sequence in which the T-X hijacks a crane and absolutely demolishes everything in her way is visually satisfying to the extreme. There’s something cathartic about watching the humdrum constructs of our menial reality getting torn to shreds and smashed onto the ground, and here Mostow’s shooting style is actually appropriate. He sticks with steady shots wide enough to capture the action but tight enough to be exciting — none of this ultra-close super-chopped action nonsense in the likes of Transformers and Quantum Of Solace, and scarcely a CG-enhanced shot in sight (in this sequence, anyway), thank god — and this action scene in particular is a lot of fun to watch. Subsequent action scenes never return to the scope of this first one, but they’re all okay, I guess, if you like watching two heavy, indestructable god-machines smashing each other into fragile things like walls and ceilings and concrete floors.

Oh, I almost forgot, WHERE THE HELL IS SARAH CONNOR? These movies are about her, this is completely 100% her story – John Connor is her son, her responsibility, her legacy, not the main character of the whole franchise, for Pete’s sake. For a good thirty minutes I kept wondering where she was, and then she gets ungraciously swept under the rug in a flimsy dialogue scene. That’s right folks, the woman who saved the world from nuclear annihilation succumbed to leukemia. Not to belittle the dreadful experiences of those suffering the disease, but killing an iconic film character with this invisible foe, and off-screen at that, screams betrayal to the audience that comes to see your movie as a continuation of a previous narrative, and in a world filled with time-travelling robots, it’s just weird. Realistic diseases are the least of our concerns, bearing in mind there’s an imminent nuclear holocaust breathing down our necks. It’s obvious that Linda Hamilton just didn’t want anything to do with this nonsense, and while I can’t blame her, the filmmakers should have dug up some archive footage of her character and built a real, satisfying reason to kill her off.

I’m the last person who’d be called a Terminator fan. I thought the first one was okay, but it’s severely dated by this day and age. I think the second film is just a good sci-fi action flick, well-constructed and fun to watch. I don’t really follow the unnecessarily convoluted Cyberdyne / Skynet nonsense, or pay too much attention to the time-travel aspect of it (wouldn’t the people who sent Arnie back in the first film know immediately that they failed, and just send another one? Or two? Perhaps earlier in Sarah Connor’s life? Idiots!), so I’m not a bona fide fanatic when it comes to the series. But Terminator 3 offends even me. As a casual observer of the first two, I feel like my casual observances have been repaid with mass-produced, pandering, sloppy, boring crap based on an uninspired script directed by an amateur. The only positive aspects for me were the action scenes and Arnie’s mere presence, and when “Arnie’s in it” is the best thing you can say about a movie, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.

Terminator 3 score

32/100