Look Again - There Are Different Levels To This Film

Rating: 7/10 (18 August 2015)

I honestly don't understand how so many people can claim to dislike Rise of the Machines, so much, and sometimes I wonder if people are attempting to trash this film, just to show how smart and sophisticated they think they are? To begin with, the CGI special effects found in Terminator 3 are superior to those found in the following two films, and if you're not sure about that, all you need to do is compare the sequence in which the Terminatrix flips the big boom truck in Terminator 3, to the school bus accident scene in Terminator 5. In Terminator 3 we get to see paint fall off as sheet-metal buckles, a wheel falls off the truck in slow motion along with the broken wheel studs, and the frame of the boom truck bends and collapses in a completely believable manner. However, in Terminator 5, the school bus appears to inexplicably twirl and pirouette all over the Golden Gate Bridge, as if the laws of physics have somehow magically been repealed, yet at the same time the passenger compartment of the bus seems to ridiculously stay intact as the bus violently flips, and none of the main characters sustain any noteworthy injuries, or are thrown from the bus! One of the other things that also makes Terminator 3 such a great film is the believability of the characters. When the Terminatrix rips the door off of Katheryn Brewster's truck, Claire Danes uses her considerable acting skills to make you believe that she is as terrified out of her mind as a real person would be under those circumstances! (Nothing like that happens in the following films.) Also, in Terminator 3 the character of John Connor is so far from the gruff talking cutout superheroes found in Terminators 4 & 5, that he is actually so overcome with despair twice in the film, that the Terminator must intervene in order to prevent him from killing himself. Nick Stahl does a passable job of portraying John Connor as deep-seated loner with a lot of personal flaws, and the John Connor character found in Terminator 3 in light years beyond the cardboard John Connor character found in Terminators 4 & 5! It's not Shakespeare, but I think that a lot of people are missing important aspects of this film, and while your watching it, pay attention to the physics found in the CGI effects.