Underhyped but over-rated

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2003)

Terminator 3 is a prime example of what I'd call underhype/over-rate syndrome. We all saw the awful trailers, we all heard about the troubled production history, and we all knew that James Cameron & Linda Hamilton wouldn't be involved. Suffice it to say, no one I knew thought this movie was going to be very good. I held out hope that I'd see a reasonably entertaining action movie.
That's exactly what I saw, . . . barely. However, I think that the fact that the movie came with such low expectations, has somehow raised a lot of people's opinions of a very mediocre film (73% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes).
But enough about other people's opinions, lets get to mine. I watched Terminator 3 with a smile throughout most of it. It wasn't a big goofy smile, or a wide-eyed look of awe or shock, but a pleasant, mildly amused smile. I left the theater entertained, but I almost immediately began to forget the movie I just saw.
I started to think about why my reaction was so luke warm. I think I can boil it down to this: There wasn't one moment in the movie that thrilled or surprised me. For a Sci-Fi action movie, let alone the 3rd installment in a series, that's a fatal flaw in my book. Where did it go wrong? Here's my breakdown:
CHARACTERS: - T101 - Great to see Arnold back as the T-101, I actually liked him better here than I did in T2. He has a couple of funny lines, but like the rest of the film they are mildly amusing and instantly forgettable. - John Connor - Nick Stahl is less annoying than Edward Furlong but not anymore interesting. He's actually quite bland and didn't generate empathy for his character. - Kate Brewster - Claire Danes manages to make her more empathetic and engaging than John Connor, but the two characters have zero chemistry together. Any human drama that might have made the movie more interesting is lost by this fact. - TX - A sorry substitute for Arnold in the 1st film and Robert Patrick as the T-1000 in the 2nd. She doesn't pull out any awe-inspiringly cool tricks like the T-1000 did, and her stone-cold-menace factor pales in comparison to the T-1000 as well as Arnold in the original. Granted she had two pretty tough acts to follow, but if the film makers insisted on telling basically the same story for the 3rd time, they had to make up in style and cool effects what they sacrificed in lack of originality and predictability.
Which brings us to STORY: I liked the 1st 2 terminator films, I didn't need to see them AGAIN during the 1st hour of this film. The first hour had no tension or suspense because I'd seen it all before, and we knew none of the main characters would be killed by the TX anyway. Had there been any spark of originality here it may have sustained my interest more than it did. During the last half hour, the story finally goes somewhere new, but by that time even these late developments are utterly predictable.
DIRECTING: Serviceable job by Jonathan Mostow, the action scenes are well structured, and the character scenes are watchable enough. However the framing of the images doesn't compare with the stylistic touch James Cameron displayed in T2.
WRITING: The dialog was succinct and to the point. No groan inducing lines, but nothing I'd call witty either.
ACTION: A lot of people have apparently been wowed by the chase scene involving a crane driven at high speed while ripping up half the city. I'll say this for this scene, it's loud, and it certainly must've been expensive. Again, there is absolutely no tension in this scene, and visually it is not as impressive as say the highway chase in Matrix Reloaded. I've seen plenty of chase scenes in my time, and a great many of them were better than this one. A fight scene between the two terminators towards the end of the film fares much better, mostly because (gasp!) I didn't know how it was going to end, and because the film makers wisely avoided the use of CGI stuntmen for the most part. You could really feel the weight of the metal crashing against the environment in this scene.
EFFECTS: Like I said before, this film has basically nothing original story, character, or action-wise, putting a great burden on the effects to offer something to keep us interested. The result is ho-hum, although I must commend the restrained use of CGI during action scenes (a practice that has cost many other movies the suspension of disbelief from their audiences).
So to summarize, T3 is a mildly fun action flick. If that's all your looking for, by all means T3 will do the job. Just don't be suckered by the under-hyping into thinking this a great film that's come to rescue the summer. As a fan of the series I liked where the story ended up, but the journey there was at times an exercise in mind numbing predictability.
My Rating 6/10