Decent script. Weak Execution.

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2003)

Having seen this film 12 years after the great T2, I was hoping to feel as involved in the characters and feel the realism of the action like I did in T2, but I felt nothing, from start to finish. I didn't feel like this was a terminator movie. This was more of a TV pilot to translate T2 into a show for Showtime.
The storyline is surprisingly decent, but not very strong and catchy. It ultimately feels conveluted and made up only to make more money and not to continue the story. It's like hiring a soap opera writer to create a sequel to Romeo & Juliet. I liked the "future wife" aspect of the story, and making Judgement Day inevitable just took everything we were told to believe in the second film, and threw it out. So much for the whole moral of "There's no fate but what we make for ourselves". I guess you can't make much more money if you end the series that way, so they ignored it, and squeezed this one out of an orafice.
The Connor family that we've grown to care about was suddenly gone, with only a glued-on backstory to explain the changes.
The new John Connor has no or little tension in his acting. Nothing about him makes me feel he's real. He starts off as a cliche' depressed teenager. He claims to be a loner, but I just don't feel he's anything more than another hot young face being dragged across the latest magazine covers to sucker us into thinking he's important. We spend little time getting to know Claire Daines, and feel nothing for her.
The new Terminatrix is played by some apparent model who does a fairly good job by simply pretending to be Robert Patrick from the second installment. The only difference in her performance from Patrick is the special effects that are done with her. She comes with a flamethrower, a magic internet key spike, and a lack of ability to mimic other people. Personally, I think the T-1000 (Patrick) was a much better villain. He could slip through small cracks and holes to get to his enemy, and couldn't get stuck to a magnet.
The whole Skynet headquarters, or whatever you want to call it, looks like a cheap rejected set from Stargate SG-1, as well as the characters and their wardrobe. Nothing about these people are believable, so again, we feel nothing.
In some scenes (Endoskeletons in battle, Arnold missing half his flesh, and Terminatrix losing her metal skin on a magnet) the CGI effects are top of the line. They feel real. However the scenes involving the CG Hovercrafts and nuclear explosion of central LA look incredibly fake. You can see the individual circular CG puffs that make up the mushroom cloud. The chrome surfacing on the Hovercrafts look like something from The Lawnmower Man. They look completely untangible, and I don't feel the suspense of their presence. I could see how hard they were trying to convince us that it was real by having a harsh brushed-metal surface, while the previous practical counterparts were just a simple soft polish. You only should use CG where you have no choice. In this case, they believe erasing a few strings from a hovering model isn't as effective to them as replacing the entire thing with unfinished-looking CGI. Also, I'm not in suspense when I'm supposed to fear being crushed by noticeably CG vehicles.
The worst problem with T3 in my opinion is the cinematography. It's not horrible DP work, but it doesn't have that "we're involved in the action" feel that the second film had. This felt like we were spectators, rather than players. The lighting didn't feel suspensful. The editing had little rhythm. The choices for camera angles were uninvolving. It's like for each moment of the story, they had to spin a roulette wheel of storyboard angles for the same shot, and whatever the needle landed on, that was the camera angle they chose.
Since the script is the heart of a production, I give it more credit than I normally would. 6/10