Best of the lot

Rating: Null/10 (26 August 2003)

Here's a bit of heresy: this one was the best of the lot.
Some reasons, in brief:
1) Minimal requirement for AS to open his mouth; but nice action and makeup.
2) The story was well told, despite AS's presence, with all the right notes in the right places.
3) The 'female' terminator was great, and more menacing than its predecessor - _because_ she was so dishy.
4) Nice mix between the serious and dark, and stuff to grin about. (Could have done without some AS one-liners and the stupid shade-gags.)
5) Neat avoidance of gratuitous gore without loss of story-telling effect.
6) The development of Kate Brewster from a bewildered - already quite 'competent', but still fairly socially conformist - female into what's going to be a very kick-ass lady was nicely indicated.
7) Great end! It promises another movie: the one telling the story about the ultimate victory.
8) No resurrection of Linda Hamilton, and
9) the absence of the wide-eyed-teenage-boy-wow-! element.
10) No unnecessarily 'noble' characters. Just people who do what turn out to be very stupid things for reasons which are perfectly valid to them. (This is known as 'life' and thus believable.)
11) The transition for the stereotypical notion of the 'mainframe'/hardware-based Skynet to the 'distributed', software-based kind (a transition symbolizing that from the industrial revolution into the information age) was a touch of genius, and provided a neat rationale for the theme of this movie.
Note:
If AS becomes governor and canna do T4, it doesn't matter. Actually I hope he won't be able to do it. Stahl and Danes are quite suited to the job. It'll be a different story, but so what? It may be a _better_ story, and, for that matter, it might actually give the whole series a proper closure.
I just hope they make the T4 story consistent. It won't be easy to convince me how a few straggly humans defeat a huge army of machines, all of whom operate without a centralized 'command'. The only device that leaps to mind is a virus-disinfectant, but that would be quite unoriginal and wouldn't provide much of a story...
Just don't let Cameron loose on this. Please, please, not!