Virtual non-stop action, and not too bad a story either.

Rating: Null/10 (27 February 2006)

I won't give T:3 a very high rating as a movie, but I will give it a high rating for entertainment, especially for action junkies. During the first half there is an inspired "chase" scene that is like nothing I have ever seen before, from its sheer audacity to the unabashed destruction in its wake. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now California Governor, seems to have been born to play the Terminator. However, although he looks much like the Terminators in the prior two installments, tells us that he is in fact a different edition.
Nick Stahl is the 20-something John Connor, object of the killing cyborgs of the two earlier editions. We remember that John Connor is supposed to be the savior of the world after the destruction by the machines, and once again future machines have sent one of their own to the present to exterminate him. (I don't know why they didn't send one back to a time when he was maybe 3 or 4, seems he would have been an easier target then!)
The exterminator this time takes the form of beautiful model turned actress, Kristanna Loken as T-X. (Reports are that she bulked up with muscle for this role, and she looks quite menacing, in a good way!) She is ruthless in her pursuit of her targets, but it seems she sometimes fails to take good opportunities to exterminate certain targets. But it is a movie, after all.
So, once again the movie is about the two terminators from the future, passionless, one programmed to kill John Connor, the other programmed to protect him. Which one do we think will succeed? Claire Danes also has a good role, as Kate Brewster, assistant veterinarian, who also has a father Robert Brewster, a military man, who has leadership of some future state of the art computer network system.
This movie is a broad comedy and the lead characters play it that way, especially Schwarzenegger and Loken, the cyborgs from the future. It is a dark comedy, to be sure, because there are a few people killed in cold blood. Not a great story, but an interesting one, and it has more action than one person needs in a 2-hour viewing.
Edit: April 2020, watching it again after all these years, it has pretty much the same impact on me.
SPOILERS FOLLOW. The machines have manufactured a sophisticated computer bug which systematically begins disabling all systems worldwide. No more communication with defense installations gets the Pentagon nervous and Robert Brewster is forced to put the prototype intelligent computer network in service, trusting it will find and defeat the bug. Instead, it becomes all part of the machines' plan, to launch an all-out war of destruction. John and Kate end up being directed to a safe shelter in the mountains, designed years earlier for the President, and they are destined to be the two to repopulate the world and continue the fight against the machines. Cool stuff!!