Not as bas as I expected, but it could have been much better

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2003)

This movie has pretty much everything you expect from a Terminator film. Plenty of action and great fx. There were some important things missing though.
First of all, I think the casting could have been better. In the making of Arnold said that they went through 10.000s of auditions and that Kristanna Loken was by far the best. I find that a little hard to believe. She's not really bad but far from flawless in portraying a robot. She shows human emotions all the time, either aggression or an evil grin. T-X is not half as frightening as T-1000, and I think here lies the main problem of the film. She's pretty much your average blonde bimbo except that she is programmed to kill people. T-X does not even come close to Robert Patricks great performance. Kristanna Loken wasn't much more than a supermodel shooting rockets out of her arm. And I don't think that Nick Stahl was believable either, as a supposedly charismatic would-be rebel leader. The only good casting choices were Claire Danes and (obviously)Arnie.

Besides the casting this Terminator film clearly suffers from not being a James Cameron film. Even though it's better than I expected, it simply lacked the suspense and atmosphere that especially the first Terminator film had. The action scenes were pretty much cloned from T2 (car chases with trucks...hmmm where did we see that before?). Don't get me wrong, Terminator 3 is a very entertaining action film. It's just that the emphasis lies too much on action. The sci-fi elements and suspense/horror elements are pretty much neglected. T-X is not scary for a moment, nor is Skynet's artificial intelligence taking over the world. It would take a better filmmaker (hint: Cameron) to add a darker atmosphere, as well as a good music score (i.e. the original music score, which was abandoned here). What's left is good, enjoyable popcorn entertainment with a couple of new gadgets, nothing more.
As a final note, I think it would be far more interesting to actually see the postapocalyptic war between the machines and humans, of which we've seen interesting glimpses in the Terminator movies. Bring on T4!
7 out of 10.