James Cameron, where are you?

Rating: 4/10 (2 October 2004)

After the excellent Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we have a trilogy now, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, the third installment couldn't live up to my expectations after the first two genuine pieces of cinema.
In the first part, Arnold was the menacing, unstoppable and relentless killing machine. In the second, Arnold was a protagonist. It's a very good idea from Cameron. Let's see if he can make a good performance on the good side. And he could!
What we get from the third movie is having Arnold again as a protagonist, even the same model which he was in T2. Nothing new... But at least it's nice to see him again in his best role.
The antagonist is now a female terminator (it's just me, or the name "Terminatrix" is really cheesy?), which is a good idea. Or at least something new. Kristanna Loken is indeed beautiful and her performance is good - but sadly just "good", and not "awesome" or "genuine" as Robert Patrick's in T2. RP was waaaay better.
The story was written in a "Come on guys, we HAVE to figure out something to make a new Terminator movie" way. Judgment Day was only delayed? Give me a break! This destroys the whole story of T2, and doesn't offer anything in order to justify this act. So this is rather pointless.
The characters are much worse than they were in the previous movies. Kyle Reese was a totally understandable character, someone that the viewer could care about and he was played by Michael Biehn. Sarah Connor was also a character like this in the second - and they killed off her in this. So, we have a new character, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), who seems like a ripoff of Sarah. She merges the SC from the first with the SC from the second installment. Nice performance from Danes, but this isn't enough to make the movie good. We have of course John Connor - but the character is completely out of place.
The action sequences were breathtaking in the first and especially in the second movie (T2 has the most breathtaking CGI I've ever seen). Now, we've got a car chase with a giant truck (does anybody have déja vu?), lots of bullets, some wrestling and giant explosions. It was done before, nothing new! Only the "hook into the manhole" scene was memorable (the CGI used in that scene was made by hungarians!), but the other parts of the car chase were simply boring. What do we see? Shaking camera, cars going off-road, and this goes on for minutes... The car chase scene in The Matrix Reloaded is way better than this one. The wrestling between the two Terminators were good, however the Burly Brawl in M:R is better - moreover, it's slightly disturbing to see Arnold constantly beating a girl...
All in all the movie deserves a 7, because it's entertaining and fun to watch Arnold again (I liked the gay glasses scene...). But apart from this, it's mindless and not even visually adequate enough.
I'm not counting "T3: Rise of the Machines" as a Terminator movie. The Terminator saga ends with the closing sequence of "T2: Judgment Day" for me.