Plays like a pilot to a Terminator TV Spin-Off Series...

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2003)

Both of the previous (and only, in my opinion) Terminator films are self-contained epics that each in their own way provide viscerally involving, intelligent, masterfully crafted, emotionally dynamic and, in more ways than one, downright meaningful and relevant stories that deserved to be told... And were in both cases told extremely well.
They were as good a fusion of pessimistically prophetic science fiction, human drama and social awareness to have been a big box office success as any film of the last quarter century. Oh, and on top of it all, they were kick-ass action flicks to boot.
Terminator 3 should have been a continuation of this. In the absence of the story's creator, those in charge of making the next Terminator film clearly must have acknowledged that they held a certain responsibility to the characters and story that had been told thus far, and they very clearly threw it everything beautiful and important about the Terminator franchise in favour of what they perceived in their narrow, bank-balance-oriented minds to be what 'the Terminator' is all about: Explosions and trucks and one-liners. Like I said, the film plays like a TV spin-off. It looks like one, it's crafted like one, it has the "Tune in next week, Folks!" mentality of an obnoxious TV Pilot, and finally it transfers only enough surface-level material from the previous films (the trucks, the explosions, the character's names, Arnie) to bear a passing resemblance to the Terminator films, but only remind you of how great the others were, at least in comparison, and what a cheap, misguided, misinformed, mistreated, disrespectfully and condescendingly poor excuse for a cash-grab this bad one-liner of a joke this film is.
What a shame. What a damn shame.