Another classic series is tarnished...

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 2004)

T3's plot is basically T2's without Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, Edward Furlong as John Connor and in place of Robert Patrick's T-1000 is the new female Terminator played by the beautiful blond, blue eyed Kristanna Loken.
John Connor is now a young adult played by Nick Stahl (the little kid from "Man Without A Face" all grown up and now resembling a young Paul Newman). Sarah's dead and John's a drifter who just wanders around because he's still afraid that a Terminator might come knocking on his door if he sets down roots anywhere. That's when the lady Terminator shows up stark naked, kills a woman and steals her clothes and goes around killing a few of John's future 2nd in commands and then tries to kill both John and his future wife Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), who was a mild associate of his when they were kids. That's when Arnold's Terminator shows up to save the day. Did I mention Kate's dad is a general continuing the Skynet project? Well, basically the whole "you can change your destiny" moral from T2 is smashed into the ground in favor of the "destiny is set" moral because Skynet takes over and destroys the world anyway, thanks to the Internet. But John & Kate survive to lead the resistance.
Now this isn't a bad film necessarily, but then again, neither was "Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom". Like that 2nd Indiana Jones feature, T3 doesn't even come close to being the classic that the first two entries were. Arnold's still fun to watch as the Terminator, Nick Stahl is a more sympathetic John Connor than Edward Furlong could ever have hoped to be, Claire Danes is alright but no Linda Hamilton and Kristanna Loken does the stoic female Terminator bit as well as any other actress can, but ultimately the film is hollow, cheesy and pointless. Despite Loken's efforts, she's never as creepy as the T-1000, and not just because she's a beautiful woman who leads the men in the audience to fantasizing about her (and I've seen some pretty creepy women in cinema in my time). The action scenes are executed competently enough but they lack the slickness of T2 and the raw power of the T1.
Ultimately, the only reasons for this film being made were to work the Internet into the Terminator mythology and to get a tall, beautiful blond woman Terminator naked to satisfy all the fan boys who wanted a naked Terminator woman. Well, those fantasies are fulfilled early in the film, when Kristanna makes the classic entrance and starts walking around completely naked, but most annoyingly her magnificent 5'11" figure is kept in the shadows for the most, which isn't fair considering that the original film and this film throw Arnold's butt right in our faces, something no one ever wanted to see except maybe his own wife, Maria. You'll have to look closely to see her derriere just before she kills her first victim. And like all women, Kristanna looks better with her hair down.
You know what a more interesting film would have been? Setting the film in the actual future and focusing on the beginning of the Terminators then. Arnold could have played a soldier who is killed by the machines and later his body is used as a model for the other Terminators to follow in as the mold.