Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristina Loken
Director: Jonathan Mostow
Synopsis: It may have taken ten years or so but he did insist he'd be back!
Reviewed by: Ali Khan

A decade has passed since John Conner, his mother and the Terminator saved the world from judgement day. But the effects of that encounter with the machines have left John Connor deeply scarred. He lives ‘off the grid’ – no permanent home, job or life in an attempt to minimise the chance of him being found by yet another machine sent to kill from the future. His mother, we learn, has since died of cancer. Yet despite all his efforts Connor and his romantic interest Kate Brewster are found and targeted by a new female Terminator – the TX. In response, an obsolete T-101 is sent to protect Connor and Brewster. In the course of the movie we also learn that rather than save the world from judgement day, Connor and the previous terminator only succeeded in postponing it. Now the machines are poised to take over through the coming on line of a worldwide computer system called Skynet. Once enabled, computers would enable machines to take over the human world.

Poster Art by Vladimir Galinsky

It has been a decade since Jim Cameron’s T2 and much has changed since. Cameron has always been a pioneer as far as technology is concerned and the special effects used in T2 were literally ground breaking. We had the amazing mercury liquidity of Robert Patrick’s Terminator as well as the thrilling confrontations between the two terminators. And…. Arnold was cool – the leather jacket, the shades, the I’ll be back all became icons. In T3, director Jonathan Mostow tries to make this second sequel bigger and better than its predecessor but in the end its more of the same and without the earlier novelty.

T3 has also been pared down in terms of plot and this removes the gravitas that characterised the first two films. T3 is all action and nothing else. So what emerges is episodes of action and no characterisation and minimal plot development. The relationship between John Connor and the Terminator, so well brought out by Cameron, is missing in T3. Similarly, the T-X lacks the menace of the T1000 in T2.

In fact there are strands in the film that, had they been explored further, could have made for a more powerful storyline. The idea of machines taking over the world, the dependence of humans on computers are fears that could have been brought out to create an atmosphere of real menace. Take for example the horrifying scene from Robocop when the Ed prototype refuses to acknowledge the disarmament of the human and proceeds to riddle him with bullets. That fear of not being able to control these extremely powerful machines is simply not brought out in T3. Instead we have a few machines firing rockets and roaming around like Daleks but its just part of the action diet we are fed. The ambivalence of Arnold’s Terminator is also not suitably used. To make things worse… Mostow then tries to make up for the lack if intelligence in the film by giving us a Planet of the Apes style ending.

The film also suffers from the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not what he was 10 years ago. To some extent, Mostow, plays on this through T3s poking fun at its predecessors but apart from a couple of scenes the humour that was part of Cameron’s film is not part of T3. Having said that, I have to say that Arnold is still the best thing in the film but ‘Talk to the hand’ just doesn’t have the staying power of “Hasta La Vista’. Stahl and Danes are incidental and Kristina Loken is suitably mechanical but never menacing until shorn of her human features.

Its difficult in some ways to describe T3 as a film… it feels so episodic and you can come out at the end feeling… we’ll that had some exciting action sequences… but that’s it. I can’t believe that audiences have become so undemanding as to settle for that but maybe that’s the way of the summer blockbuster.