Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines

Synopsis: John Connor (Nick Stahl) is now a young man. He believes he has averted Armageddon (as related in in the previous installment of the Terminator series, Terminator 2: Judgement Day) but is not completely sure. His doubts are confirmed when a cyborg, T-X (Kristanna Loken), arrives on the scene, hotly pursued by his old "friend", T-1 (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

I imagine most people would go to see T3 with the expectation of seeing the action/special effects bar raised on the previous instalment and the sci-fi/action genre in general . They would be disappointed. James Cameron has handed the directorial baton to Jonathan Mostow and the result is surprisingly constrained, almost politically correct. There is one impressive set-piece involving a chase with a giant mobile crane destroying cars, buildings and anything in its path and a couple of relatively more modest sequences of de rigeur destructive mayhem but technically this does not break new ground. Whilst T3 studiously avoids the body-count-movie tag, Columbine High shootings notwithstanding, there is still the usual preoccupation with fantastic artillery and some, mercifully offscreen, callous execution-style killings by the thoroughly nasty cyborg, T-X, played skilfully by Kristanna Loken.

Imaginatively, the film fails to excite. One of the problems is the fact with the plot’s future-visits-the-present scenario we know what the outcome will be (as far as there is a comprehensible plot, which I’m not so sure about) and thus there is no suspense here, only pre-destined action. There’s an attempt to invest the man vs machine main narrative axis with some romantic play between Nick Stahl and Claire Danes but that’s hard to do when you’ve got 2 hours to save the world and a homicidally-maniacal cyborg on your ass. There is some Armageddon-like stuff invoked at the beginning of the film (and alluded to in the title) that fails to materialize but at least the whole shebang is over fairly quickly without out-wearing its welcome. Not that I’ve ever played one, but I imagine this could be compared to a very slick video arcade game.

There is one element of charm and that is Arnie. He’s aged remarkably well in the nearly two decades since the first film in this series and his cyborg character has acquired a kind of world-weary wit about his part in the Grand Terminator Narrative. If not exactly cuddly, he’s quite personable now, ironically, more so than anybody else in this gratuitous extension to Cameron’s benchmark contributions.

 

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