Arnold rules, but where's Cameron?

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2003)

After leaving T3, and viewing T2 again over the holiday weekend, I realized the key thing that gives T1 and 2 the edge over this recent blockbuster. James Cameron, co-writer and director of those first two, knew right away how to do the action sequences, how to make them exciting, and even how to top himself in the sequel. But what he was keen on was the story, the characters- for a world such so hard-edged and desolate as in these films, the overall humanity has to be all the more noticeable in order to feel for the main players. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was made without anything to do with Mr. Cameron, and because of that there is a slight feeling of aloof, even as Jonathan Mostow and his writers try their best to make an impact on the saga of John Connor and the Machines.

Here's the good news- the action in this film is still exciting, in the sort of dumbdy-dumb dumb flow of this season of movies, and one of the pleasures of seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in nearly all of his films is that he can bring a laugh and a grin at the most dire of sequences, not to mention his catch phrases (some are corny "She'll be back", others are amusing "Talk to the hand"). And the new Terminator (T-X), played in a strikingly impervious and sensual efficiency by Kristina Lokken, is a good counterpart for the model 101.
The bad news is that there isn't as much to take in as far as interesting new roles and situations and such, the dialogue revels in cliches instead of juggling around with them as in the other 2, and the actors who play them aren't the wiser- Claire Danes as Kathryn Brewster is convincing to a point, pushing the thankless boundaries of the helpless maiden; Nick Stahl's Connor looks and acts as much like Edward Furlong as Jodie Foster looks and acts like Julianne Moore, and the purpose for Earl Boen's Dr. Silbermen is purely for gag value at this point.
The story-line takes us in this chapter as that this is the new Judgment Day, with Sky-Net on a roll to domination. Fair enough, but the writers don't overcome any of the subtle, and not so subtle plot-holes. For instance(s), after the Terminator goes out of the funeral parlor with the casket, gets shot at by bullets that don't leave a mark on him (which did in the last films), he shoots back and explodes some cop cars and then reading on his monitor that there wasn't one human casualty. The reasoning for the Terminator not committing any human casualties worked in part 2 since young John Connor made him swear not to kill anyone, and in this one it isn't the same Terminator as in that one, so why is he still an "anti-terminator terminator"? For an R-rating there is something fishy about Arnold as a semi-pacifist trapped inside of a cybornetic organism. And Sarah Connor dying of leukemia in 1997 will be a bit of a contradiction as to what's mentioned in the T2 book.
And yet, these I suppose are my problems with such a film, and I can guess I am probably not the only one with them. Indeed even the most shallow of movie-goers will see this is the least effective of the three in the now Terminator trilogy. But for this summer's crowd of movie-goers, being fed the assembly line of sequels and re-fashionings of part efforts, it's certainly not indigestible, and it may keep some hoping for a part 4. As Mr. Connor says in the film, "there is no fate but what we make of it". Grade: B