Terminator 3

I saw Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines this evening.

If the story had been told as a standalone, out of the shadow of the two James Cameron films, it’d be seen as a decent enough science fiction film, but nothing special. Trouble is, in our timeline T3 follows two ground-breaking, hugely popular films which established Arnie as an icon and set a dauntingly high standard for director Jonathan Mostow to follow. That said, T3 is by no means an Alien 3. David Fincher’s film managed to squander pretty much all the goodwill built up by its predecessors by trying to approach the basic situation in a very different way and fumbling it, whereas T3 is a disappointment because it falls right into the groove established by the previous films and does it all again, only with less originality on display for the most part. In fairness, I have to give credit for T3’s climax, which is quite different in tone to that of the earlier films and a highly effective way to wrap up the story. Trouble is, the rest of T3 is a retread of what came before: vehicular carnage, bullets flying thick and fast, and Arnie taking on a cleverer, faster, more adaptable terminator. There are a few neat in-jokes, from a reappearance of a minor character from the first two films to Arnie’s never-ending search for a suitable pair of sunglasses, but these are balanced by several laboured attempts at echoing lines from the earlier films. Arnie announcing that “She’s back” when the terminatrix shows up one more time just isn’t that funny, even in context.

One striking change from the earlier films is that this time round almost all the action takes place in daylight. Somehow I can’t help feeling that the biggest, baddest sequences in the Terminator films should happen at night. Probably a more important contrast with the earlier films is that this time round I didn’t feel that the plot was propelling me towards a huge climax. It was, of course - let’s face it, the approach of a nuclear apocalypse is a big enough ending for any film - but it didn’t feel like it at the time. For the most part the plot felt like nothing more than a sequence of chase scenes stitched together, with just the location changing.

I haven’t talked about the acting, because there’s not much to say. We all know what Arnie playing the Terminator is all about. Nick Stahl fails completely to make us believe that John Connor has supposedly had led a really shitty, lonely existence over the last decade, having lost his mother to leukemia and grown up on the run, waiting to see whether Judgement Day would happen. Claire Danes is playing a character whose main role is to run from Point A to Point B and duck when the bullets start flying, while occasionally stopping to break down in tears or look confused at all these warrior robots from the future and tales of an impending apocalypse. She did OK, and that’s about as much as you could expect with the part as written. Kristanna Loken looks suitably determined and sexy as the Terminatrix, but she’s not half as scary as Robert Patrick’s T-1000 from T2.

All in all, T3 is destined to go down in history as a thoroughly unloved, unnecessary sequel. Like Arnie’s T-800, the Terminator franchise has been superseded by faster, sexier and more versatile models. Time for the series to self-terminate.