Good, but not good enough

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2006)

It's a good, entertaining film for fans of the previous two Terminator films, but it doesn't make enough of an effort, so ends the series on an anticlimactic note. For example, the new Terminator of the second film was a dramatic improvement over the Terminator of the first, while the villain machine of T3 is the same as the previous one with the exception of being a female machine that accessorizes.
The adult John Connor has less juevos than even Claire Danes' character, who surprisingly impresses in this film as she does in all her work. I didn't expect her to do well in an action film and she demonstrated herself to be capable of some of the moxie of a Uma Thurman or Angelina Jolie. I hope she makes more action films. Unfortunately, in this film the action sequences make no attempt to go beyond anything accomplished in the previous two films. There is one exceptional car chase scene that rivals the freeway chase scene of the Matrix trilogy, but this expected device is the film's highlight.
The film departs philosophically from the previous two: human victories were previously believed to create an open ended future. This film, in contrast, ends on a fatalist note; the future is determined and our only responsibility is to survive. For this reason this is possibly the last film in the series; all that is left is to depict the human/machine war after Judgment Day or the future they build after beating the machines.