Entertaining but Shallow

Rating: 7/10 (19 July 2003)

Appropriately, many large trucks haul the terminators and co through this movie. I say 'appropriately', because this movie contains an inordinate amount of holes which such vehicles could drive through.
Clearly, Cameron had sewn his movie shut with no intention of a sequel. We all remember him saying 'T3 without me!' some years back. Like Alien3, the allure of $$ drove the writers to open up what the creator wanted shut. Most people couldn't care less about this sort of thing, but to me it makes it hard for me to suspend my disbelief.
T3 lacks continuity from the characters of its predecessors. This John Connor to me just doesn't fit - he's wimpy, seems to have forgotten what he did in T2, and doesn't have the hard edge he had in T2. The absence of Linda Hamilton, or perhaps any strong human character, diminishes the entire human/robot dynamic.
And while the humor in prior T* movies stemmed from plausible situations that a terminator would run into, you can see right through each of the staged jokes in T3. You find yourself laughing, but it feels like 'Airplane' humor.
But in spite of all this, T3 certainly gave me a couple hours of entertainment. I can't get enough of robots destroying things, quite honestly. Yes, as an engineer I cringe each time I see how easily the movie sidesteps such issues as the weight of a Terminator, the need for amazing amounts of friction between their feet and the ground, and how a clearly visible metallic backpack buckle somehow ignores magnetic forces.
So, while I clearly enjoyed the entertaining action and eyecandy, I missed the depth of the T* films which transcended a cheap action movie.