Author: EVula
Date: 8/25/03
Rating: 3.6
Movie Rating: R
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Terminator 3 is the latest unnecessary sequel to come from Hollywood, and is filled with all sorts of useless storyline additives and bits of "humor" that add absolutely nothing to the film. In case you can't tell, I didn't like it.
As a fan of the first two films (especially Terminator 2), I was already a little weary of the movie for the simple reason that everything was wrapped up sufficiently at the end of the second movie. When we left our heroes, they had just destroyed Cyberdyne Systems, the company responsible for developing the CPU systems used by the Terminators, as well as killing (not on purpose, though) the guy who was in charge of the whole thing as well.
Alright, that's what the movie had going against it right out of the gate. However, any movie can easily overcome such a hurdle if they have well developed characters or a worthwhile plot, but if this movie had either of those, do you really think that I would have written the opening paragraph the way that I did?
The Terminator character in this flick was, well, a Terminator. Arnold's a cold character, which is exactly what he should be, but he is a little "too" cold, if it's possible (a little too not caring about things might be a better way of describing it). The TX character, on the other hand... ugh. Sure, she was supposed to be cold too, but the scenes where she's impersonating someone else, she remains cold and doesn't even bother to try to act like a normal person; the T-1000 from the second movie had emotion when dealing with people that he didn't need to kill, and behaved in ways that made him inconcspicuous (for a cop). John Connor also seems a bit dumber than he should at times, and Claire Danes' character is just a whiny, obnoxious little bitch for a good portion of the movie.
Plot wise, this movie was rather thin, deciding to instead stick to the old stand-by of "what you lack in an actual storyline, make up for in explosions." The movie starts out just as the other two have, with our two time-travelers appearing and going about acquiring the clothes and weapons that they'll be using throughout the film. Both the Terminator and the TX find our two heroes, and after a far too long chase sequence, the Terminator tries it's best to protect the two humans in it's custody, while the TX waits for a chance to try again. ...Basically, that's the whole movie.
Alrighty, now we need to discuss the special effects. The special effects... kind of sucked. Yeah, they somehow managed to make them suck. Don't know how exactly, but they did. A lot of the things were just plain fake looking, like when Arnold drives a truck over a bump to run the TX into the wall (and somehow completely avoided running over the chick that the TX was standing over...). That whole bit of action just looked incredibly lame. I'll discuss a few other complaints about the special effects in a little bit.
There were also a plethora of things in this movie that bugged the shit out of me, mostly because of the fact that I'm a huge fan of the second film. One of them is the fact that they rewrote a fair amount of the plot for that film in this movie. That sort of stuff just really bugs me; it's one thing to unnecessarily build upon another movie's storyline, but to bastardize and rewrite the whole meaning behind another movie is just plain lame.
Then there is the scene where we see a swarm of Terminator endoskeletons. First of all, that entire scene was too friggin' slow. It looked like they were moving in slow motion. Secondly, these skeletons were CGI, not live-action like they were in the second movie, so they could be animated a bit "better." Great, just great. What the final product ends up looking like is a big metal version of the aliens in Mars Attacks. Seriously. There is a shot of one of the Terminators zoomed in close on his head, and his jaw shifts back and forth just like the aliens. It looks HORRIBLE!
Something they tried way too hard to implement in the movie was a simple little thing called "humor." When the movie starts and Arnold is trying to get clothes, he ends up going to a women's strip bar where there is a guy on the stage with clothes that (somehow) would fit Arnold. He tells the guy to give him the clothes, and the (rather gay) stripper does the whole "talk to the hand" thing. Later in the movie, Arnold does that to someone else; it has absolutely no place in the movie, and is just plain stupid! Another example also involves the gay stripper; when Arnold leaves the place with the clothes, he reaches into the pocket to pull out a pair of sunglasses, which are rather standard element in both the first and second movies. Instead of manly sunglasses, he pulls out a stupid Elton John-esque pair and dons the. For the love of... *sigh*
However, the BIG thing that gets me is the fact that they completely rewrite how old John Connor is in the second film. Originally, he was 10 years old. In T3, he says that all the events happened when he was 13. Between that and the brief history that John gives in the movie, nothing adds up properly. By T2's standards, the movie happens in 1995 (John was born early '85), but by T3's standards, the movie happens in 1998 (or he was born three years earlier). This matters quite a bit because he talks about how his mother fought the lieukemia she was diagnosed with for three years, but yet she died in 1997 according to T3. 1997 was also the year that Judgement Day was supposed to happen (according to T2). Basically, nothing that has anything to do with years makes sense in Terminator 3. Good job with the writing and editing, guys.
All in all, while this certainly isn't the worst action movie, it looses major points because of the fact that it's such a pathetic follow-up to one of the all-time best action films ever made.