8 replies on “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Discussion”

  1. Good Movie (spoiler-free)
    Make sure you’ve seen T2 recently, because T3 has a bunch of inside jokes that reward the diligent fan.

    Arnold is as good or better than he’s ever been in his role.

    I don’t feel like I can say much about Nick Stahl’s portrayal of John Conner without giving anything away – suffice to say, it was good.

    Claire Danes makes an impressive debut in the action genre, bringing with her an emotional counterpoint to the Terminator’s cold logic.

    Jonathan Mostow brings it all together as a worthy sequel to Terminator 2. It’s a well-paced ride through the best action movie this year – and with, if you actually believe me, a decent plot.

    The only low points I can think of were a minor techincal term used improperly (teraflops / second? it’s accelerating!), and I miss the intensity of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.

  2. Highly enjoyable

    Don’t get me wrong, I loved X-2. The Lord of the Rings films are cinematic genius. The Matrix has wonderful thought provoking qualities. But Terminator 3 is the most fun I’ve had at a movie since, well, Terminator 2.

    T3 is an action film of the purest order. However, it is an action film that remembers why we used to love action films in the first place. True action films aren’t just about computer graphics and kung-fu on wires. They are also about massive property damage and horrible, painful things being done to stuntmen :-). Action films should have a good plot, as this film does, but the plot should never be allowed to distract you from the action.

    Now, I wouldn’t call this film perfect. I personally found the score slightly laking and the ending I thought wasn’t as good as the one I thought they were foreshadowing. Still, T3 will provide the most fun of any film in the theaters today.

    • Re: Highly enjoyable
      <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="cite">
      <p>Don’t get me wrong, I loved X-2. The Lord of the Rings films are cinematic genius. The Matrix has wonderful thought provoking qualities. But Terminator 3 is the most fun I’ve had at a movie since, well, Terminator 2.
      </p><p>
      T3 is an action film of the purest order. However, it is an action film that remembers why we used to love action films in the first place. True action films aren’t just about computer graphics and kung-fu on wires. They are also about massive property damage and horrible, painful things being done to stuntmen :-). Action films should have a good plot, as this film does, but the plot should never be allowed to distract you from the action.
      </p><p>
      Now, I wouldn’t call this film perfect. I personally found the score slightly laking and the ending I thought wasn’t as good as the one I <i>thought</i> they were foreshadowing. Still, T3 will provide the most fun of any film in the theaters today.</p>
      </blockquote>
      Curious, because I thought the ending was particularly effective. BTW, what were you expecting?
      SPOILERS
      At the begining we se Connor at a very low, unheroic point in his life. He is reasonably sure they prevented judgment day but he can’t let go of, even in his mind, the paranoia he’d grown up with.
      Upon learning of the new date for Judgment Day, his response is to try to prevent it. <p> These are all me behaviors. He’s living "off the gird" because he is afraid of being found. He tries to stop Judgement Day because he doesn’t want to be the great leader, especially since he knows the exact date of this death.
      Perfectly understandable. At the end of the movie when John and Kate are in the shelter, John makes his first really deliberate choice in the movie. Up till now it has all been knee-jerk reactions.
      All his life John has been told that he will be the great leader, that it is his destiny. That is a scary thing, but now he has the chance to choose between staying in that shelter for the rest of his natural life, and probably living to a ripe old age, or stepping up. Destiny doesn’t make John a leader. He becomes a leader because he chooses a course of action.
      And the best part is his motivations. Like I said, everything up until now has been about John, but when the voice on the radio asks, "Who’s in charge?" and John says, "I’m am," he is making a choice to act in humanity’s interests, not his own.

      Come to think of it, the whole movie is about the relationship between freewill and destiny…
      Okay, I’ll stop talking… for now.

  3. My Spoiler-Free Two Bits Worth
    Just got back from the theatre from seeing it, was kinda concerned because USA Today and Roger Ebert panned it and said it was only 100 min long for $150 mil, possibly a sign of problems. The LA Times critic liked it, tho. Me? Well, it’s a better T2 sequel than Reloaded was a Matrix sequel, but I still think X2 is the best sci-fi film of the summer. T3 can’t do much in the way of character development (too compressed a story both in screentime and storytime), but it does the action stuff OK and it DOES advance the whole John Connor story another step, which is no small accomplishment in itself. A healthy dose of suspension of disbelief is required, this is not a story I felt that could really happen as depicted even if there WERE terminators after you, if that makes any sense. People just pop up in the middle of top-secret secure facilities with no prior planning in impossibly short timelines just because they have to so the plot can keep going. Some interesting hints at destiny but no sense of resonating mythos. I agree with the above, the music was definitely not intense enough to generate an emotional response, but some of the gags were good – there’s a few honest laughs. More money went in Ah-nold’s pocket than up on the screen at $150 mil for 100 min, that’s for sure. Bottom line, a solid B but it’s stretching to give it a B+.

  4. Lamer than a one legged lemur!
    This movie was one low point after another.
    Right from the beguinning, when WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST
    IS A SPOILERFEST! SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER WARNING!
    (you’ve been
    warned) John Connor stupidly crashes his bike to avoid bambi, and
    bambi just walks away calmly. That deer should have high tailed it out
    of there as soon as the very violent and loud accident happened right
    next to it, not just stand there and them skip away gaintily.

    The T-X inflates her boobs, supposedly to seduce the cop, but just goes
    ahead and kills him. Useless boob inflation.

    Then Arnold runs into the T-X with a pickup truck and rams it (why do
    they keep calling it “her”???) in a building, something unidentified
    mysteriously explodes for no reason 10 feet away.

    Then the T-X pulls a Jhonny5 and remote controlls cars, but how does it
    controll them when they are out of its field of vision??? They performed a
    well coordinated attack on Connor’s erratically moving truck while the T-
    X is in a whole different street (whe then see her crane truck
    come out and make a turn in that street). Stupid.

    I don’t know where that gogo boy got his biker threads, but Arnold gets
    rammed through buildings (who explode for no reason at all) after
    building and his clothes end up without the slightest scratch! The
    Terminators might be nearly indestructible, why why are his clothes
    indestructible? huh? WHY?

    We’re now, what, 10, 15 minutes in the movie? It just keeps getting
    stupider…

    What next? T-X punches through the cop and grabs the steering wheel
    only to then perform a manoeuvre that requires the use of both the
    break and gas pedal. T-X has its target fooled by looking like its fiancé
    but then makes her get scared and run away by completely uselessly
    morphing into its usual hot-chick look and then pointlessly bringing out
    her particle weapon. I guess walking up to the ususpecting target and
    offing her at close range by non-flashy means would have been too
    damn effective. Supider.

    Etc, etc, etc.

    Oh, and the retconning!!! T101 are powered by 2 (convenient that there
    are two huh?) batteries that blow up when dammaged? Funny how
    neither of the 2 previous Terminators blew up like that when they were
    damaged.
    The first Terminator was crushed by an hydrolic press, and now the door
    at the end doesn’t crush him…
    Sigh.

    • Re: Lamer than a one legged lemur!
      I would say it depends on what you want from the movie. It’s an okay action movie, but a poor Terminator sequel. T3 basically tells the same story as T2, but with all of the good emotions of T2 left out. Some ideas are good but not well used, like the idea that Judgment Day could still occur. Some things are honestly dumb, like Arnold’s terminator throwing a damaged power cell out the window, which explodes like a miniature A-bomb. All in all, a disappointment if you’re looking for another good Terminator sequel.

    • Re: Lamer than a one legged lemur!

      This movie was one low point after another.
      Right from the beguinning, when WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST
      IS A SPOILERFEST! SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER WARNING!
      (you’ve been
      warned) John Connor stupidly crashes his bike to avoid bambi, and
      bambi just walks away calmly. That deer should have high tailed it out
      of there as soon as the very violent and loud accident happened right
      next to it, not just stand there and them skip away gaintily.

      The T-X inflates her boobs, supposedly to seduce the cop, but just goes
      ahead and kills him. Useless boob inflation.

      Then Arnold runs into the T-X with a pickup truck and rams it (why do
      they keep calling it “her”???) in a building, something unidentified
      mysteriously explodes for no reason 10 feet away.

      Then the T-X pulls a Jhonny5 and remote controlls cars, but how does it
      controll them when they are out of its field of vision??? They performed a
      well coordinated attack on Connor’s erratically moving truck while the T-
      X is in a whole different street (whe then see her crane truck
      come out and make a turn in that street). Stupid.

      I don’t know where that gogo boy got his biker threads, but Arnold gets
      rammed through buildings (who explode for no reason at all) after
      building and his clothes end up without the slightest scratch! The
      Terminators might be nearly indestructible, why why are his clothes
      indestructible? huh? WHY?

      We’re now, what, 10, 15 minutes in the movie? It just keeps getting
      stupider…

      What next? T-X punches through the cop and grabs the steering wheel
      only to then perform a manoeuvre that requires the use of both the
      break and gas pedal. T-X has its target fooled by looking like its fiancé
      but then makes her get scared and run away by completely uselessly
      morphing into its usual hot-chick look and then pointlessly bringing out
      her particle weapon. I guess walking up to the ususpecting target and
      offing her at close range by non-flashy means would have been too
      damn effective. Supider.

      Etc, etc, etc.

      Oh, and the retconning!!! T101 are powered by 2 (convenient that there
      are two huh?) batteries that blow up when dammaged? Funny how
      neither of the 2 previous Terminators blew up like that when they were
      damaged.
      The first Terminator was crushed by an hydrolic press, and now the door
      at the end doesn’t crush him…
      Sigh.

    • Re: Lamer than a one legged lemur!
      Could not agree more…..

      except “lamer than a one legged script writer for Survivor45.”

      My wife and I just saw the movie on PPV. What a waste of $3.95

      My first clue this was a waste of food was the lack of James Cameron at the helm. He must have took one look at the script and said Hasta La vista Bay-bee.

      This film had more contradictions than Star Wars 5 actually episode II if that makes any sense.

      The people who like this film (i.e. less than 30 year old crowd). These people probably have not seen an original movies (i.e. not a sequel). This is one of the reasons that the movies these days are rehashes of previously done work. Low expectations breed low quality work.

      T3 could have been so much more. I’m glad that I picked up the T1 & T2 box set years ago.

      In my opinion, the Universal studios “T2 3D” experience was much better (acting, action, and concept) than the feature film.

      Hollywood has certainly reached a new low.

      This film made me sad….not only for Arnold (certainly under contract to do this film) but for the movie industry as well.

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