Review of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) by Ric P — 16 Jul 2015

The Terminator is one of the finest films ever made. What makes the film is its simplicity - it's a monster movie. A big scary robot is stalking a waitress. That's it. What films like T3:RotM and the Hollywood suits who green-light these continuing sequels fail to grasp is that there really isn't any need, or reason, to attempt to further the story. This is because the lore/mythology/backstory is just exposition; the future war, the resistance, John Connor... this is all theoretical stuff that helps build a world for a chase movie to work. You can suspend your disbelief for an hour and half because the backstory is explained well enough that it serves to frame the straightforward action going on and give you enough fuel for your imagination. If you delve into the exposition you can't actually get very far, and in essence the 'franchise' was a dead mechanism after T2. James Cameron knew there was nothing else to show or tell after Judgment Day, and so he let it be. With a story like this you can only really go small and intimate (The Terminator) or go big and bombastic (Terminator 2: Judgment Day); after that anything else is middling and pointless.

And so we arrive at T3:RotM. Probably the least offensive of the post-Cameron efforts, Mostow's film just seems superfluous and vapid. It's not a bad movie, it's well shot, the effects are clean, shiny and generally excellent. The action is entertaining enough, and the set-pieces are well thought out and presented. It's a perfectly serviceable action movie.

The story is a simple rehash of T2 with less Guns and Roses. John Connor has been living in bus shelters and under rocks since he was mentally traumatised back in 1992 and is essentially a hobo. Why, or how this useless hobo presents a threat to Skynet at this point is moot - he is the future leader of the resistance and that's just the way it is. A sexy Terminator (Kristanna Loken) is sent back in time to kill off all the future resistance bods and blah blah blah blah blah. You know the deal here. Good Arnie shows up, fighting commences, and this leads to Skynet's uprising and the eventual nuclear apocalypse.

There are moments in the film that feel almost special - the final scene of the film (the end of the world) almost works visually, and there is a reasonable amount of tension in these moments. But the trouble is the film gives off such a plastic vibe that the payoff isn't there. Do the filmmakers really care? Do the characters even care? Claire Danes' character goes from being a vet to the last survivor of the planet and pulls a few funny faces, quivers her lip a tad and goes on about her business of standing around pulling funny faces. The nuclear apocalypse feels like a set up for a sequel.

The acting is just... there. Nick Stahl is a fine actor but doesnt suit the character of John Conner, who was never meant to be seen as an adult in the first place. He's satisfactory enough but it feels like miscasting. He also has ZERO CHEMISTRY with Claire Danes' Kate Brewster, which is unfortunate. Speaking of Danes, she has seemingly vanished from existence since this film. Maybe she got lost in the convoluted time-travel story that continues to plague this dead franchise. Schwarzenegger continues to highlight these movies; he really is the only thing worth watching. He can play this role in his sleep, and in truth it does feel as though he is on the verge of phoning this one in. The whole male stripper scene is wrong on pretty much every level, but Arnie does his mighty best to make it work.

The film just has no emotion and no reason for existing. For all intents and purposes it is purely a corporate movie. There is no art, or love, in this film. The effects are great, the direction is fine, the acting is perfunctory but the whole package feels so manufactured it never means anything. It's like McDonalds. It does the job but leaves you so underwhelmed you wish you went for the steak.

It just seems to me that the people OK-ing these films will never understand why they keep failing - there is no more story to tell. There never was. Theyre trying to create stories about a hypothetical future that was never meant to actually be realised. In many ways these films represent what happens when you can do something (technologically speaking) but really, maybe, shouldn't. It's too tempting for Hollywood to dip their feet in the water again when people still love the first two films. "But this time it will be bigger and have more robots!" I never felt that the post-apocalyptic stuff was what made the films great - its the implication that the here and now needs to be seen because nobody wants to see the end of the world. Well, here's the end of the world! The end result is kinda flat and uninteresting.

T3:RotM represents, in essence, the fundamental flaw in Hollywood's obsession with sequels - this film doesn't have a soul. It doesn't have a reason for existing.

Apart from the $433.4 million it made.