Pure Action, Without Any Drive, Spirit or Thought Required

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2003)

I've seen it twice now and have been doing a lot of thinking about what I've observed. I've been trying to figure out what they've done to one of my favorite movie series of all time.
T1 was a Sci-Fi thriller with some action thrown in. It was about thought. They couldn't throw out hours of CGI action back in these days. It was up to your imagination to fill in the gaps. It left you wondering just what you were seeing and what was happening. Cameron didn't go out of his way to explain everything or to have explosions everywhere. It was about shadows, symbolism, and dreaming. It was awesome.
T2 was the action side of T1 but still with a razor sharp plot that left the viewer thinking hard about what he was seeing. It dealt with issues of humanity and the thought that our lives are not predetermined to work out a certain way. T2, as was T1, was a finely sculpted movie. The only improvement could have been leaving all the DVD's added footage in the theatrical release.
T3 is a new and very different monster. Cameron is gone, replaced by Mostow. Mostow created a movie with a different goal, and a very different feeling. The emphasis was plainly on the action with storyline and character development taking a backseat. There weren't really any major flaws with the small amount of story there was, and I liked how it continued T2's "fate is what we make" theme. But, this move just lacks the character and energy of Cameron's Terminator works.
For one, the humor was far too excessive. T-800s don't crack jokes. The ONLY reason Arnold did in T2 was because John taught them to him after they switched Arnold's chip to learn mode. A T-800 is a walking AI designed to efficiently and ruthlessly kill. They don't go out of their way to be funny. The worst part of the humor was most certainly the fact that it downplayed the seriousness of the film. The world is about to end, T-800s and T-Xs are trashing citys and gruesomely murdering people. Intertwining humor with this is ridiculous. They seemed to go out of their way to destroy the atmosphere of the movie.
One MAJOR peeve for me was the lack of a quality soundtrack. Music is a major part of this series, and a soundtrack easily makes or breaks a movie for me. Brad Fiedel's score for T1 and T2 are indisputably legendary and are easily 50% of what made the movies so great. They had an edge to them that fit with the whole evil machine theme, and created a simply stunning sonic atmosphere. His use of industrial sounds to create a moving, percussion-based sound was just incredibly creative.
This new Marco Beltrami fellow decided to take the Terminator his own direction. Too bad his direction is a muddy, unemotional mess. Perhaps he is a T-800, his music inspired the same level of emotion in me as the T-800 displays. Watching the city-block smashing scene without any influential background music was just completely illusion-breaking and dumbfounding. The theme for the T-X was uninspired and very weak. Arnold's hammer-banging heavy industrial theme from T2 was replaced with nothing as far as I could tell. The poor score made the movie feel like a halfway effort. The music lacked heart, and thus so did the visuals.
After seeing it a second time I've become sort of less critical, however. A sequel means changes, and I realize that. The new director did a decent job maintaining consistency with the Terminator plotline. He just couldn't knit together the atmosphere, story, emotion, and action that made the older two flicks such total classics.
A special message for Mostow: Bring back Brad Fiedel to score T4.

C+