Sinking as low in two hours as commercial television has in twenty-five years...

Rating: 4/10 (29 July 2003)

Arnold, I am able to remember way back in your career when many saw you as just another idiotic hero who couldn't speak intelligible English, a poor man's Sylvester Stallone, some called you. But your films appealed to me as a child for their raw violence, macho bravado, and the fact that in a supposed democracy, even a man whose only outstanding attribute was his biceps could make it big.
Unfortunately, you seemed to forget something around the mid-1990s, namely that your primary audience was young men who loved nothing more than the thrill of seeing how hard you could hit an enemy, or how creatively you could come up with a smart remark after creatively dispatching him. Instead, you began pushing this choice-removing agenda and making your films as family-friendly or ham-fistedly political as possible. The 6th Day is a good example of this - I am one of the millions of people whose life could be substantially improved by the cloning of singular cells.
Terminator 3 has me asking how much further you are going to turn your back on the things that made you a star. Few of the things done in this film to protect John Connor or Kate Brewster make any sense, and even fewer manage to satisfy the audience. Do you honestly think that not killing a singular person in this film somehow erases the ultra-conservative's stigma that you've killed more on-screen bad guys than any other actor in Hollywood?
But to get away from knocking Arnold and his lack of respect for the audience mindest that made him one of the richest actors in Hollywood for a moment, he isn't the only one showing a profound lack of respect here. The screenwriters in this turkey quite obviously read half of the scripts for Terminators 1 and 2, then thought to themselves "wheee, I can do that!". Unfortunately, Confucious hit the nail on the head when he said that when you only read half of the sentence, you lose all the meaning. Terminators 1 and 2 were famous for pushing how far one could take violence in a film that is approved for teen viewing, but they also had a certain intelligence and moral to the story. Terminator 1 in particular showed us that even the most timid, seemingly useless person can rise to be a king (or rather queen) when given the right circumstances. Not because it is their destiny, or even because they are pushed in that direction, but because they have the good in them to make the right choice at the right time.
Terminator 3 ditches everything the other two films told us about how our lives are not dictated or set to a script. Instead, we are told that Judgement Day is inevitable, and that we will kill ourselves for our own feelings of insecurity, no matter what. That's strike number one against the script. The next fatal error is to tell us that Skynet was no physical system at all, but rather a sentient program that is capable of writing its own digital virii to manipulate enemies to its will. Can you hear the screenwriting committee say "hey, we need to make this story more MODERN, more NOW"? Remember when Madonna said that about the theme for Advertise Another Day, and what happened after that? Sometimes "modern" and "good" are two seperate things, guys.
The third strike against Terminator 3 lies in the cinematography. Granted, it's a real challenge to be compared to James Cameron and the people he likes to work with in this department. After all, he is the only director who knows how to compose a scene on Super 35 negative that looks the same no matter what ratio you frame it in. But even directors who use Super 35 and quite apparently don't know how to do this, such as David Fincher, can make films that are more pleasant to look at than this. Doesn't anyone know yet that the thing that made Terminator 1 in particular shine was that sheer mayhem was going on in front of the camera (cars going through front walls for instance), but the camera stayed as still as an oak so that one could see exactly what was going on? Well, in Terminator 3, Jonathan Mostow resorts to the tactic of wobbling the camera to keep us confused as to what is going on during key action sequences. Put simply, this is not good enough.
I won't get into all the continuity issues between this and the other two films in there series, but I will get into one issue. When Terminator 2 wrapped (and Arnold still had a career), James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd called it the final chapter in the story. As in that's it, we won't be coming back to this again, we'd rather be CREATIVE. Well, fast forward ab out ten years, and Arnold's career is tanking because he has turned his back on what made him a star in the first place. So he goes to James Cameron and moans "puh-lease writer another Terminator so I can keep making films". Cameron told him where to go, but conveniently, Mostow stepped in and said "yeah sure, we'll have a good time wiping our butts on the film that made you the big star you once were".
In short, to the writers of this pungent turd, I say shame on you for dragging cinema even further down into the "dumbest buy the mostest" philosophy that the summer blockbuster has been driven by for the last ten years (and yet they say ticket sales are slumping... gee, wonder why). To Arnold, I have the following to say. You are a sell-out, a hypocrite, and you are washed-up. You might call that statement cruel, but hopefully someone will read it to you and you will realise why the same people who made your career sparkle in the 1980s are turning their back on you. Until at least that happens, there is no hope for the intelligent action film. If Terminator 3 proves nothing else, it certainly proves that.
On the plus side, however, it wasn't nearly as bad as the committee-butchered Alien 3 that made it into cinemas, but it does stand alongside it as an example of an unnecessary installment in a franchise being slung out to make a quick buck. Both of these films have received a very generous four out of ten from me.