Review of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) by Chris S — 13 Jul 2015

This had all the potential to be a good film. Unfortunately it borrows far too much from it's predecessors. While this can be a good thing, the cheap daytime tv movie production brings down any impact it may have had. A copy of the Cyberdyne sequence from T2 is produced as a cutdown shoot out in a graveyard. The evening setting kills the atmosphere and production values reduce the sequence to a small amount of coppers driving up, getting briefly shot at and driving up.

The same scene shows up the films plot and story for the rubbish it really is. The group of John Conner and friends need weapons. Rather than aquisition through a series of problem solving encounters or tracking down old contacts they just go to sarah connor's grave, which is in a mausoleum which is packed with weapons. A to B, no interesting detours through C or even D. In T2 the T1000 couldn't form complex devices, whilst it could imitate the appearance of various people and objects it came into contact with. In T3 this seems to have gone out of the window. No gun? Not a problem, the T-X can transform part of itself in to that.

If you think that's a spoiler, pick a scene from either T1 or T2. Add a terrible script, lack of atmosphere, general plodding yet rushed set piece changes. You're probably there it terms of spoiling the film for yourself.