The Long Road

07/04/2003 Archived Entry: "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"

I am so very torn by this movie. I want to like it very much, and indeed there is a lot to like about it but it makes such a huge turn for the franchise and I’m not exactly sure I like where it goes. I think I have to see this movie again. Beware of many spoilers!

As with previous Terminator movies, the effects and action scenes in T3 are spectacular. Remember in T2 when Arnold tells John Connor that the T1000 can only form simple solid objects and no complex, moving, mechanical parts? Well the TX can do that! All the TX transformations were nicely super complex looking and I really like the particle accelerator bit. They also did some nice stuff with the Arnold-Terminator. When he gets half his face blown off this time, we not only see an exposed metal forehead but also the lower half with cheek, chin and jaw. There’s a really nice shot when we see a ½ flesh, ½ metal face and we can look right through where his cheek would have been. VERY nice. Overall though, I didn’t find the TX very menacing. She didn’t seem anywhere near as creepy as the T-1000. I blame the actress. Can it be called acting if one just walks around with the same blank expression throughout an entire film?

I really enjoyed the first car chase in this movie; it’s on a much bigger scale than any car chase previously done. The huge amount of destruction that went on was unbelievable. I think that after Matrix: Reloaded and this movie, car chases are going to start using bigger and bigger vehicles! But, really, how can you top a chase involving a crane-truck-thing and a fire truck?

I have problems with the pacing of this movie, the action scenes are great but they are non-stop. We and the characters don’t have nearly enough down time to connect. They’re constantly on the run, we never get to see them live, chat, or interact meaningfully. All their discussions are based around advancing the plot or giving us exposition about this and that. As a result, I never really end up caring about these characters. When the Terminator sacrificed himself at the end of T2, it was such an emotional moment, when the Terminator sacrificed himself at the end of T3, it felt very much empty. This is where James Cameron would have been an asset to this movie, he knows how to make you care about someone as he makes their lives a living hell.

The character of John Connor is in a very different place in this movie than I thought he would be. He lives “off the grid”, more or less a bum, not knowing what to do with himself after Judgment Day didn’t come in 1997 like it was suppose to. He was suppose to train to become a technologically savvy, charismatic leader but drifted away from that after T2, he seems to have wandered aimlessly fearing the future. A very interesting place to take the character.

Lets talk about the movie’s ending! This is where the film has me wavering.

If you think about it, the ending here is the only one that they could have done, the only one that makes sense if they want to move the series forward without being repetitive. But still, the finality of it really takes away from the beautifully poetic ambiguity that T2 left us off with. What T3 feels like is a Pilot for a TV show where everything is set up for years worth of storylines. Where T3 leaves us is at the beginning of a story. T3 doesn’t even feel like it’s a full story on its own, it’s the beginning of the beginning and because of that they now HAVE TO tell the rest of it. They have to show us how John will fight the machines, how he becomes this great warrior/leader, how Neo will come and save us all from the evil computers. Wait, never mind that last part. You know what I mean. We have to see how this will end now or else this movie and the 2 before it become almost meaningless.

Here’s me nitpicking this movie. Since Terminators 1 and 2, the cyborgs have had On Screen Displays in their vision - text that tells them what they think or what decisions they’ve made. Terminator three continues this, I understand that it’s used to convey to the audience what is going on; but it’s such an immensely huge fallacy! Why would a computer need to be visually made aware of its own decisions? It makes taking action infinitely longer (in computer time), the computer should just decide and act, period. It’s like the Terminator’s decision making programs were only connected to its motor control programs through a visual interface, which would be very very inefficient and stupid. Also like Terminator 1 and 2, this one uses time travel (it has to) and time travel can never make total sense. Like, if Skynet can send robots to the pass, why is it sending them chronologically...why isn't it sending TX to way back when in T1 instead of sending it to after its last attempt?

Another thing is that the TX, from what I understand, controls other machines by injecting them with nannites (very Borg of her). Which is cool, I can see nannites reprogramming machines but what nannites shouldn’t be able to do is let the TX drive cars by remote control! For nannites to drive a car, they’d have to get gas into the engine, brake, turn the tires. Since nannites are microscopic robots, I doubt that the TX injected those vehicles with enough nannites to actually move all the large mechanical parts needed to drive. If it turns out that those vehicles were already made to be computer driven then I take back this whole paragraph.

Nitpick 4, at the end John says that Skynet has no core, that it lives in all computers in the world, on the Internet. If this is so, why does Skynet still exist after it caused Nuclear Armageddon? I imagine that Nuclear Armageddon would have destroyed all, or most, of the computers in the world. Or at least make them all go offline, which would kill Skynet for sure. My last nitpick, and this might not even be right, I’m pretty sure that John Connor was only 10 years old in T2, right at the beginning of T3 he tells us that he was 13. I’ll have to look this up, but it’s a dumb mistake if it is one.

If this were the first Terminator movie, I'd give it an 8 or 9 on 10.
But because its come after 2 others and yet feels way too much like the pilot episode of a tv series, I give it a 7/10.

Replies: 10 comments

Haven't seen the movie and I'm not trying to defend it here, but with your beef on the nanites driving a car, I thought I'd try and propose a theory (after I'm done, I'll reflect on if even I believe this theory).

As a human, to drive a car, we interact with a few key components. Assuming an automatic car, we're talking about things like the two pedals, a gear shifter, steering column and the ignition. So now... *thinks* perhaps the nanites stuck themselves just behind these interfaces and manipulated the connections our controls change. Or, they built something around the controls?

You know what? That's ridiculous. Either it was a computer-controlled car or it's just crap.

As for Skynet not having a core... well, I haven't seen T3 yet, so I'm assuming the Nuclear Armageddon you speak of is the one we were expecting to happen back in 1997. If that is so, perhaps the new Skynet (assuming Skynet still happens, somehow) is different than the one that existed in a different timeline (the timeline that was thwarted in previous movies). So this 'new' version of Skynet is without a central core, whereas the old one actually had a central core (hence how is escaped the Nuclear Armageddon). Guessing, of course, especially since I haven't seen the movie.

Posted by Romer @ 07/04/2003 02:36 AM EST

From what I got, this was a "new" Skynet, which is sorta ridiculous since having a company and the military both coming up with super-computer programs both named skynet seems farfetched. Anyways, this "new" Skynet doesn't have a core...or at least not yet. It exists everywhere so it should have died when most of the computers in the world were destroyed in Nuclear Armageddon (I love that phrase!).

Posted by Rayne @ 07/04/2003 10:42 AM EST

Hmm...although the TX was much stronger than T-1000...I agree with her being less menacing...I remember her more as being hot and knowing how to "strut" her stuff...:P

Funny you should be so disappointed with this movie Thai...yet, you found Reloaded to be "decent"...anyway, lets not go back down that road...

Once again...you rant about the "on screen display"...yet you know it is done (completely and PRIMARILY) for the audience...it conveys information that could not have been passed on to us, unless we were reading about it from a novel...

I enjoyed the movie...probably more so because my expectations were low, Schwarzenegger kicked ass, and the actors played their roles better than I would have expected...decent for a movie which lacked James Cameron...what I also liked (SPOILER AHEAD) was the inevitability factor in the movie...I really thought they were going to go the "Cinderella" way about it and have the heroes prevent Judgment Day...but, Hollywood didn't cheat this time around...:P

As for Nanites (there's no "nn" in the spelling)...they were a little far-fetched...but you never know with technologies from the future...there's a lot of lee-way for writers...I found the concept very stupid and irritating though...why didn't she just activate every single damn vehicle to hunt them down...

I give this movie...8/10...

Posted by dAN @ 07/04/2003 07:24 PM EST

The On Screen Displays, yes it does convey to the viewer information, but a lot of the time its stuff we can infer for ourselves. Like when Arnold is scanning the clothes on women, its obvious he's going to pass on them. And when he scans the clothes on some guy and approaches the guy to tell him "take off your clothes" its obvious he's found a match, i don't really remember anything that couldn't have been conveyed a little less...on screen.

And yes, I agree that the ending was braver (and better) than I was expecting; but, to me, this franchise is much better off having ended with T2.

Though my review seems negative because I'm nitpicking it to death, you have to remember that I gave it a 7 which is not that far from the 8 that you give it, dAN. Certainly not as big a difference as the 8 vs 4.5 we gave to Reloaded! =P
and again, it would have been an 8 or more to me if it wasn't for it neutering T2's ending.

Posted by Rayne @ 07/05/2003 12:32 AM EST

Hey...I gave a 5.5 (not 4.5) to Reloaded...:P

Posted by dAN @ 07/05/2003 05:26 PM EST

so, no lunch today... whatever.

anyway. i liked this ending. through the whole movie, i kept getting the impression they were going to try and prevent the nuclear holocaust thing. john kept saying the girl's father was the key, he had the power to destroy skynet. only at the end do we find out that destruction of everything was inevitable and but that john and the girl had been spared by retreating to the nuclear fallout shelter. and they only found out when they got there that there was nothing they could do to prevent it. i liked that. the whole time i'm thinkings they're going to do the cheesy-save-the-world ending, and they can't. that, above all else, is what made me like this movie a lot.

oh ya, spoilers above :)

granted, now we're at the beginning of a new story, and we're left wondering how they're going to do it. really, with the amount of material they'll need to cover, i can't see any other way than a tv series. it would fit in perfectly. and if it could be a realyl good tv series, like farscape, all the better. we'll just have to wait and see
.

Posted by shawnathan @ 07/08/2003 01:07 PM EST

They'll never get Ah-nuld to do a TV show!

Plus the budget would have to be immense. But yes, it seems like they have way too much ground to cover now.

Posted by Rayne @ 07/10/2003 05:02 PM EST

Okay, now for my reply... Thai pressured poor me a lot to write one, so here we go! For you Thai:

as a fun/action-packed/entertaining movie, T3 should have at least 9/10! It's precisely the kind of movie i loved when i was a kid and it has some very strong moments. The end would have left me thinking and dreaming of john's future saving the world for at least a few years, and i know i would have watched it again, again and again...

Now, as a serious/character-developping/well-thought out movie, i have to give it a 6/10. there isn't that much content to the movie and, in fact, much of it is not much more than a parody of the first two of the series. Shwarzie's one-liners and jokes are fun to hear at the time, but have absolutely no depth. The story takes place during such a small length of time and the movie goes at such a pace that john and his counterpart's psyches are not explored very much. I can't say that a single actor convinced me in the movie... Arnold's character, which should have been easy for him to render after two movies, was particularly messed because of all the jokes and references. That, a Terminator? He was nearer to AI's Gigolo Joe to me :P.

I didn't expect much of T3 and was still quite surprised to have a damn good time while watching it! At times, I really felt like a kid watching a BIG action movie for the very first time and thought "WOAH!". I also agree with everything Shawn wrote about the end, except for one thing:

What i think is great about the movie is that we don't have to know what the hell will happen to John in the future; the whole Terminator Saga is about how he survives until Judgement Day even though he is often targeted by deadly robots... His future, roughly told here and there during the story, is exactly like past achievements of usual main characters in movies: we know that it is (will ba) a fact, but that doens't really have to be thoroughly explained. We just know it and accept it and focus on the movie. Ill respect the terminator saga a lot more if they do nothing else than if they tell us what happens later. It'd be just like the Star Wars prequels... YUK!

Posted by Étienne @ 07/10/2003 06:49 PM EST

That was the least you could write after i spent like a week writing about Finding Nemo!! =P

I, obviously, disagree with you about "whats next", they HAVE TO finish the whole story now.

Posted by Rayne @ 07/10/2003 07:08 PM EST

eheheh from what you told me, though, it's not like you had anything else to do during your weekdays than writing on Finding Nemo.

I think you should be thankful that i gave you some king of challenging occupation... What i like most of what came out of it si that you wrote that many about F.N. but finally never saw it, but instead saw the Hulk two times :P. lol.

Posted by Étienne @ 07/10/2003 07:38 PM EST